Table of Contents

Upcoming Events

Message from the Chair

Focus of the Week - Community

Announcements

Faculty Presentations/Publications

Department Member Recognition

Frankly Speaking Podcast

Clinical Services Spotlight

Upcoming Events

FMCH Town Hall

Tuesday, September 20th, 12:00 - 1:00 pm. 

Meeting ID: 915 8133 4605 Passcode: 334605

https://umassmed.zoom.us/j/91581334605?pwd=dndhY3paSmRRZ1RTQndtTEwxaWZOdz09

16th Annual Louis A. Cottle Event

Tuesday, October 11th at 6:30pm, (being held virtually via Zoom) Hugh Silk, MD, MPH, FAAFP, presents: "Stories, Art, Music and Photographs-Reducing Burnout and Improving Patient Care Through the Medical Humanities".

(see brochure)

Message from the Chair

Dear Faculty and Chief Residents:

Each year, the department recognizes individuals who have contributed to the department’s mission of service and teaching. The awards are described below with the list of previous awardees. One of the teaching awards will honor a faculty member for outstanding work in Diversity, Inclusion and Social Justice. We are seeking your nominations for these recognitions.

These awards are important for the faculty and call for thought and reflection on those who deserve recognition. A nomination should include the person’s name, the award you are nominating them for, and a brief paragraph describing why the individual is deserving.

Written nominations will be shared with the leadership team in advance of the team’s October meeting. Nominees will be presented, discussed, and voted on by the Leadership Team. Awardees will be honored on November 15^th from noon to 1:00 pm at the Department’s Annual Awards Ceremony (in lieu of Grand Rounds).

The awards are: Diversity, Inclusion and Health Equity Excellence, Education, Outstanding Community Clinician and the Chair Award.

Focus of the Week - Research

Monthly Research Forum – many of you attended the terrific research forum 2 weeks ago; it was conducted by 2 of our reference librarians on the methodology of doing a scientific review or a scoping review. If you would like a copy of the slides they presented, please let Judy Savageau or Lorna Chiasson know and we’ll send them out to you. If you would like to present at one of our upcoming forums, please let Judy Savageau know. These are held on the 3rd Friday of the month, from 12:00-1:00pm. When more of us are on campus, we will do these live (with lunch), but for right now they will continue to be held via zoom. Any 'works in progress' are great for getting some input from the attendees about possible next steps and feedback on what you have done so far!

Resources for Healthcare Information: Newsletters, Blogs, Funding Opportunities, Data and more…. The listing below identifies a number of websites that have terrific newsletters, blogs, funding opportunities, data, and much more – things you might be very interested in receiving on a regular basis. From data visualization to current and hot topic healthcare information, there’s something for everyone on this list. This is Part 1 of 2 of these listings – next month when ‘research’ is being featured in the Tuesday Talk, we’ll supply you with a number of sites where local, state, and national data can be easily had. If you have some favorites of your own that you’d like to share, please send these to Judy Savageau and we’ll consider having a new link on our research web pages where we highlight these many great opportunities to obtain info that’s relevant to the work we do. Enjoy!

Places to Register for Newsletters, Blog Posts, Resources, and much more:

• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (http://www.ahrq.gov)
• American Evaluation Association (AEA): webinars, coffee break brief webinars, AEA365 daily tips of the day blogs on content areas, methods, etc.; other professional development opportunities, and more (http://www.eval.org)
• Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation (https://www.bluecrossma.org/medical-policies)
• CDC: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov)
• Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS); policy center for advancing innovations for health care delivery for low-income Americans (https://www.chcs.org)
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/USCMS/subscriber/new?topic_id=USCMS_610)
• Community Engagement and Resource Section of the UMMS CCTS (part of the CTSA): provides community statistics resources and much more (CommunityEngagement@umassmed.edu) (communityengagement@list.umassmed.edu)
• Evergreen Data: Intentional Reporting and Data Visualization – like the AEA and SocialCops, this site has many free blogs and how to’s for displaying data creatively and getting away from the text-heavy technical reports; webinars are rarely free (https://stephanieevergreen.com)
• Fresh Spectrum: Like Stephanie Evergreen, Chris Lysy is an evaluator (and cartoonist) who makes data visualization look easy. He offers many classes (not always free) and has a blog/news postings that are worth subscribing to at: https://www.freshspectrum.com.
• Health Affairs Today (healthaffairstoday@healthaffairs.org)
• iSPARC (Implementation Science and Practice Advances Research Center – UMMS, Department of Psychiatry): host a # of webinars and have a newsletter (sparc@umassmed.edu) (http://www.umassmed.edu/sparc)
• Kaiser Family Foundation: health policy news and analysis (http://www.kff.org)
• Modern Healthcare (https://www.modernhealthcare.com/)
• Mathematica Policy Research (communications@mathematica-mpr.com)
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (http://www.rwjf.org)
• SocialCops Academy: like the AEA, many great (and free) webinars and downloaded materials with a focus on all types of methods for survey development and data collection (https://www.socialcops.com)
• The Commonwealth Fund (https://www.commonwealthfund.org)

