Page 7 - BusinessWest August 4, 2021

BusinessWest: How is the process of returning to ‘normal’ proceeding at your business?
Bitsoli: “It does appear that patients are coming back; our Emer- gency Department is really returning back to the volumes it had before the pandemic. On the surgical side, the same thing is occur- ring. I do think there is a lot of caution about the fall, but for the time being, patients are seeking the appropriate level of care, including a lot of the screenings they put off. That’s the good news in terms of a public-health policy standpoint. At the hospital, we’re still wearing masks, and we’re still relying heavily on Webex; we have some meetings face to face, but we still have masks on. As for returning to normal, we continue to have a focus on patient safety, and we have an expansion planned in our Emergency Department. Overall, we are trying to return to normal, but everyone is looking to the fall, and there is caution there. The one big difficulty is hiring staff.”
“For the traditional undergraduate, first-time freshman, we had a record deposit year, and we are looking at potentially a record enrollment
year for first-time freshmen, so that has come back better than it was before.”
Dumay: “At the college, ‘normal’ for us would mean getting back
to the high-touch, nurturing, vibrant, in-person environment for teaching and learning. Returning to normal means having everyone on campus in the same mode we had pre-pandemic. The process for preparing for that is the same as we had last year, with the Elms- Safe Plan for making sure that employees and students are safe. That begins with a level of vaccination that we need to accomplish. That’s why we came out very early and required vaccinations for our students and employees. The challenges are to ensure that we’re get- ting to that level of vaccination that the state considers optimal for campuses, which is roughly 90%. We are gearing up for the fall, to have full in-person learning and all of our faculty and staff on cam- pus. We have a task force that is meeting on a regular basis to come up with all the elements of the ElmsSafe plan so that we can make sure our campus is safe and as back to ‘normal’ as possible.”
HARRY DUMAY
TOM SENECAL
“I think we’re all going in the right direction, and there’s nothing but good news ahead as long as inflation stays in check.”
Leary: “We have found that our biggest challenge to returning to normal is a big investment in software. When we all went remote in March of 2020, we found the flaws in our system, we found out where we were falling down and where our system couldn’t handle the stress of people working remotely, etc. So we had a big invest- ment in software across the board — we’ve replaced really all of our systems, so we met the challenge of not only keeping up with workload, but having people keep up with workload while also learning new software. The other challenge involves getting back to the office; being a CPA, we can work from just about anywhere — I
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BusinessWest FEATURE AUGUST 4, 2021 7