Monthly Newsletter | May 2023

Phuoc Le and Sri Shamasunder have been selected to receive the 2023 Edison T. Uno Chancellor Award for Public Service. Each year this award recognizes and honors people at UCSF who have demonstrated outstanding public service and lead social, political, or civic groups that promote human rights and bring about social change.

Meet DHM

Get to know our division by reading our faculty and staff interviews!

Register for DHM-sponsored Point of Care Ultrasound for the Hospitalist CME Course in Hawaii, June 19-20, 2023!

Trevor Jensen will lead the Point of Care Ultrasound for the Hospitalist Course, a hands-on experience to learn the techniques of bedside ultrasound. The course will be held at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Honolulu.

Register for DHM-sponsored Hospital Medicine: Evidence to Practice CME Course in Hawaii, June 21-23, 2023!

Bradley Sharpe will lead the Hospital Medicine: Evidence to Practice Course covering the clinical issues most relevant to hospitalists and other clinicians who care for inpatients. The course will be held at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, Honolulu.

Akshar Rambachan was awarded a Pain and Addiction Research Center (PARC) Fellowship for 2023-2024 to study the relationship between pain management practices and patient sociodemographic factors among minoritized, hospitalized patients with substance use disorder.

Nader Najafi and Saj Patel's JAMA IM paper was featured as one of the "Elite 8" articles of 2022 in "Quality & Safety in the Literature: Top Papers from the Past Year" at SHM Converge 2023. They developed a clinical decision support (CDS) tool that used predictive analytics to notify providers that their patients may be stable enough to forego nighttime vital signs to reduce sleep interruptions, and conducted a randomized-control trial showing that the CDS tool was effective and safe in helping providers de-escalate vital sign checks and reduce sleep interruptions.

Liz Dzeng was elected to Society of General Internal Medicine Council.

Joshua Ronan was interviewed by the Meet the Doctor Podcast on Apple Podcasts, an introductory podcast for physicians of different specialties which involves describing their clinical work, educational pursuits, and personal interests.

DHM Social Activities

DHM at SHM Converge 2023! More images available in Box.

A "pearl" in promoting Equity and Belonging is a short, action-oriented, topic that aims to raise awareness, increase concern, and share strategies to mitigate our institutional inequities and promote inclusion.

The May newsletter is highlighting collective action, spotlighting University of California and UC resident physicians, in their efforts to mitigate our institutional inequities, namely the economic structures of oppression defined as lack of fair wages and benefits. May 1 was International Workers Day, also referred to as May Day. Let us look back at the last year and highlight a few examples of collective action:

• The University of California 6-week strike involved 48,000 student workers at all 10 UC campuses. Unionized resident physicians joined the strikes as well, demanding fair pay and benefits. Contracts with increases in salary, more child care support, and new measures to protect against bullying and harassment were reached in agreement in December 2022.
• In Los Angeles some 30,000 bus drivers, special education assistants, cafeteria workers, custodians, and others will receive a 30% wage increase, retroactive pay of up to $8,000, and average salaries of $33,000, up from $25,000. Thirty-five thousand L.A. public school teachers joined the picket line with the educational support workers.
• The University of Michigan graduate students were on strike demanding fair wages, sexual harassment protections, and new provisions for campus safety, among other issues.
• Rutgers University faculty were on strike for pay increases, job security, and union representation. Their agreements include a 48% raise for adjunct faculty and a 33% pay raise for graduate workers.
• The University of Illinois Chicago faculty went on strike demanding fair wages that reflect historic inflation, mental health support, and learning disability assessments for students.

Sources:

• U.S. Labor Protests | Democracy Now!
• KRON 4 News: Doctors call for higher wages on day 3 of UC strike

To share an example of collective action, provide feedback or comments, or to share pearls for the next DHM newsletter, please email [email protected]. 

Sandra Oreper, Allison Bond, Margaret Fang, Sujatha Sankaran, and Akshar Rambachan were coauthors on a new study published in Substance Abuse regarding their screening and clinical intervention program with streamlined outpatient linkage for hospitalized patients with opioid use disorder experiencing homelessness. 

Andrew Auerbach, Colin Hubbard, Sumant Ranji, Molly Kantor, Peter Barish, Armond Esmaili, Cindy Fenton, Tiffany Lee, and colleagues published a study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that sought to determine the frequency of diagnostic errors and their causes among patients hospitalized under investigation (PUI) for COVID-19 across 8 medical centers associated with HOMERuN.

Akshay Ravi and Raman Khanna published an article describing the implementation of an integrated consult order to improve ED length of stay and user satisfaction.

In collaboration with HOMERuN, Andrew Auerbach and colleagues published an article in the Journal of Hospital Medicine on hospitalists' perspectives regarding the current and future roles of environmental health within the practice of hospital medicine, as well as existing barriers and potential motivators to its further inclusion.

Leo Liu, Akshay Ravi, Simone Arvisais-Anhalt, and Anoop Muniyappa, along with collaborators from the University of San Francisco, developed a machine learning model to predict 30-day readmissions at UCSF. They are working to operational the model through a Caring Wisely proposal. Their paper was published in Informatics.

Priya Prasad, Sandra Oreper, Margaret Fang, and Andrew Auerbach (in collaboration with HOMERuN) were coauthors along with colleagues from the HCA Healthcare CHARGE consortium on a new study in the Journal of Hospital Medicine which explored the performance of several point-of-care risk scores to predict poor outcomes in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

Sunny Kishore was an author of a piece published in The Lancet Global Health which reviewed progress on tackling global chronic, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the modern era.

Andrew Auerbach and colleagues published a cross-sectional analysis in Cureus which sought determine the degree to which hospitalists published academic manuscripts related to COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic.

Sarah Flynn and Erin Yao-Cohen

"I wanted send a thank you/shout out to Sarah Flynn and Erin Yao-Cohen for being such supportive amazing colleagues that went above and beyond to lend a compassionate shoulder when I was having a hard time on Goldman last month. They made sure I was fed and checked up on me throughout the week. Sarah even made me cupcakes despite being on a busy and challenging Goldman stretch herself! I cannot express how much that meant to me!"

-Tiffany Chang

David Arboleda

"I wanted to thank David Arboleda for so quickly stepping up yesterday when a colleague had to leave urgently during their Goldman shift and needed someone to cover the pager until Swan arrived. Before I could even figure out the best coverage plan you had already taken over the pager — no questions asked. It is great appreciated and we are so lucky to have you as a colleague!"

-Sarah Apgar

David Arboleda, Sarah Flynn, Salman Rahman

"Thanks so much David Arboleda, Sarah Flynn, and Salman Rahman for answering my many questions, helping me figure out systems issues, and being such a stellar and supportive workroom crew on my first Goldman block!"



-Anoop Muniyappa