Ob.Gyn. News

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems, hospitals, and hospitalists – especially in hot spots like New York, Detroit, or Boston – have been challenged to stretch limits, redefine roles, and redeploy critical staff in response to rapidly changing needs on the ground.

Many hospitalists are working above and beyond their normal duties, sometimes beyond their training, specialty, or comfort zone and are rising to the occasion in ways they never imagined. These include doing shifts in ICUs, working with ventilator patients, and reporting to other atypical sites of care like postanesthesia care units and post-acute or step-down units.

Valerie Vaughn, MD, MSc, a hospitalist with Michigan Medicine and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was doing research on how to reduce overuse of antibiotics in hospitals when the COVID-19 crisis hit and dramatically redefined her job. “We were afraid that we might have 3,000 to 5,000 hospitalized COVID patients by now, based on predictive modeling done while the pandemic was still growing exponentially,” she explained. Although Michigan continues to have high COVID-19 infection rates, centered on nearby Detroit, “things are a lot better today than they were 4 weeks ago.”

Dr. Vaughn helped to mobilize a team of 25 hospitalists, along with other health care providers, who volunteered to manage COVID-19 patients in the ICU and other hospital units. She was asked to help develop an all-COVID unit called the Regional Infectious Containment Unit or RICU, which opened March 16. Then, when the RICU became full, it was supplemented by two COVID-19 Moderate Care Units staffed by hospitalists who had “learned the ropes” in the RICU.

Both of these new models were defined in relation to the ICUs at Michigan Medicine – which were doubling in capacity, up to 200 beds at last count – and to the provision of intensive-level and long-term ventilator care for the sickest patients. The moderate care units are for patients who are not on ventilators but still very sick, for example, those receiving massive high-flow oxygen, often with a medical do-not-resuscitate/do-not-intubate order. “We established these units to do everything (medically) short of vents,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We are having in-depth conversations about goals of care with patients soon after they arrive at the hospital. We know outcomes from ventilators are worse for COVID-positive patients who have comorbidities, and we’re using that information to inform these conversations. We’ve given scripts to clinicians to help guide them in leading these conversations. We can do other things than `use ventilators to manage their symptoms. But these are still difficult conversations,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We also engaged palliative care early on and asked them to round with us on every [COVID] patient – until demand got too high.” The bottleneck has been the number of ICU beds available, she explained. “If you want your patient to come in and take that bed, make sure you’ve talked to the family about it.”

The COVID-19 team developed guidelines printed on pocket cards addressing critical care issues such as a refresher on how to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome and how to use vasopressors. (See the COVID-19 Continuing Medical Education Portal for web-accessible educational resources developed by Michigan Health).

It’s amazing how quickly patients can become very sick with COVID-19, Dr. Vaughn said. “One of the good things to happen from the beginning with our RICU is that a group of doctors became COVID care experts very quickly. We joined four to five hospitalists and their teams with each intensivist, so one critical care expert is there to do teaching and answer clinicians’ questions. The hospitalists coordinate the COVID care and talk to the families.”

Working on the front lines of this crisis, Dr. Vaughn said, has generated a powerful sense of purpose and camaraderie, creating bonds like in war time. “All of us on our days off feel a twinge of guilt for not being there in the hospital. The sense of gratitude we get from patients and families has been enormous, even when we were telling them bad news. That just brings us to tears.”

One of the hardest things for the doctors practicing above their typical scope of practice is that, when something bad happens, they can’t know whether it was a mistake on their part or not, she noted. “But I’ve never been so proud of our group or to be a hospitalist. No one has complained or pushed back. Everyone has responded by saying: ‘What can I do to help?’ ”
 

Enough work in hospital medicine

Hospitalists had not been deployed to care for ICU patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, a major hot spot for COVID-19, said Joseph Ming Wah Li, MD, SFHM, director of the hospital medicine program at BIDMC, when he spoke to The Hospitalist in mid-May. That’s because there were plenty of hospital medicine assignments to keep them busy. Dr. Li leads a service of 120 hospitalists practicing at four hospitals.

“As we speak today, we have 300 patients with COVID, with 70 or 80 of them in our ICU. I’m taking care of 17 patients today, 15 of them COVID-positive, and the other two placed in a former radiology holding suite adapted for COVID-negative patients. Our postanesthesia care unit is now an ICU filled with COVID patients,” he said.

“Half of my day is seeing patients and the other half I’m on Zoom calls. I’m also one of the resource allocation officers for BIDMC,” Dr. Li said. He helped to create a standard of care for the hospital, addressing what to do if there weren’t enough ICU beds or ventilators. “We’ve never actualized it and probably won’t, but it was important to go through this exercise, with a lot of discussion up front.”

Haki Laho, MD, an orthopedic hospitalist at New England Baptist Hospital (NEBH), also in Boston, has been redeployed to care for a different population of patients as his system tries to bunch patients. “All of a sudden – within hours and days – at the beginning of the pandemic and based on the recommendations, our whole system decided to stop all elective procedures and devote the resources to COVID,” he said.

NEBH is Beth Israel Lahey Health’s 141-bed orthopedic and surgical hospital, and the system has tried to keep the specialty facility COVID-19–free as much as possible, with the COVID-19 patients grouped together at BIDMC. Dr. Laho’s orthopedic hospitalist group, just five doctors, has been managing the influx of medical patients with multiple comorbidities – not COVID-19–infected but still a different kind of patient than they are used to.

“So far, so good. We’re dealing with it,” he said. “But if one of us got sick, the others would have to step up and do more shifts. We are physicians, internal medicine trained, but since my residency I hadn’t had to deal with these kinds of issues on a daily basis, such as setting up IV lines. I feel like I am back in residency mode.”
 

Convention Center medicine

Another Boston hospitalist, Amy Baughman, MD, who practices at Massachusetts General Hospital, is using her skills in a new setting, serving as a co-medical director at Boston Hope Medical Center, a 1,000-bed field hospital for patients with COVID-19. Open since April 10 and housed in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, it is a four-way collaboration between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, Partners HealthCare, and the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Boston Hope is divided into a post-acute care section for recovering COVID-19 patients and a respite section for undomiciled patients with COVID-19 who need a place to safely quarantine. Built for a maximum of 1,000 beds, it is currently using fewer, with 83 patients on the post-acute side and 73 on the respite side as of May 12. A total of 370 and 315, respectively, had been admitted through May 12.

The team had 5 days to put the field hospital together with the help of the Army National Guard. “During that first week I was installing hand sanitizer dispensers and making [personal protective equipment] signs. Everyone here has had to do things like that,” Dr. Baughman said. “We’ve had to be incredibly creative in our staffing, using doctors from primary care and subspecialties including dermatology, radiology, and orthopedics. We had to fast-track trainings on how to use EPIC and to provide post-acute COVID care. How do you simultaneously build a medical facility and lead teams to provide high quality care?”

Dr. Baughman still works hospitalist shifts half-time at Massachusetts General. Her prior experience providing post-acute care in the VA system was helpful in creating the post-acute level of care at Boston Hope.

“My medical director role involves supervising, staffing, and scheduling. My co-medical director, Dr. Kerri Palamara, and I also supervise the clinical care,” she said. “There are a lot of systems issues, like ordering labs or prescriptions, with couriers going back and forth. And we developed clinical pathways, such as for [deep vein thrombosis] prophylaxis or for COVID retesting to determine when it is safe to end a quarantine. We’re just now rolling out virtual specialist consultations,” she noted.

“It has gone incredibly well. So much of it has been about our ability and willingness to work hard, and take feedback and go forward. We don’t have time to harp on things. We have to be very solution oriented. At the same time, honestly, it’s been fun. Every single day is different,” Dr. Baughman said.

“It’s been an opportunity to use my skills in a totally new setting, and at a level of responsibility I haven’t had before, although that’s probably a common theme with COVID-19. I was put on this team because I am a hospitalist,” she said. “I think hospitalists have been the backbone of the response to COVID in this country. It’s been an opportunity for our specialty to shine. We need to embrace the opportunity.”
 

Balancing expertise and supervision

Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) in Manhattan is in the New York epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis and has mobilized large numbers of pulmonary critical care and anesthesia physicians to staff up multiple ICUs for COVID-19 patients, said Andrew Dunn, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

“My hospitalist group is covering many step-down units, medical wards, and atypical locations, providing advanced oxygen therapies, [bilevel positive airway pressure], high-flow nasal cannulas, and managing some patients on ventilators,” he said.

MSH has teaching services with house staff and nonteaching services. “We combined them into a unified service with house staff dispersed across all of the teams. We drafted a lot of nonhospitalists from different specialties to be attendings, and that has given us a tiered model, with a hospitalist supervising three or four nonhospitalist-led teams. Although the supervising hospitalists carry no patient caseloads of their own, this is primarily a clinical rather than an administrative role.”