Request for Publications and Presentations for our FMCH Research Web Pages

Several times a year, but especially as the new academic year begins, we update our department’s research web pages (www.umassmed.edu/fmch/research) with new grants, publications, presentations, student/faculty projects, and many other research-related activities. If you have published something in the past year that hasn’t gotten to the Tuesday Talk, or you’ve given a research presentation, please send those updates to Judy Savageau (judith.savageau@umassmed.edu) and we’ll include them in the next set of updates. We would love to highlight all of your great work!

Research Support

A reminder that the Department offers support for FMCH faculty research leading to scholarly publications and/or presentations. You can find more information, including a form for requesting support, on the FMCH website: Research Initiatives - UMass Medical School - Worcester [https://www.umassmed.edu/fmch/research/research-initiatives].

Trying to Keep Up with the Literature?

The department pulls together the tables of contents (TOCs) for about 15 medical journals and distributes this bundle monthly to a select listserv that people can easily sign up for. The TOCs include 4-5 FM journals, JAMA, NEJM, AJPH, Health Affairs, Medical Care, JGIM, Am J Prev Med, key Pediatrics and key OB/Gyn journals, Addiction Medicine, and many more – lots of great articles that can easily be accessed through links within the bundle. We are also open to adding more journals if there’s an interest expressed! Take a look at what's been posted in the past several months by going to the department's web pages under the section on Research. You will see a tab in the left-hand margin for these TOC bundles that we post monthly: (www.umassmed.edu/fmch/research). If you’d like to be on the distribution list, please send an email to Judy Savageau at (judith.savageau@umassmed.edu).

Announcements

Calling All Fellows and Chief Residents

The FMCH Fellows and Chief Residents are invited to a dinner gathering and get to know each other on September 29th, 2022, 6:30 - 8:30pm. Location TBD.

Please RSVP through your Outlook invite or contact Erica White at Erica.white@umassmemorial.org.

Transitions/Open Medical Director position at Benedict

From Josephine Fowler, MD, MBA: I am pleased to share that the UMass Chan has increased its support of the important role of the 3rd year clerkship directors. As a result, Dr. Mary Lindholm will be stepping down from her medical director role and shifting her time to, as she says, "care for her patients and care for the clerkship." Mary has served as Benedict's Medical Director for five years and I am grateful for her leadership. Mary has led Benedict to excellence in quality and patient care. Anyone from the Benedict practice who is interested in stepping into this role should contact me for more information at Josephine.Fowler@umassmemorial.org.

Med Moth is looking for speakers at its fall event, scheduled for October 12th at 5:30pm in the Albert Sherman Center Multi-Purpose Room (Cafeteria). Med Moth is an event based on The Moth Story Hour where 6-8 members of the UMass Community (SOM, GSN, GSBS, and Baystate) share stories for 5-10 minutes each. Past talks have been about the speaker's journey into medicine, meaningful patient encounters, or other experiences that have shaped one's personal or professional identity in health care. Some have been humorous (a horrible first day of internship) and others have been more serious (coping with the guilt of making a medical error) but the topic is up to the speaker. We seek to highlight a diverse collection of voices and capture the richness of experiences of the members of our UMass-Chan community. Those interested in sharing a story can contact the event organizers, Sean Boyden (sean.boyden@umassmed.edu or Eve Manghis (eve.manghis@umassmed.edu) for more information. Talks do not need to be scripted or pre-approved.

Drs. Judson Brewer and Lia Antico in conjunction with the Brown Mindfulness Center is conducting a research study to test if a short mindfulness-based training is effective at reducing burnout in physicians. Participants must be physicians. If you are a physician and you are interested in helping us to learn about burnout, please contact Brown affiliated contact person at burnout-research@brown.edu. Use of this message for recruiting participants has been approved by Brown's Human Research Protection Program. Protocol # 2022003296. 

