American Experience with Extracorporeal Support in Covid-19 Patients: Early Outcomes from a Single Institution

All patients placed on ECMO due to COVID-19 pneumonia from March 10^th, 2020 to April 30^th, 2020 were identified. Data was manually extracted from the medical records of all fifteen patients into the ECMO registry. All patients were admitted to either the medical surgical intensive care unit (MSICU) or cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU) between March 15^th, 2020, and April 27^th, 2020. This study was approved by the Institutional review board.

Patients were managed by the ECMO team, which consisted of an experienced ECMO physician, cardiac surgeon, ECMO nurse, ECMO specialist and respiratory therapist. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, ECMO patients had only been cared for in the CVICU. Do to overwhelming number and severity of the respiratory failure, extension into the MSICU was necessary. Placement and care of ECMO patients within the MSICU was a new practice and required sharing of resources from the CVICU and included CVICU ECMO nurses, physicians and ECMO specialists to care for the ECMO patients. The CVICU nurse were additionally tasked with training the MSICU nurses.