At the peak, there were 40 rounding teams at MSH, each with a typical census of 15 patients or more, which meant that 10 supervisory hospitalists were responsible for 300 to 400 patients. “What we learned first was the need to balance the level of expertise. For example, a team may include a postgraduate year 3 resident and a radiology intern,” Dr. Dunn said. As COVID-19 census has started coming down, supervisory hospitalists are returning to direct care attending roles, and some hospitalists have been shared across the Mount Sinai system’s hospitals.

Dr. Dunn’s advice for hospitalists filling a supervisory role like this in a tiered model: Make sure you talk to your team the night before the first day of a scheduling block and try to address as many of their questions as possible. “If you wait until the morning of the shift to connect with them, anxiety will be high. But after going through a couple of scheduling cycles, we find that things are getting better. I think we’ve paid a lot of attention to the risks of burnout by our physicians. We’re using a model of 4 days on/4 off.”

Another variation on these themes is Joshua Shatzkes, MD, assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at Mount Sinai, who practices outpatient cardiology at MSH and in several off-site offices in Brooklyn. He saw early on that COVID-19 would have a huge effect on his practice, so he volunteered to help out with inpatient care. “I made it known to my chief that I was available, and I was deployed in the first week, after a weekend of cramming webinars and lectures on critical care and pulling out critical concepts that I already knew.”

Dr. Shatzkes said his career path led him into outpatient cardiology 11 years ago, where he was quickly too busy to see his patients when they went into the hospital, even though he missed hospital medicine. Working as a temporary hospitalist with the arrival of COVID-19, he has been invigorated and mobilized by the experience and reminded of why he went to medical school in the first place. “Each day’s shift went quickly but felt long. At the end of the day, I was tired but not exhausted. When I walked out of a patient’s room, they could tell, ‘This is a doctor who cared for me,’ ” he said.

After Dr. Shatzkes volunteered, he got the call from his division chief. “I was officially deployed for a 4-day shift at Mount Sinai and then as a backup.” On his first morning as an inpatient doctor, he was still getting oriented when calls started coming from the nurses. “I had five patients struggling to breathe. Their degree of hypoxia was remarkable. I kept them out of the ICU, at least for that day.”

Since then, he has continued to follow some of those patients in the hospital, along with some from his outpatient practice who were hospitalized, and others referred by colleagues, while remaining available to his outpatients through telemedicine. When this is all over, Dr. Shatzkes said, he would love to find a way to incorporate a hospital practice in his job – depending on the realities of New York traffic.

“Joshua is not a hospitalist, but he went on service and felt so fulfilled and rewarded, he asked me if he could stay on service,” Dr. Dunn said. “I also got an email from the nurse manager on the unit. They want him back.”

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems, hospitals, and hospitalists – especially in hot spots like New York, Detroit, or Boston – have been challenged to stretch limits, redefine roles, and redeploy critical staff in response to rapidly changing needs on the ground.

Many hospitalists are working above and beyond their normal duties, sometimes beyond their training, specialty, or comfort zone and are rising to the occasion in ways they never imagined. These include doing shifts in ICUs, working with ventilator patients, and reporting to other atypical sites of care like postanesthesia care units and post-acute or step-down units.

Valerie Vaughn, MD, MSc, a hospitalist with Michigan Medicine and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was doing research on how to reduce overuse of antibiotics in hospitals when the COVID-19 crisis hit and dramatically redefined her job. “We were afraid that we might have 3,000 to 5,000 hospitalized COVID patients by now, based on predictive modeling done while the pandemic was still growing exponentially,” she explained. Although Michigan continues to have high COVID-19 infection rates, centered on nearby Detroit, “things are a lot better today than they were 4 weeks ago.”

Dr. Vaughn helped to mobilize a team of 25 hospitalists, along with other health care providers, who volunteered to manage COVID-19 patients in the ICU and other hospital units. She was asked to help develop an all-COVID unit called the Regional Infectious Containment Unit or RICU, which opened March 16. Then, when the RICU became full, it was supplemented by two COVID-19 Moderate Care Units staffed by hospitalists who had “learned the ropes” in the RICU.

Both of these new models were defined in relation to the ICUs at Michigan Medicine – which were doubling in capacity, up to 200 beds at last count – and to the provision of intensive-level and long-term ventilator care for the sickest patients. The moderate care units are for patients who are not on ventilators but still very sick, for example, those receiving massive high-flow oxygen, often with a medical do-not-resuscitate/do-not-intubate order. “We established these units to do everything (medically) short of vents,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We are having in-depth conversations about goals of care with patients soon after they arrive at the hospital. We know outcomes from ventilators are worse for COVID-positive patients who have comorbidities, and we’re using that information to inform these conversations. We’ve given scripts to clinicians to help guide them in leading these conversations. We can do other things than `use ventilators to manage their symptoms. But these are still difficult conversations,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We also engaged palliative care early on and asked them to round with us on every [COVID] patient – until demand got too high.” The bottleneck has been the number of ICU beds available, she explained. “If you want your patient to come in and take that bed, make sure you’ve talked to the family about it.”

The COVID-19 team developed guidelines printed on pocket cards addressing critical care issues such as a refresher on how to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome and how to use vasopressors. (See the COVID-19 Continuing Medical Education Portal for web-accessible educational resources developed by Michigan Health).

It’s amazing how quickly patients can become very sick with COVID-19, Dr. Vaughn said. “One of the good things to happen from the beginning with our RICU is that a group of doctors became COVID care experts very quickly. We joined four to five hospitalists and their teams with each intensivist, so one critical care expert is there to do teaching and answer clinicians’ questions. The hospitalists coordinate the COVID care and talk to the families.”

Working on the front lines of this crisis, Dr. Vaughn said, has generated a powerful sense of purpose and camaraderie, creating bonds like in war time. “All of us on our days off feel a twinge of guilt for not being there in the hospital. The sense of gratitude we get from patients and families has been enormous, even when we were telling them bad news. That just brings us to tears.”

One of the hardest things for the doctors practicing above their typical scope of practice is that, when something bad happens, they can’t know whether it was a mistake on their part or not, she noted. “But I’ve never been so proud of our group or to be a hospitalist. No one has complained or pushed back. Everyone has responded by saying: ‘What can I do to help?’ ”
 

Enough work in hospital medicine

Hospitalists had not been deployed to care for ICU patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, a major hot spot for COVID-19, said Joseph Ming Wah Li, MD, SFHM, director of the hospital medicine program at BIDMC, when he spoke to The Hospitalist in mid-May. That’s because there were plenty of hospital medicine assignments to keep them busy. Dr. Li leads a service of 120 hospitalists practicing at four hospitals.

“As we speak today, we have 300 patients with COVID, with 70 or 80 of them in our ICU. I’m taking care of 17 patients today, 15 of them COVID-positive, and the other two placed in a former radiology holding suite adapted for COVID-negative patients. Our postanesthesia care unit is now an ICU filled with COVID patients,” he said.

“Half of my day is seeing patients and the other half I’m on Zoom calls. I’m also one of the resource allocation officers for BIDMC,” Dr. Li said. He helped to create a standard of care for the hospital, addressing what to do if there weren’t enough ICU beds or ventilators. “We’ve never actualized it and probably won’t, but it was important to go through this exercise, with a lot of discussion up front.”

Haki Laho, MD, an orthopedic hospitalist at New England Baptist Hospital (NEBH), also in Boston, has been redeployed to care for a different population of patients as his system tries to bunch patients. “All of a sudden – within hours and days – at the beginning of the pandemic and based on the recommendations, our whole system decided to stop all elective procedures and devote the resources to COVID,” he said.

NEBH is Beth Israel Lahey Health’s 141-bed orthopedic and surgical hospital, and the system has tried to keep the specialty facility COVID-19–free as much as possible, with the COVID-19 patients grouped together at BIDMC. Dr. Laho’s orthopedic hospitalist group, just five doctors, has been managing the influx of medical patients with multiple comorbidities – not COVID-19–infected but still a different kind of patient than they are used to.

“So far, so good. We’re dealing with it,” he said. “But if one of us got sick, the others would have to step up and do more shifts. We are physicians, internal medicine trained, but since my residency I hadn’t had to deal with these kinds of issues on a daily basis, such as setting up IV lines. I feel like I am back in residency mode.”
 

Convention Center medicine

Another Boston hospitalist, Amy Baughman, MD, who practices at Massachusetts General Hospital, is using her skills in a new setting, serving as a co-medical director at Boston Hope Medical Center, a 1,000-bed field hospital for patients with COVID-19. Open since April 10 and housed in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, it is a four-way collaboration between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, Partners HealthCare, and the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Boston Hope is divided into a post-acute care section for recovering COVID-19 patients and a respite section for undomiciled patients with COVID-19 who need a place to safely quarantine. Built for a maximum of 1,000 beds, it is currently using fewer, with 83 patients on the post-acute side and 73 on the respite side as of May 12. A total of 370 and 315, respectively, had been admitted through May 12.

