Take this as anecdotal but from someone who watched their love one help set up a statewide hospital system's triage and response plan. My SO spent weeks...weeks.... working with a large team updating every thing needed to ensure seamless patient transfers within their hospital system. The capability simply was not there. Prior to this, it was a doctor at one hospital calling a doctor at another to see if they could take the patient who needed an extra-level of care the smaller hospital could not provide. There was no system wide entity tracking resources across the entire board. The best analogy I could come up with is the A&M system. If something happened at A&M in College Station, could we easily transfer records, students, teachers, supplies, within the A&M system as it is currently set up?
I have no doubt some systems were far more ahead of others, but many were not set up to act as a system-wide healthcare provider. They were a bunch of regional hospitals that were clobbered together and management at the system level did not track day to day patient activity. And that is even within the same system. There are multiple private hospital systems that definitely do not have the capability to share records, supplies, or other resources between each other.
NY and NO suffered because they were hit the hardest and were the first outside of the Seattle area, where we originally thought it was localized, for this to appear. While NY suffered, hospital systems every where were updating their plans and fixing the hurdles within their bureaucracy that prevented administrators from using the system to its fullest capacity. I have no doubt hospitals in NY fell victim to a system that very rarely needed to look at a response on a system wide level. The only thing we have had anywhere close to this has been mass casualty responses, but even those are more localized and short-lived. So this was really new territory for a lot of these systems.
While I only know about that one system specifically, my SO explained many systems in the region where taking the same steps because they lacked the ability to track and move folks easily.
