Greetings! 

Over the past month and a half, we have all gained experience not only with conducting video visits to manage Covid-19, chronic conditions and preventive care needs for our outpatients, but also many of us have had to learn how to supervise and teach residents who are conducting these visits. 

The challenges of doing patient care and teaching this way motivated me to look to the literature for guidance on how to be most effective when we don’t have face to face and/or physical contact with our patients. 

I have found this graphic below published by Dr. Donna Zulman (a former student of mine and a UCLA alumnus!) and colleagues from Stanford to be quite helpful. 

Please stay safe and remember to stay connected with your colleagues in any way that you can. 

With deep admiration,

Carol 

Stanford shares resources on adapting evidence-based practices to help clinicians foster humanism during clinical encounters (related article in JAMA) for telemedicine.  

Tele-Presence 5: Strategies to foster humanism and meaningful connection during virtual encounters 

Adapted from Zulman DM & Verghese A, et al. Practices to foster physician presence and connection with patients in the clinical encounter. JAMA. 2020;323(1):70–81. 

Check the UCLA COVID-19 Website, available from the Mednet Homepage, for COVID-19 Updates.  An updated policy on outpatient management is available here:  UCLA Health COVID-19 Primary Care Clinical Guidance. 

For urgent telehealth consults with ID experts, phone 310-206-7663.  For non-urgent issues, request an e-consult through an order, “eConsult Infectious Disease Adult” in Care Connect.

This policy was developed and reviewed by a multi-disciplinary group including the following GIM faculty, as well as experts in infectious diseases, pulmonary and critical care medicine,  family medicine, and pediatrics. Jeff Borenstein, MD; Will Carroll, MD; Adam Cavallero, MD; Eric Curcio, MD;  Evelyn Curls, MD; Sarah Goldgar, MD; Mark Grossman, MD, MBA ; Maria Han, MD, Russ Johnson, MD; John Mafi, MD, MPH; Carol Mangione, MD, MSPH, FACP; Sheila Naghshineh, MD; Janet Pregler, MD, FACP; Faysal Saab, MD; Nathan Samras, MD, MPH; Arielle Sommer, MD; Nisha Viswanathan, MD; Ben Waterman, MD; Pauline Yi, MD; Sun Yoo, MD, MPH

COVID Ambulatory Monitoring Program 

The COVID Ambulatory Monitoring Program was launched in April to co-manage COVID-19 patients discharged from RR-UCLA, SM-UCLA, and our community UCLA hospitalist teams. Patients are monitored through daily symptom surveys or telephone/video visits with Sp02 monitoring. Information about the program can be found here. 

The team consists of GIM faculty members Drs. Will Carroll, Sarah Goldgar, Josh Khalili, Will Pittman, Russ Johnson, Arielle Sommer, Nathan Samras, Ben Waterman, Nisha Viswanathan, Pauline Yi, and Sun Yoo.

The on-call MD can be reached by Pager p89544 for any questions. 

Thank you to Drs. Pregler & Yoo for summarizing this.

Internal Medicine resident Dr. Utpal Sandesara penned an opinion piece for BMJ.com:
We need to protect the most vulnerable healthcare workers

"Many healthcare workers will have health conditions or personal circumstances that make them more vulnerable to covid-19. The private dilemmas they face should be openly discussed"


 

NCSP Fellow, Dr. Kimon Ioannedis, an Emergency Medicine doctor, penned a first-person piece for Salon.com
What emergency doctors worry about
I’m trained to save your life. Recently I’ve been wondering how — and whether — you want me to do that 
(Salon, April 12)

Professor David Hayes-Bautista co-authored a report, "State COVID-19 Case Rates and Pandemic Protection: A Metric for Decisions to Implement, Continue, or Relax Measures," with Dr. Paul Hsu.  It is available from our Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture website.
 

Associate Professor Joseph Ladapo weighed in with an op-ed piece:

The Looming Civil-Liberties Battle
(Wall Street Journal, April 29)

 

Professor David Eisenman provided commentary on the concept of herd immunity:

What would coronavirus herd immunity look like? - Los Angeles Times
(LA Times, April 22)