The team had 5 days to put the field hospital together with the help of the Army National Guard. “During that first week I was installing hand sanitizer dispensers and making [personal protective equipment] signs. Everyone here has had to do things like that,” Dr. Baughman said. “We’ve had to be incredibly creative in our staffing, using doctors from primary care and subspecialties including dermatology, radiology, and orthopedics. We had to fast-track trainings on how to use EPIC and to provide post-acute COVID care. How do you simultaneously build a medical facility and lead teams to provide high quality care?”

Dr. Baughman still works hospitalist shifts half-time at Massachusetts General. Her prior experience providing post-acute care in the VA system was helpful in creating the post-acute level of care at Boston Hope.

“My medical director role involves supervising, staffing, and scheduling. My co-medical director, Dr. Kerri Palamara, and I also supervise the clinical care,” she said. “There are a lot of systems issues, like ordering labs or prescriptions, with couriers going back and forth. And we developed clinical pathways, such as for [deep vein thrombosis] prophylaxis or for COVID retesting to determine when it is safe to end a quarantine. We’re just now rolling out virtual specialist consultations,” she noted.

“It has gone incredibly well. So much of it has been about our ability and willingness to work hard, and take feedback and go forward. We don’t have time to harp on things. We have to be very solution oriented. At the same time, honestly, it’s been fun. Every single day is different,” Dr. Baughman said.

“It’s been an opportunity to use my skills in a totally new setting, and at a level of responsibility I haven’t had before, although that’s probably a common theme with COVID-19. I was put on this team because I am a hospitalist,” she said. “I think hospitalists have been the backbone of the response to COVID in this country. It’s been an opportunity for our specialty to shine. We need to embrace the opportunity.”
 

Balancing expertise and supervision

Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) in Manhattan is in the New York epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis and has mobilized large numbers of pulmonary critical care and anesthesia physicians to staff up multiple ICUs for COVID-19 patients, said Andrew Dunn, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

“My hospitalist group is covering many step-down units, medical wards, and atypical locations, providing advanced oxygen therapies, [bilevel positive airway pressure], high-flow nasal cannulas, and managing some patients on ventilators,” he said.

MSH has teaching services with house staff and nonteaching services. “We combined them into a unified service with house staff dispersed across all of the teams. We drafted a lot of nonhospitalists from different specialties to be attendings, and that has given us a tiered model, with a hospitalist supervising three or four nonhospitalist-led teams. Although the supervising hospitalists carry no patient caseloads of their own, this is primarily a clinical rather than an administrative role.”

At the peak, there were 40 rounding teams at MSH, each with a typical census of 15 patients or more, which meant that 10 supervisory hospitalists were responsible for 300 to 400 patients. “What we learned first was the need to balance the level of expertise. For example, a team may include a postgraduate year 3 resident and a radiology intern,” Dr. Dunn said. As COVID-19 census has started coming down, supervisory hospitalists are returning to direct care attending roles, and some hospitalists have been shared across the Mount Sinai system’s hospitals.

Dr. Dunn’s advice for hospitalists filling a supervisory role like this in a tiered model: Make sure you talk to your team the night before the first day of a scheduling block and try to address as many of their questions as possible. “If you wait until the morning of the shift to connect with them, anxiety will be high. But after going through a couple of scheduling cycles, we find that things are getting better. I think we’ve paid a lot of attention to the risks of burnout by our physicians. We’re using a model of 4 days on/4 off.”

Another variation on these themes is Joshua Shatzkes, MD, assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at Mount Sinai, who practices outpatient cardiology at MSH and in several off-site offices in Brooklyn. He saw early on that COVID-19 would have a huge effect on his practice, so he volunteered to help out with inpatient care. “I made it known to my chief that I was available, and I was deployed in the first week, after a weekend of cramming webinars and lectures on critical care and pulling out critical concepts that I already knew.”

Dr. Shatzkes said his career path led him into outpatient cardiology 11 years ago, where he was quickly too busy to see his patients when they went into the hospital, even though he missed hospital medicine. Working as a temporary hospitalist with the arrival of COVID-19, he has been invigorated and mobilized by the experience and reminded of why he went to medical school in the first place. “Each day’s shift went quickly but felt long. At the end of the day, I was tired but not exhausted. When I walked out of a patient’s room, they could tell, ‘This is a doctor who cared for me,’ ” he said.

After Dr. Shatzkes volunteered, he got the call from his division chief. “I was officially deployed for a 4-day shift at Mount Sinai and then as a backup.” On his first morning as an inpatient doctor, he was still getting oriented when calls started coming from the nurses. “I had five patients struggling to breathe. Their degree of hypoxia was remarkable. I kept them out of the ICU, at least for that day.”

Since then, he has continued to follow some of those patients in the hospital, along with some from his outpatient practice who were hospitalized, and others referred by colleagues, while remaining available to his outpatients through telemedicine. When this is all over, Dr. Shatzkes said, he would love to find a way to incorporate a hospital practice in his job – depending on the realities of New York traffic.

“Joshua is not a hospitalist, but he went on service and felt so fulfilled and rewarded, he asked me if he could stay on service,” Dr. Dunn said. “I also got an email from the nurse manager on the unit. They want him back.”

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems, hospitals, and hospitalists – especially in hot spots like New York, Detroit, or Boston – have been challenged to stretch limits, redefine roles, and redeploy critical staff in response to rapidly changing needs on the ground.

Many hospitalists are working above and beyond their normal duties, sometimes beyond their training, specialty, or comfort zone and are rising to the occasion in ways they never imagined. These include doing shifts in ICUs, working with ventilator patients, and reporting to other atypical sites of care like postanesthesia care units and post-acute or step-down units.

Valerie Vaughn, MD, MSc, a hospitalist with Michigan Medicine and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, was doing research on how to reduce overuse of antibiotics in hospitals when the COVID-19 crisis hit and dramatically redefined her job. “We were afraid that we might have 3,000 to 5,000 hospitalized COVID patients by now, based on predictive modeling done while the pandemic was still growing exponentially,” she explained. Although Michigan continues to have high COVID-19 infection rates, centered on nearby Detroit, “things are a lot better today than they were 4 weeks ago.”

Dr. Vaughn helped to mobilize a team of 25 hospitalists, along with other health care providers, who volunteered to manage COVID-19 patients in the ICU and other hospital units. She was asked to help develop an all-COVID unit called the Regional Infectious Containment Unit or RICU, which opened March 16. Then, when the RICU became full, it was supplemented by two COVID-19 Moderate Care Units staffed by hospitalists who had “learned the ropes” in the RICU.

Both of these new models were defined in relation to the ICUs at Michigan Medicine – which were doubling in capacity, up to 200 beds at last count – and to the provision of intensive-level and long-term ventilator care for the sickest patients. The moderate care units are for patients who are not on ventilators but still very sick, for example, those receiving massive high-flow oxygen, often with a medical do-not-resuscitate/do-not-intubate order. “We established these units to do everything (medically) short of vents,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We are having in-depth conversations about goals of care with patients soon after they arrive at the hospital. We know outcomes from ventilators are worse for COVID-positive patients who have comorbidities, and we’re using that information to inform these conversations. We’ve given scripts to clinicians to help guide them in leading these conversations. We can do other things than `use ventilators to manage their symptoms. But these are still difficult conversations,” Dr. Vaughn said.

“We also engaged palliative care early on and asked them to round with us on every [COVID] patient – until demand got too high.” The bottleneck has been the number of ICU beds available, she explained. “If you want your patient to come in and take that bed, make sure you’ve talked to the family about it.”

The COVID-19 team developed guidelines printed on pocket cards addressing critical care issues such as a refresher on how to treat acute respiratory distress syndrome and how to use vasopressors. (See the COVID-19 Continuing Medical Education Portal for web-accessible educational resources developed by Michigan Health).

It’s amazing how quickly patients can become very sick with COVID-19, Dr. Vaughn said. “One of the good things to happen from the beginning with our RICU is that a group of doctors became COVID care experts very quickly. We joined four to five hospitalists and their teams with each intensivist, so one critical care expert is there to do teaching and answer clinicians’ questions. The hospitalists coordinate the COVID care and talk to the families.”

Working on the front lines of this crisis, Dr. Vaughn said, has generated a powerful sense of purpose and camaraderie, creating bonds like in war time. “All of us on our days off feel a twinge of guilt for not being there in the hospital. The sense of gratitude we get from patients and families has been enormous, even when we were telling them bad news. That just brings us to tears.”

