Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital
ORGANIZATION DESCRIPTION
Opened in 2015 as a state-of-the-art facility, Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital (MLKCH) is a private nonprofit safety-net hospital dedicated to improving the health of South Los Angeles, providing both quality patient care and programs that address preventative health and social conditions that impact health.
FIELD OF INTEREST
grant programs
Space Conversion: Hitting the Black and Latino communities served by MLKCH hardest, the hospital is addressing new critical needs to ensure its COVID patients – whose positivity rate runs double L.A. County’s average – receive proper care. With capacity stretched, MLKCH converted an entire floor into an intensive care unit to meet the unanticipated level of critical care needed for COVID patients. As well, it is using every other space possible to house patients.
As part of preparations for COVID-19, MLKCH launched a bi-lingual virtual assistant, “Mia,” a diagnostic tool to answer questions, screen for COVID-19 symptoms, describe risk factors, and navigate patients to appropriate care. Mia is currently operating on its website but MLKCH believes it is essential to build out Mia for its COVID-19 response and overall telehealth infrastructure.