Faculty Presentations/Publications



Jennifer Reidy, MD, co-authored with faculty, administrators and students from the four Massachusetts medical schools as well as Atul Gawande, MD, who originally brought the group together along with Harris Berman, MD, the former dean of Tufts University Medical School on a new publication titled "Paving the Way for Universal Medical Student Training in Serious Illness Communication: the Massachusetts Medical Schools’ Collaborative." The article describes an approach to building and scaling medical student training in serious illness communication through the Collaborative.

https://www.maseriouscare.org/medical-schools-collaborative

Dr. Philip Bolduc, presented "HIV Update in the time of COVID-19" at the New England AIDS Training and Education Center (NEAETC)’s HIV Primary Care Update on September 16th in Provincetown, MA.

Philip G. Day, PhD, had the following paper(s) published.

• Farley A, Johnson C, Anasi C, Cai C, Raman Shivani, Rossopolous T, Cantu K, Strenth C, Day P, Gimpel N. Assessing the Factors that Influence Medical Students Attitudes towards Working with Medically Underserved Populations. PRiMER 2022;6:35. This study identifies factors associated with high Attitudes towards Underserved scores within medical education, including female gender identification, higher empathy score, higher emphasis on teamwork, higher community-centeredness, and plans to practice primary care.
• Woods S, Strenth C, Day P, Tsewang T, Aparicio K, Ross K, Ventimiglia J, Jetpuri Z. Relational and Individual Stress Pathways Linking Discrimination and Aging Cardiometabolic Health. Stress & Health;2022 https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3166. Results indicate that inclusion of family in interventions to mitigate the impact of discrimination may be indicated for promoting cardiometabolic wellness.

Department Member Recognition

Ashley Hall, MS director of the Merrimack Valley AHEC, hosted by Greater Lawrence Family Health Center presented at the National AHEC Organization’s virtual Leadership Conference in September. She is the first AHEC Scholar in the country to become an AHEC Center Director and she presented on From Learning to Leading.  

Frankly Speaking Podcast

A weekly Podcast series covering newsworthy topics in primary care medicine.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/frankly-speaking-about-family-medicine/id1194659367.

Please join us for an overview: Chronic Obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is typically diagnosed based on spirometry findings, but what if that finding isn't what you expect? Spirometry measurements are compared to standard values for age, sex, and race. The use of race-based equations has been questioned in several clinical situations, and researchers are now raising similar concerns about the use of race-based equations in spirometry, which may lead to health inequities. Join us for an important discussion on how to overcome these potential disparities in diagnosing COPD. Guest: Alan Ehrlich, MD, FAAFP, presents: "Suspecting COPD: What If the Spirometry Result is Normal?". - Frankly Speaking Ep 295.

COVID-19 UPDATES

COVID-19 UMMMC

• The 7-day average percent positivity is 11.9%.
• In-house confirmed positive cases, 39. Of the 39, 67% are fully vaccinated.
• Of the 4 in the ICU, all are fully vaccinated.

CoOVID-19 MA

• There were 9,091 cases confirmed in the last 7 days.
• The 7-day average of percent positivity is 7.48%.
• There are 194 patients primarily hospitalized for COVID. There are 509 total patients hospitalized who have tested COVID positive. There are 50 patients in the ICU and 11 intubated.
• Confirmed deaths: 20,646 total for MA.

"Long COVID" as a Disability under the ADA, section 504, section 1557

• This guidance protects persons with disabilities related to long COVID from discrimination.
• https://www.hhs.gov/civil-rights/for-providers/civil-rights-Covid19/guidance-long-Covid-disability/index.html
• Long COVID can be a disability under title II (state and local government) and III (public accommodations) under the American Disability Act.
• Civil rights protections apply even during emergencies and cannot be waived.

Monkeypox

• Total global cases: 65,415.
• US cases: 24,846.
• In MA: 381 cases. 
• The largest number of cases are in CA: 4,886.

Treatment for Monkeypox

• Supportive care.
• Management of itching, pain, and nausea, and vomiting.
• TPOXX for high-risk groups. 
• Management of secondary bacterial infections. 
• Check UptoDate.com and the CDC website for medication choices, doses, and regimens.

Wellness Resources

The Caring for the Caregiver Program provides resources such as the Caregiver Support Line (508-334-HELP) and The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) which offers a variety of services and supports (including virtual peer support and wellness tips. EAP can be accessed at 866-263-3525, or www.LiveandWorkWell.com, [company code UmassMemorial]. More information is available on the Caring for the Caregiver page.