One of the hardest things for the doctors practicing above their typical scope of practice is that, when something bad happens, they can’t know whether it was a mistake on their part or not, she noted. “But I’ve never been so proud of our group or to be a hospitalist. No one has complained or pushed back. Everyone has responded by saying: ‘What can I do to help?’ ”
 

Enough work in hospital medicine

Hospitalists had not been deployed to care for ICU patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston, a major hot spot for COVID-19, said Joseph Ming Wah Li, MD, SFHM, director of the hospital medicine program at BIDMC, when he spoke to The Hospitalist in mid-May. That’s because there were plenty of hospital medicine assignments to keep them busy. Dr. Li leads a service of 120 hospitalists practicing at four hospitals.

“As we speak today, we have 300 patients with COVID, with 70 or 80 of them in our ICU. I’m taking care of 17 patients today, 15 of them COVID-positive, and the other two placed in a former radiology holding suite adapted for COVID-negative patients. Our postanesthesia care unit is now an ICU filled with COVID patients,” he said.

“Half of my day is seeing patients and the other half I’m on Zoom calls. I’m also one of the resource allocation officers for BIDMC,” Dr. Li said. He helped to create a standard of care for the hospital, addressing what to do if there weren’t enough ICU beds or ventilators. “We’ve never actualized it and probably won’t, but it was important to go through this exercise, with a lot of discussion up front.”

Haki Laho, MD, an orthopedic hospitalist at New England Baptist Hospital (NEBH), also in Boston, has been redeployed to care for a different population of patients as his system tries to bunch patients. “All of a sudden – within hours and days – at the beginning of the pandemic and based on the recommendations, our whole system decided to stop all elective procedures and devote the resources to COVID,” he said.

NEBH is Beth Israel Lahey Health’s 141-bed orthopedic and surgical hospital, and the system has tried to keep the specialty facility COVID-19–free as much as possible, with the COVID-19 patients grouped together at BIDMC. Dr. Laho’s orthopedic hospitalist group, just five doctors, has been managing the influx of medical patients with multiple comorbidities – not COVID-19–infected but still a different kind of patient than they are used to.

“So far, so good. We’re dealing with it,” he said. “But if one of us got sick, the others would have to step up and do more shifts. We are physicians, internal medicine trained, but since my residency I hadn’t had to deal with these kinds of issues on a daily basis, such as setting up IV lines. I feel like I am back in residency mode.”
 

Convention Center medicine

Another Boston hospitalist, Amy Baughman, MD, who practices at Massachusetts General Hospital, is using her skills in a new setting, serving as a co-medical director at Boston Hope Medical Center, a 1,000-bed field hospital for patients with COVID-19. Open since April 10 and housed in the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, it is a four-way collaboration between the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the City of Boston, Partners HealthCare, and the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program.

Boston Hope is divided into a post-acute care section for recovering COVID-19 patients and a respite section for undomiciled patients with COVID-19 who need a place to safely quarantine. Built for a maximum of 1,000 beds, it is currently using fewer, with 83 patients on the post-acute side and 73 on the respite side as of May 12. A total of 370 and 315, respectively, had been admitted through May 12.

The team had 5 days to put the field hospital together with the help of the Army National Guard. “During that first week I was installing hand sanitizer dispensers and making [personal protective equipment] signs. Everyone here has had to do things like that,” Dr. Baughman said. “We’ve had to be incredibly creative in our staffing, using doctors from primary care and subspecialties including dermatology, radiology, and orthopedics. We had to fast-track trainings on how to use EPIC and to provide post-acute COVID care. How do you simultaneously build a medical facility and lead teams to provide high quality care?”

Dr. Baughman still works hospitalist shifts half-time at Massachusetts General. Her prior experience providing post-acute care in the VA system was helpful in creating the post-acute level of care at Boston Hope.

“My medical director role involves supervising, staffing, and scheduling. My co-medical director, Dr. Kerri Palamara, and I also supervise the clinical care,” she said. “There are a lot of systems issues, like ordering labs or prescriptions, with couriers going back and forth. And we developed clinical pathways, such as for [deep vein thrombosis] prophylaxis or for COVID retesting to determine when it is safe to end a quarantine. We’re just now rolling out virtual specialist consultations,” she noted.

“It has gone incredibly well. So much of it has been about our ability and willingness to work hard, and take feedback and go forward. We don’t have time to harp on things. We have to be very solution oriented. At the same time, honestly, it’s been fun. Every single day is different,” Dr. Baughman said.

“It’s been an opportunity to use my skills in a totally new setting, and at a level of responsibility I haven’t had before, although that’s probably a common theme with COVID-19. I was put on this team because I am a hospitalist,” she said. “I think hospitalists have been the backbone of the response to COVID in this country. It’s been an opportunity for our specialty to shine. We need to embrace the opportunity.”
 

Balancing expertise and supervision

Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH) in Manhattan is in the New York epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis and has mobilized large numbers of pulmonary critical care and anesthesia physicians to staff up multiple ICUs for COVID-19 patients, said Andrew Dunn, MD, chief of the division of hospital medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

“My hospitalist group is covering many step-down units, medical wards, and atypical locations, providing advanced oxygen therapies, [bilevel positive airway pressure], high-flow nasal cannulas, and managing some patients on ventilators,” he said.

MSH has teaching services with house staff and nonteaching services. “We combined them into a unified service with house staff dispersed across all of the teams. We drafted a lot of nonhospitalists from different specialties to be attendings, and that has given us a tiered model, with a hospitalist supervising three or four nonhospitalist-led teams. Although the supervising hospitalists carry no patient caseloads of their own, this is primarily a clinical rather than an administrative role.”

At the peak, there were 40 rounding teams at MSH, each with a typical census of 15 patients or more, which meant that 10 supervisory hospitalists were responsible for 300 to 400 patients. “What we learned first was the need to balance the level of expertise. For example, a team may include a postgraduate year 3 resident and a radiology intern,” Dr. Dunn said. As COVID-19 census has started coming down, supervisory hospitalists are returning to direct care attending roles, and some hospitalists have been shared across the Mount Sinai system’s hospitals.

Dr. Dunn’s advice for hospitalists filling a supervisory role like this in a tiered model: Make sure you talk to your team the night before the first day of a scheduling block and try to address as many of their questions as possible. “If you wait until the morning of the shift to connect with them, anxiety will be high. But after going through a couple of scheduling cycles, we find that things are getting better. I think we’ve paid a lot of attention to the risks of burnout by our physicians. We’re using a model of 4 days on/4 off.”

Another variation on these themes is Joshua Shatzkes, MD, assistant professor of medicine and cardiology at Mount Sinai, who practices outpatient cardiology at MSH and in several off-site offices in Brooklyn. He saw early on that COVID-19 would have a huge effect on his practice, so he volunteered to help out with inpatient care. “I made it known to my chief that I was available, and I was deployed in the first week, after a weekend of cramming webinars and lectures on critical care and pulling out critical concepts that I already knew.”

Dr. Shatzkes said his career path led him into outpatient cardiology 11 years ago, where he was quickly too busy to see his patients when they went into the hospital, even though he missed hospital medicine. Working as a temporary hospitalist with the arrival of COVID-19, he has been invigorated and mobilized by the experience and reminded of why he went to medical school in the first place. “Each day’s shift went quickly but felt long. At the end of the day, I was tired but not exhausted. When I walked out of a patient’s room, they could tell, ‘This is a doctor who cared for me,’ ” he said.

After Dr. Shatzkes volunteered, he got the call from his division chief. “I was officially deployed for a 4-day shift at Mount Sinai and then as a backup.” On his first morning as an inpatient doctor, he was still getting oriented when calls started coming from the nurses. “I had five patients struggling to breathe. Their degree of hypoxia was remarkable. I kept them out of the ICU, at least for that day.”

Since then, he has continued to follow some of those patients in the hospital, along with some from his outpatient practice who were hospitalized, and others referred by colleagues, while remaining available to his outpatients through telemedicine. When this is all over, Dr. Shatzkes said, he would love to find a way to incorporate a hospital practice in his job – depending on the realities of New York traffic.

“Joshua is not a hospitalist, but he went on service and felt so fulfilled and rewarded, he asked me if he could stay on service,” Dr. Dunn said. “I also got an email from the nurse manager on the unit. They want him back.”

Federal health officials are encouraging clinicians to use the free CURE ID mobile app and web platform as a tool to collect cases on the treatment of patients with COVID-19, in conjunction with ongoing clinical trial efforts.

“By utilizing the CURE ID platform now for COVID-19 case collection – in conjunction with data gathered from other registries, EHR systems, and clinical trials – data collected during an outbreak can be improved and coordinated,” Heather A. Stone, MPH, said during a June 9 webinar sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration. “This may allow us to find possible treatments to help ease this pandemic, and prepare us better to fight the next one.”

