Monthly Newsletter | November 2024

Welcome to DHM Academic Faculty and Clinical Faculty who recently joined DHM in September and October. Onboarding season is always a highlight of the year, and we look forward to working with and getting to know all of you in the weeks and months ahead!

Meet DHM

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

Tim Judson has been appointed interim Chief Population Health Officer at UCSF Health. 

Rashmi Manjunath was selected as the Medical Director of the St. Mary's Hospital Medicine program.

Neal Tambe was selected as the Associate Director of the St. Mary's Hospital Medicine Service.

Sunny Kishore was featured in the UC Population Health Annual Report 2023-2024 where his work on a newly developed UC-wide hypertension medication algorithm was featured. The algorithm focuses on reducing disparities, promoting equity and improving outcomes. 

Congratulations to UCSF MS4 Harrison Tran and his mentor, Ritu Bansal, for their outstanding work on improving handoffs for patients with limited English proficiency. Their project was awarded first place in the Medical Student Clinical Research Poster Competition at the ACP Regional Meeting, held at Stanford on October 26.

Sujatha Sankaran was accepted to the second cohort of the Science and Healthcare Advocates for Research Policy (SHARP) Program, led by UCSF's Community & Government Relations and Office of Research.

Kristen Kipps and Sangeeta Prabhakar Bhat completed the Litigation Peer Supporter training program led by UCSF Risk Management. 

The UCSF DHM POCUS team is hosting their next quarterly workshop on December 11th from 3-5 PM at Parnassus. This is a fantastic opportunity to enhance your POCUS skills, whether you're new to POCUS or looking to refine your technique.

The workshop will focus on hands-on bedside teaching with standardized patients, emphasizing image acquisition along with indications, interpretation, and clinical integration.

If you're interested, please email Ritu.Bansal@ucsf.edu. Don't miss out on this valuable learning experience!

Community Corner

Welcome to the heart of DHM! This spot is all about keeping you in the loop on all things community—highlights from last month’s events, snapshots of fun moments, and a heads-up on what's coming up next month. Keep an eye here for dates, details, and photos that celebrate our DHM community spirit! Reach out to Rosemary Yau to share yours.

Upcoming events:

• December 5^th – Karaoke Night! Festa Lounge, 7-9 pm
• After the Holidays Party: January 10 

October Event Recap:

CBC October Happy Hour!

DHM Women's Council Book Club "Between the Pages"

DHM Fall Gathering at the San Francisco Zoo (more pictures available in Box)

DHM Fall Gathering for Fellows and Fellowship alumni; prospective hospitalists from the UCSF IM residency were also in attendance to promote academic careers in HM.

Family Hike

Staff Retreat

Equity & Belonging in Hospital Medicine

For this month's Equity Pearl, we share a piece of critical healthcare history: the Black origins of today’s Emergency Medical Services. This post is authored by Catthi Ly, Sharifa Brooks-Smith-Lowe, Sofia Weiss-Goitiandia, Julia Axelrod, and Elizabeth Dzeng (The RISE Project Team).

The legacy of Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Services on today's emergency care

Before 1967, emergency medical services (EMS) in most American municipalities were operated by local police departments, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the country’s most diverse yet segregated cities. Because of the anti-Blackness woven into the infrastructure of the policing system, patients from Black communities were the least prioritized for Emergency Department (ED) transfers.

Out of this injustice came the Freedom House Ambulance Services, an initiative to administer at-the-scene life-saving care and facilitate ED transfers in the Hill District, one of Pittsburgh’s most under-resourced neighborhoods. [click here to continue reading]

The PFAC: Updates

This past month the PFAC focused on updating and finessing the PFAC-initiated quality improvement project to find out, in real-time, what is most important for patients and families in terms of improving patient experience. The PFAC facilitator team is working with post bacc students to do in-person interviews, using this survey tool developed with a subcommittee of the PFAC. 

Additionally, you're invited to come learn with and from the PFAC! Even if you don't have a current project for PFAC review, DHM faculty and staff are invited to join in a meeting to meet and connect with the PFAC. Email us to schedule a time to visit with the Hospital Medicine PFAC! We are now scheduling for 2025 PFAC meetings (email Martha for more information).

- Signed, the PFAC facilitator team, Jeannie, Mia, Martha & James

Photo of 3 PFAC members, Darryl, Harry, and Michelle

Tim Judson, Michelle Mourad, Bob Wachter, and colleagues were coauthors on a study recently accepted for publication in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, which demonstrated the feasibility and acceptability of Targeted Automatic E-Consults (TACo’s) for inpatient hyponatremia. 

Leo Liu and Andy Auerbach just had their paper on "Sabercaremetrics" published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. They are calling for the development of a new generation of measures and metrics to help improve physician training and growth.

Andy Auerbach coauthored a long awaited update to key AHA/ACC guidelines for preoperative evaluation and cardiac risk reduction strategies. Kirsten Fleischmann (UCSF Cardiology) and Annemarie Thompson (former UCSF Medicine Chief Resident) were two of the three primary authors of this immense work. He also coauthored a related review article on perioperative cardiac risk.

Andy Auerbach published an editorial in JAMA Network Open about how a paper from Hardeep Singh's group describes some early applications of AI to screen medical records to find cases where a diagnostic error might have taken place.