During the hour-long webinar, Ms. Stone, a health science policy analyst in the office of medical policy at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, demonstrated CURE ID, an Internet-based data repository first developed in 2013 as a collaboration between the FDA and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NCATS/NIH). It provides licensed clinicians worldwide with an opportunity to report novel uses of existing drugs for patients with difficult-to-treat infectious diseases, including COVID-19, through a website, a smartphone, or other mobile device. The app can be downloaded for free at http://cure.ncats.io. It can also be downloaded from the Apple app store or the Google Play store by searching “CURE ID.”

According to Ms. Stone, the platform’s three main goals are to enhance the understanding of new uses of approved medical products, to facilitate clinical trials and drug development, and to serve as a resource for physicians to share information where no FDA-approved product (which has been proven to be safe and effective) exists for the new use. CURE ID enables users to report their own cases as well as read cases of neglected infectious diseases with no sufficient approved therapies from other clinicians around the world. “It also enables clinicians to engage directly with communities of disease experts around the world, breaking down geographic and specialty silos,” Ms. Stone said. “It also enables them to access information on approved therapies for each disease and as well on active clinical trials.”

To date, CURE-ID contains information on 325 infectious diseases, including 1,580 case reports and 18,907 clinical trials. Initial pilot priority diseases include COVID-19, mycetoma, atypical mycobacteria, drug-resistant gonorrhea, rare and resistant fungal infections, as well as multidrug resistant gram-negative bacteria.

As of June 9, COVID-19-related data on the platform includes 151 case reports that have been extracted from the published literature or entered by clinician users, 80 discussion posts, and links to 694 clinical trials, 303 journal articles, 212 news articles, and 34 events. A total of 65 repurposed drugs have been identified as potential treatments for the virus, including 15 drugs with 10 or more cases.

“This facilitates clinicians reporting their real-world experiences treating COVID-19 patients, when patients are unable to be enrolled in a clinical trial,” Ms. Stone said. “It includes an updated case report form tailored to COVID-19 and data fields that have been harmonized with other real-world data and clinical trial platforms.” She pointed out that voluntary submission of cases to CURE ID is not a substitute for filing information with regulatory and public health authorities, where required. The platform also enables data to be entered and adverse events to be automatically shared with the FDA’s MedWatch Adverse Reporting System.

Ms. Stone concluded the webinar by announcing the formation of a new private-public partnership between the Critical Path Institute and the FDA and NCATS/NIH known as the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory. The effort will begin with a pilot project focused on furthering drug development for COVID-19 through use of the CURE ID platform. “The Collaboratory will demonstrate how data shared from clinicians in real-time can be used to inform ongoing and future clinical trials, and potentially drug labeling,” Ms. Stone said. She reported having no financial disclosures.

dbrunk@mdedge.com

Federal health officials are encouraging clinicians to use the free CURE ID mobile app and web platform as a tool to collect cases on the treatment of patients with COVID-19, in conjunction with ongoing clinical trial efforts.

“By utilizing the CURE ID platform now for COVID-19 case collection – in conjunction with data gathered from other registries, EHR systems, and clinical trials – data collected during an outbreak can be improved and coordinated,” Heather A. Stone, MPH, said during a June 9 webinar sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration. “This may allow us to find possible treatments to help ease this pandemic, and prepare us better to fight the next one.”

During the hour-long webinar, Ms. Stone, a health science policy analyst in the office of medical policy at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, demonstrated CURE ID, an Internet-based data repository first developed in 2013 as a collaboration between the FDA and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NCATS/NIH). It provides licensed clinicians worldwide with an opportunity to report novel uses of existing drugs for patients with difficult-to-treat infectious diseases, including COVID-19, through a website, a smartphone, or other mobile device. The app can be downloaded for free at http://cure.ncats.io. It can also be downloaded from the Apple app store or the Google Play store by searching “CURE ID.”

According to Ms. Stone, the platform’s three main goals are to enhance the understanding of new uses of approved medical products, to facilitate clinical trials and drug development, and to serve as a resource for physicians to share information where no FDA-approved product (which has been proven to be safe and effective) exists for the new use. CURE ID enables users to report their own cases as well as read cases of neglected infectious diseases with no sufficient approved therapies from other clinicians around the world. “It also enables clinicians to engage directly with communities of disease experts around the world, breaking down geographic and specialty silos,” Ms. Stone said. “It also enables them to access information on approved therapies for each disease and as well on active clinical trials.”

To date, CURE-ID contains information on 325 infectious diseases, including 1,580 case reports and 18,907 clinical trials. Initial pilot priority diseases include COVID-19, mycetoma, atypical mycobacteria, drug-resistant gonorrhea, rare and resistant fungal infections, as well as multidrug resistant gram-negative bacteria.

As of June 9, COVID-19-related data on the platform includes 151 case reports that have been extracted from the published literature or entered by clinician users, 80 discussion posts, and links to 694 clinical trials, 303 journal articles, 212 news articles, and 34 events. A total of 65 repurposed drugs have been identified as potential treatments for the virus, including 15 drugs with 10 or more cases.

“This facilitates clinicians reporting their real-world experiences treating COVID-19 patients, when patients are unable to be enrolled in a clinical trial,” Ms. Stone said. “It includes an updated case report form tailored to COVID-19 and data fields that have been harmonized with other real-world data and clinical trial platforms.” She pointed out that voluntary submission of cases to CURE ID is not a substitute for filing information with regulatory and public health authorities, where required. The platform also enables data to be entered and adverse events to be automatically shared with the FDA’s MedWatch Adverse Reporting System.

Ms. Stone concluded the webinar by announcing the formation of a new private-public partnership between the Critical Path Institute and the FDA and NCATS/NIH known as the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory. The effort will begin with a pilot project focused on furthering drug development for COVID-19 through use of the CURE ID platform. “The Collaboratory will demonstrate how data shared from clinicians in real-time can be used to inform ongoing and future clinical trials, and potentially drug labeling,” Ms. Stone said. She reported having no financial disclosures.

dbrunk@mdedge.com

Federal health officials are encouraging clinicians to use the free CURE ID mobile app and web platform as a tool to collect cases on the treatment of patients with COVID-19, in conjunction with ongoing clinical trial efforts.

“By utilizing the CURE ID platform now for COVID-19 case collection – in conjunction with data gathered from other registries, EHR systems, and clinical trials – data collected during an outbreak can be improved and coordinated,” Heather A. Stone, MPH, said during a June 9 webinar sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration. “This may allow us to find possible treatments to help ease this pandemic, and prepare us better to fight the next one.”

During the hour-long webinar, Ms. Stone, a health science policy analyst in the office of medical policy at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, demonstrated CURE ID, an Internet-based data repository first developed in 2013 as a collaboration between the FDA and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, a part of the National Institutes of Health (NCATS/NIH). It provides licensed clinicians worldwide with an opportunity to report novel uses of existing drugs for patients with difficult-to-treat infectious diseases, including COVID-19, through a website, a smartphone, or other mobile device. The app can be downloaded for free at http://cure.ncats.io. It can also be downloaded from the Apple app store or the Google Play store by searching “CURE ID.”

According to Ms. Stone, the platform’s three main goals are to enhance the understanding of new uses of approved medical products, to facilitate clinical trials and drug development, and to serve as a resource for physicians to share information where no FDA-approved product (which has been proven to be safe and effective) exists for the new use. CURE ID enables users to report their own cases as well as read cases of neglected infectious diseases with no sufficient approved therapies from other clinicians around the world. “It also enables clinicians to engage directly with communities of disease experts around the world, breaking down geographic and specialty silos,” Ms. Stone said. “It also enables them to access information on approved therapies for each disease and as well on active clinical trials.”

To date, CURE-ID contains information on 325 infectious diseases, including 1,580 case reports and 18,907 clinical trials. Initial pilot priority diseases include COVID-19, mycetoma, atypical mycobacteria, drug-resistant gonorrhea, rare and resistant fungal infections, as well as multidrug resistant gram-negative bacteria.

As of June 9, COVID-19-related data on the platform includes 151 case reports that have been extracted from the published literature or entered by clinician users, 80 discussion posts, and links to 694 clinical trials, 303 journal articles, 212 news articles, and 34 events. A total of 65 repurposed drugs have been identified as potential treatments for the virus, including 15 drugs with 10 or more cases.

“This facilitates clinicians reporting their real-world experiences treating COVID-19 patients, when patients are unable to be enrolled in a clinical trial,” Ms. Stone said. “It includes an updated case report form tailored to COVID-19 and data fields that have been harmonized with other real-world data and clinical trial platforms.” She pointed out that voluntary submission of cases to CURE ID is not a substitute for filing information with regulatory and public health authorities, where required. The platform also enables data to be entered and adverse events to be automatically shared with the FDA’s MedWatch Adverse Reporting System.

Ms. Stone concluded the webinar by announcing the formation of a new private-public partnership between the Critical Path Institute and the FDA and NCATS/NIH known as the CURE Drug Repurposing Collaboratory. The effort will begin with a pilot project focused on furthering drug development for COVID-19 through use of the CURE ID platform. “The Collaboratory will demonstrate how data shared from clinicians in real-time can be used to inform ongoing and future clinical trials, and potentially drug labeling,” Ms. Stone said. She reported having no financial disclosures.

dbrunk@mdedge.com

As might be expected, the “EULAR [European League Against Rheumatism] provisional recommendations for the management of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases [RMDs] in the context of SARS-CoV-2” concur with much of the guidance already released on how best to manage patients during the current pandemic.

Highlights of the five overarching principles are that, contrary to earlier expectations, “there is no indication that patients with RMDs have an additional, or have a higher, risk of contracting the virus, or that they fare a worse course” than the general population, said the task force convener Robert Landewé, MD, PhD, professor of rheumatology at the University of Amsterdam.

“The second pertinent highlight is that, when it comes to managerial discussions, whether or not to stop or to start treatment for RMDs, rheumatologists should definitely be involved,” Dr. Landewé said during a live session at the annual European Congress of Rheumatology, held online this year due to COVID-19. “In practice, something that happens very often is that immunosuppressive drugs are stopped by medical specialists involved in the care of COVID but without any expertise in treating patients with rheumatic diseases. We should try to avoid that situation.”

The third highlight, something many rheumatologists may already be well aware of, is that rheumatology drugs are being used to treat COVID-19 patients without RMDs and a shortage of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) agents is a real possibility. As such, the fifth overarching highlight states that the availability of both synthetic and biologic DMARDs is “a delicate societal responsibility” and that “the off-label use of DMARDs in COVID-19 outside the context of clinical trials should be discouraged.”

The EULAR recommendation are now published online in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases and they are “what you could call an unprecedented set of recommendations,” Dr. Landewé said. “We have never done this before,” he added, referring to the speed and way in which they had to be put together, remotely, and with little scientific evidence currently available. “Three months ago we hadn’t even heard about the virus.”

From the first patient being identified in the Hubei province of China in November 2019, to the first U.S. patient in the state of Washington on Jan. 20, 2020, and to the first European patient identified a little over 10 days later, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm. It was only declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, however, and Dr. Landewé noted that the response to the pandemic had been very variable – some countries locking down their borders early, while others took their time to make an appropriate response, if at all.

The rheumatology community was particularly concerned, Dr. Landewé said, because people with autoimmune diseases who were taking immunosuppressant drugs might be at higher risk for becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, and may be at higher risk than others for a worse disease course. Thankfully, that seems not to be the case according to data that are emerging from new registries that have been set up, including EULAR’s own COVID-19 registry.

There are 13 recommendations that cover 4 themes: general measures and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection; the management of RMD patients during the pandemic; the management of RMD patients who have COVID-19; and the prevention of other pulmonary infections in RMD patients.

Highlighting the first three general recommendations, Dr. Landewé said: “Follow the regular guidelines in your country; if a patient with RMD does not have symptoms of COVID-19, simply continue RMD treatments,” albeit with a couple of exceptions.

The next four recommendation highlights are to avoid visits to the hospital or to the office; use remote monitoring via the telephone, for example; and if visits cannot be avoided, then take appropriate precautions. Finally, if you suspect a patient has COVID-19, do a test.

If patients test positive, then the next four recommendations cover what to do, such as continuing use of RMD treatments, but in the case of glucocorticoids this should be the lowest possible dose necessary. There is no consensus on what to do in cases of mild symptoms; the recommendation is to “decide on a case-by-case basis,” said Dr. Landewé. If a patient’s symptoms worsen, then “seek expert advice immediately and follow local treatment recommendations. The rheumatologist is not the expert to treat COVID-19,” he added. That responsibility lies with the pulmonologist, infectious disease specialist, or maybe the intensive care specialist, depending on local situations.

On the whole, the EULAR recommendations are pretty similar to those already released by the American College of Rheumatology, said Ted Mikuls, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha. The ACR recommendations are “slightly more prescriptive”, he suggested, with 25 final guidance statements. For example, general statements focused not only on the use of glucocorticoids, but also other medicines, such as antihypertensives.

“There’s really not a [lot of], I would say, major differences in the two efforts and that’s ... somewhat reassuring that we’re approaching the unknown from very different parts of the world, and driving in a very similar place,” commented Dr. Mikuls, who is a member of the ACR COVID-19 recommendations task force.

“I think one of the very important similarities that I would highlight is that, in the absence of known exposure, in the absence of COVID-19 infection, our panel felt very strongly about the importance of continuing rheumatic disease treatments,” Dr. Mikuls observed. The ACR guidelines also touch upon societal perspectives, including “some statements that were made very specific to lupus, and the use of antimalarials, given supply chain issues that we have encountered.”

Dr. Mikuls also said that the American recommendations emphasized that “you really have to manage active inflammatory rheumatic disease. Even in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, given what we saw as the potential risk of unchecked inflammation and unchecked rheumatic disease.”

One notable difference, however, is that the European recommendations advise on immunizations and pneumonia prophylaxis, saying that all patients without COVID-19 symptoms should make sure they are up to date with any recommended vaccinations, “with a particular focus on pneumococcal and influenza vaccinations,” Dr. Landewé said.

Another difference is that the ACR recommendations are a living document and could potentially be updated monthly if the evidence arrives to allow that. In that sense, the American guidance is more agile, with EULAR expecting to update its recommendations every 3 months.

“The current evidence is extremely sparse and fragmented,” Dr. Landewé said. “We, as a task force are essentially flying blindly. We also have to cover many jurisdictions within Europe, with many conflicting opinions. So the last word to say is that updates are truly necessary, but we have to wait a while.”

SOURCE: Landewé RB et al. Ann Rheum Dis. 2020 Jun 5. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-217877.

As might be expected, the “EULAR [European League Against Rheumatism] provisional recommendations for the management of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases [RMDs] in the context of SARS-CoV-2” concur with much of the guidance already released on how best to manage patients during the current pandemic.

Highlights of the five overarching principles are that, contrary to earlier expectations, “there is no indication that patients with RMDs have an additional, or have a higher, risk of contracting the virus, or that they fare a worse course” than the general population, said the task force convener Robert Landewé, MD, PhD, professor of rheumatology at the University of Amsterdam.

“The second pertinent highlight is that, when it comes to managerial discussions, whether or not to stop or to start treatment for RMDs, rheumatologists should definitely be involved,” Dr. Landewé said during a live session at the annual European Congress of Rheumatology, held online this year due to COVID-19. “In practice, something that happens very often is that immunosuppressive drugs are stopped by medical specialists involved in the care of COVID but without any expertise in treating patients with rheumatic diseases. We should try to avoid that situation.”

The third highlight, something many rheumatologists may already be well aware of, is that rheumatology drugs are being used to treat COVID-19 patients without RMDs and a shortage of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) agents is a real possibility. As such, the fifth overarching highlight states that the availability of both synthetic and biologic DMARDs is “a delicate societal responsibility” and that “the off-label use of DMARDs in COVID-19 outside the context of clinical trials should be discouraged.”

The EULAR recommendation are now published online in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases and they are “what you could call an unprecedented set of recommendations,” Dr. Landewé said. “We have never done this before,” he added, referring to the speed and way in which they had to be put together, remotely, and with little scientific evidence currently available. “Three months ago we hadn’t even heard about the virus.”

From the first patient being identified in the Hubei province of China in November 2019, to the first U.S. patient in the state of Washington on Jan. 20, 2020, and to the first European patient identified a little over 10 days later, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm. It was only declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, however, and Dr. Landewé noted that the response to the pandemic had been very variable – some countries locking down their borders early, while others took their time to make an appropriate response, if at all.

The rheumatology community was particularly concerned, Dr. Landewé said, because people with autoimmune diseases who were taking immunosuppressant drugs might be at higher risk for becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, and may be at higher risk than others for a worse disease course. Thankfully, that seems not to be the case according to data that are emerging from new registries that have been set up, including EULAR’s own COVID-19 registry.

There are 13 recommendations that cover 4 themes: general measures and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection; the management of RMD patients during the pandemic; the management of RMD patients who have COVID-19; and the prevention of other pulmonary infections in RMD patients.

Highlighting the first three general recommendations, Dr. Landewé said: “Follow the regular guidelines in your country; if a patient with RMD does not have symptoms of COVID-19, simply continue RMD treatments,” albeit with a couple of exceptions.

The next four recommendation highlights are to avoid visits to the hospital or to the office; use remote monitoring via the telephone, for example; and if visits cannot be avoided, then take appropriate precautions. Finally, if you suspect a patient has COVID-19, do a test.

If patients test positive, then the next four recommendations cover what to do, such as continuing use of RMD treatments, but in the case of glucocorticoids this should be the lowest possible dose necessary. There is no consensus on what to do in cases of mild symptoms; the recommendation is to “decide on a case-by-case basis,” said Dr. Landewé. If a patient’s symptoms worsen, then “seek expert advice immediately and follow local treatment recommendations. The rheumatologist is not the expert to treat COVID-19,” he added. That responsibility lies with the pulmonologist, infectious disease specialist, or maybe the intensive care specialist, depending on local situations.

On the whole, the EULAR recommendations are pretty similar to those already released by the American College of Rheumatology, said Ted Mikuls, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha. The ACR recommendations are “slightly more prescriptive”, he suggested, with 25 final guidance statements. For example, general statements focused not only on the use of glucocorticoids, but also other medicines, such as antihypertensives.

“There’s really not a [lot of], I would say, major differences in the two efforts and that’s ... somewhat reassuring that we’re approaching the unknown from very different parts of the world, and driving in a very similar place,” commented Dr. Mikuls, who is a member of the ACR COVID-19 recommendations task force.

“I think one of the very important similarities that I would highlight is that, in the absence of known exposure, in the absence of COVID-19 infection, our panel felt very strongly about the importance of continuing rheumatic disease treatments,” Dr. Mikuls observed. The ACR guidelines also touch upon societal perspectives, including “some statements that were made very specific to lupus, and the use of antimalarials, given supply chain issues that we have encountered.”

Dr. Mikuls also said that the American recommendations emphasized that “you really have to manage active inflammatory rheumatic disease. Even in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, given what we saw as the potential risk of unchecked inflammation and unchecked rheumatic disease.”

One notable difference, however, is that the European recommendations advise on immunizations and pneumonia prophylaxis, saying that all patients without COVID-19 symptoms should make sure they are up to date with any recommended vaccinations, “with a particular focus on pneumococcal and influenza vaccinations,” Dr. Landewé said.

Another difference is that the ACR recommendations are a living document and could potentially be updated monthly if the evidence arrives to allow that. In that sense, the American guidance is more agile, with EULAR expecting to update its recommendations every 3 months.

“The current evidence is extremely sparse and fragmented,” Dr. Landewé said. “We, as a task force are essentially flying blindly. We also have to cover many jurisdictions within Europe, with many conflicting opinions. So the last word to say is that updates are truly necessary, but we have to wait a while.”

SOURCE: Landewé RB et al. Ann Rheum Dis. 2020 Jun 5. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-217877.

As might be expected, the “EULAR [European League Against Rheumatism] provisional recommendations for the management of rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases [RMDs] in the context of SARS-CoV-2” concur with much of the guidance already released on how best to manage patients during the current pandemic.

Highlights of the five overarching principles are that, contrary to earlier expectations, “there is no indication that patients with RMDs have an additional, or have a higher, risk of contracting the virus, or that they fare a worse course” than the general population, said the task force convener Robert Landewé, MD, PhD, professor of rheumatology at the University of Amsterdam.

“The second pertinent highlight is that, when it comes to managerial discussions, whether or not to stop or to start treatment for RMDs, rheumatologists should definitely be involved,” Dr. Landewé said during a live session at the annual European Congress of Rheumatology, held online this year due to COVID-19. “In practice, something that happens very often is that immunosuppressive drugs are stopped by medical specialists involved in the care of COVID but without any expertise in treating patients with rheumatic diseases. We should try to avoid that situation.”

The third highlight, something many rheumatologists may already be well aware of, is that rheumatology drugs are being used to treat COVID-19 patients without RMDs and a shortage of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (DMARDs) agents is a real possibility. As such, the fifth overarching highlight states that the availability of both synthetic and biologic DMARDs is “a delicate societal responsibility” and that “the off-label use of DMARDs in COVID-19 outside the context of clinical trials should be discouraged.”

The EULAR recommendation are now published online in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases and they are “what you could call an unprecedented set of recommendations,” Dr. Landewé said. “We have never done this before,” he added, referring to the speed and way in which they had to be put together, remotely, and with little scientific evidence currently available. “Three months ago we hadn’t even heard about the virus.”

From the first patient being identified in the Hubei province of China in November 2019, to the first U.S. patient in the state of Washington on Jan. 20, 2020, and to the first European patient identified a little over 10 days later, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by storm. It was only declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, however, and Dr. Landewé noted that the response to the pandemic had been very variable – some countries locking down their borders early, while others took their time to make an appropriate response, if at all.

The rheumatology community was particularly concerned, Dr. Landewé said, because people with autoimmune diseases who were taking immunosuppressant drugs might be at higher risk for becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, and may be at higher risk than others for a worse disease course. Thankfully, that seems not to be the case according to data that are emerging from new registries that have been set up, including EULAR’s own COVID-19 registry.

There are 13 recommendations that cover 4 themes: general measures and prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection; the management of RMD patients during the pandemic; the management of RMD patients who have COVID-19; and the prevention of other pulmonary infections in RMD patients.

Highlighting the first three general recommendations, Dr. Landewé said: “Follow the regular guidelines in your country; if a patient with RMD does not have symptoms of COVID-19, simply continue RMD treatments,” albeit with a couple of exceptions.

The next four recommendation highlights are to avoid visits to the hospital or to the office; use remote monitoring via the telephone, for example; and if visits cannot be avoided, then take appropriate precautions. Finally, if you suspect a patient has COVID-19, do a test.

If patients test positive, then the next four recommendations cover what to do, such as continuing use of RMD treatments, but in the case of glucocorticoids this should be the lowest possible dose necessary. There is no consensus on what to do in cases of mild symptoms; the recommendation is to “decide on a case-by-case basis,” said Dr. Landewé. If a patient’s symptoms worsen, then “seek expert advice immediately and follow local treatment recommendations. The rheumatologist is not the expert to treat COVID-19,” he added. That responsibility lies with the pulmonologist, infectious disease specialist, or maybe the intensive care specialist, depending on local situations.

On the whole, the EULAR recommendations are pretty similar to those already released by the American College of Rheumatology, said Ted Mikuls, MD, of the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Omaha. The ACR recommendations are “slightly more prescriptive”, he suggested, with 25 final guidance statements. For example, general statements focused not only on the use of glucocorticoids, but also other medicines, such as antihypertensives.

“There’s really not a [lot of], I would say, major differences in the two efforts and that’s ... somewhat reassuring that we’re approaching the unknown from very different parts of the world, and driving in a very similar place,” commented Dr. Mikuls, who is a member of the ACR COVID-19 recommendations task force.

“I think one of the very important similarities that I would highlight is that, in the absence of known exposure, in the absence of COVID-19 infection, our panel felt very strongly about the importance of continuing rheumatic disease treatments,” Dr. Mikuls observed. The ACR guidelines also touch upon societal perspectives, including “some statements that were made very specific to lupus, and the use of antimalarials, given supply chain issues that we have encountered.”

Dr. Mikuls also said that the American recommendations emphasized that “you really have to manage active inflammatory rheumatic disease. Even in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, given what we saw as the potential risk of unchecked inflammation and unchecked rheumatic disease.”

One notable difference, however, is that the European recommendations advise on immunizations and pneumonia prophylaxis, saying that all patients without COVID-19 symptoms should make sure they are up to date with any recommended vaccinations, “with a particular focus on pneumococcal and influenza vaccinations,” Dr. Landewé said.

Another difference is that the ACR recommendations are a living document and could potentially be updated monthly if the evidence arrives to allow that. In that sense, the American guidance is more agile, with EULAR expecting to update its recommendations every 3 months.

“The current evidence is extremely sparse and fragmented,” Dr. Landewé said. “We, as a task force are essentially flying blindly. We also have to cover many jurisdictions within Europe, with many conflicting opinions. So the last word to say is that updates are truly necessary, but we have to wait a while.”

SOURCE: Landewé RB et al. Ann Rheum Dis. 2020 Jun 5. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-217877.

Living in a neighborhood lacking adequate access to affordable high-quality food is associated with a modestly greater risk of developing a pregnancy morbidity, according to a retrospective observational study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Previous research has linked so-called “food deserts” to higher systolic blood pressure and an increased risk of cardiovascular events in people with coronary artery disease, the authors note.

“Research on populations in the United States confirm that increased access to supermarkets is associated with lower prevalence of overweight and obesity, and improved fruit and vegetable consumption,” said Matthew J. Tipton, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, and colleagues.

“With our study showing an association between living in a food desert and increased pregnancy morbidity, it is our hope that with future work, an unhealthy food environment could prove to be a modifiable factor that does contribute to disparities in pregnancy morbidity,” the authors said. “Perhaps then, one could question whether greater access to healthier foods could reduce unexplained pregnancy morbidity for this population of patients,” paving the way toward developing interventions that can then improve vulnerable women’s health.

The researchers reviewed the electronic medical records of all the pregnant patients who delivered at Loyola University Medical Center in 2014. To determine who lived in a food desert, the authors relied on data about grocery food availability within Census tracts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas.

Dr. Tipton and associates defined living in a food desert as living in a low-income Census tract “where at least 33% of the population is more than half a mile from the nearest large grocery store for an urban area or more than 10 miles for a rural area.” Low-income Census tracts are those where “at least 20% of the population has a median family income at or below 80% of the metropolitan area or state median income.”

The authors compared women’s residence within a food desert (or not) with six different pregnancy morbidities: preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, prelabor rupture of membranes, preterm labor, and intrauterine growth restriction.

Among 1,001 deliveries, about 1 in 5 women (20%) lived in a food desert. These women tended to be slightly younger than those not living in a food desert (28 vs. 30 years old), and a higher proportion of women in food deserts were black (44%) rather than white (32%). They also had a lower average income ($44,694) than those not living in food deserts ($67,005).

After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance type (private, Medicaid, other), the researchers found that women who lived in a food desert had 1.6 times greater odds of pregnancy comorbidity than if they did not (odds ratio, 1.64; P = .004). Nearly half the women living in food deserts had any type of comorbidity (47%), compared with just over a third of women who did not (36%).

Among the six comorbidities studied, preterm rupture of membranes was significantly different before adjustment between those who lived in food deserts (16%) and those who did not (10%) (P = .015). An association with preeclampsia had borderline significance before adjustment: 13% of women in food deserts had preeclampsia, compared with 9% of women not (P = .049). After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance, however, neither of these associations retained statistically significant differences.

The study was limited by leaving out consideration of other factors besides local food access that might influence pregnancy health, including “quality of patient-doctor communication, implicit bias, structural racism, and stress owing to concern for neighborhood safety,” Dr. Tipton and associates said.

“An additional, albeit less obvious factor that may be unique to patients suffering disproportionately from obstetric morbidity is exposure to toxic elements,” the researchers add. “It has been shown in a previous study that low-income, predominately black communities of pregnant women may suffer disproportionately from lead or arsenic exposure.”

The study did not note external funding, and the authors reported no relevant financial disclosures.

SOURCE: Tipton MJ et al. Obstet Gynecol. 2020. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000003868.

Living in a neighborhood lacking adequate access to affordable high-quality food is associated with a modestly greater risk of developing a pregnancy morbidity, according to a retrospective observational study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Previous research has linked so-called “food deserts” to higher systolic blood pressure and an increased risk of cardiovascular events in people with coronary artery disease, the authors note.

“Research on populations in the United States confirm that increased access to supermarkets is associated with lower prevalence of overweight and obesity, and improved fruit and vegetable consumption,” said Matthew J. Tipton, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, and colleagues.

“With our study showing an association between living in a food desert and increased pregnancy morbidity, it is our hope that with future work, an unhealthy food environment could prove to be a modifiable factor that does contribute to disparities in pregnancy morbidity,” the authors said. “Perhaps then, one could question whether greater access to healthier foods could reduce unexplained pregnancy morbidity for this population of patients,” paving the way toward developing interventions that can then improve vulnerable women’s health.

The researchers reviewed the electronic medical records of all the pregnant patients who delivered at Loyola University Medical Center in 2014. To determine who lived in a food desert, the authors relied on data about grocery food availability within Census tracts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas.

Dr. Tipton and associates defined living in a food desert as living in a low-income Census tract “where at least 33% of the population is more than half a mile from the nearest large grocery store for an urban area or more than 10 miles for a rural area.” Low-income Census tracts are those where “at least 20% of the population has a median family income at or below 80% of the metropolitan area or state median income.”

The authors compared women’s residence within a food desert (or not) with six different pregnancy morbidities: preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, prelabor rupture of membranes, preterm labor, and intrauterine growth restriction.

Among 1,001 deliveries, about 1 in 5 women (20%) lived in a food desert. These women tended to be slightly younger than those not living in a food desert (28 vs. 30 years old), and a higher proportion of women in food deserts were black (44%) rather than white (32%). They also had a lower average income ($44,694) than those not living in food deserts ($67,005).

After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance type (private, Medicaid, other), the researchers found that women who lived in a food desert had 1.6 times greater odds of pregnancy comorbidity than if they did not (odds ratio, 1.64; P = .004). Nearly half the women living in food deserts had any type of comorbidity (47%), compared with just over a third of women who did not (36%).

Among the six comorbidities studied, preterm rupture of membranes was significantly different before adjustment between those who lived in food deserts (16%) and those who did not (10%) (P = .015). An association with preeclampsia had borderline significance before adjustment: 13% of women in food deserts had preeclampsia, compared with 9% of women not (P = .049). After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance, however, neither of these associations retained statistically significant differences.

The study was limited by leaving out consideration of other factors besides local food access that might influence pregnancy health, including “quality of patient-doctor communication, implicit bias, structural racism, and stress owing to concern for neighborhood safety,” Dr. Tipton and associates said.

“An additional, albeit less obvious factor that may be unique to patients suffering disproportionately from obstetric morbidity is exposure to toxic elements,” the researchers add. “It has been shown in a previous study that low-income, predominately black communities of pregnant women may suffer disproportionately from lead or arsenic exposure.”

The study did not note external funding, and the authors reported no relevant financial disclosures.

SOURCE: Tipton MJ et al. Obstet Gynecol. 2020. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000003868.

Living in a neighborhood lacking adequate access to affordable high-quality food is associated with a modestly greater risk of developing a pregnancy morbidity, according to a retrospective observational study published in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Previous research has linked so-called “food deserts” to higher systolic blood pressure and an increased risk of cardiovascular events in people with coronary artery disease, the authors note.

“Research on populations in the United States confirm that increased access to supermarkets is associated with lower prevalence of overweight and obesity, and improved fruit and vegetable consumption,” said Matthew J. Tipton, MD, of Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, and colleagues.

“With our study showing an association between living in a food desert and increased pregnancy morbidity, it is our hope that with future work, an unhealthy food environment could prove to be a modifiable factor that does contribute to disparities in pregnancy morbidity,” the authors said. “Perhaps then, one could question whether greater access to healthier foods could reduce unexplained pregnancy morbidity for this population of patients,” paving the way toward developing interventions that can then improve vulnerable women’s health.

The researchers reviewed the electronic medical records of all the pregnant patients who delivered at Loyola University Medical Center in 2014. To determine who lived in a food desert, the authors relied on data about grocery food availability within Census tracts from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Access Research Atlas.

Dr. Tipton and associates defined living in a food desert as living in a low-income Census tract “where at least 33% of the population is more than half a mile from the nearest large grocery store for an urban area or more than 10 miles for a rural area.” Low-income Census tracts are those where “at least 20% of the population has a median family income at or below 80% of the metropolitan area or state median income.”

The authors compared women’s residence within a food desert (or not) with six different pregnancy morbidities: preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, gestational diabetes, prelabor rupture of membranes, preterm labor, and intrauterine growth restriction.

Among 1,001 deliveries, about 1 in 5 women (20%) lived in a food desert. These women tended to be slightly younger than those not living in a food desert (28 vs. 30 years old), and a higher proportion of women in food deserts were black (44%) rather than white (32%). They also had a lower average income ($44,694) than those not living in food deserts ($67,005).

After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance type (private, Medicaid, other), the researchers found that women who lived in a food desert had 1.6 times greater odds of pregnancy comorbidity than if they did not (odds ratio, 1.64; P = .004). Nearly half the women living in food deserts had any type of comorbidity (47%), compared with just over a third of women who did not (36%).

Among the six comorbidities studied, preterm rupture of membranes was significantly different before adjustment between those who lived in food deserts (16%) and those who did not (10%) (P = .015). An association with preeclampsia had borderline significance before adjustment: 13% of women in food deserts had preeclampsia, compared with 9% of women not (P = .049). After adjustment for age, race, and medical insurance, however, neither of these associations retained statistically significant differences.

The study was limited by leaving out consideration of other factors besides local food access that might influence pregnancy health, including “quality of patient-doctor communication, implicit bias, structural racism, and stress owing to concern for neighborhood safety,” Dr. Tipton and associates said.

“An additional, albeit less obvious factor that may be unique to patients suffering disproportionately from obstetric morbidity is exposure to toxic elements,” the researchers add. “It has been shown in a previous study that low-income, predominately black communities of pregnant women may suffer disproportionately from lead or arsenic exposure.”

The study did not note external funding, and the authors reported no relevant financial disclosures.

SOURCE: Tipton MJ et al. Obstet Gynecol. 2020. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000003868.

Nisha Mehta, MD, said her phone has been ringing with calls from tearful and shaken physicians who are distressed and unsettled about their work and home situation and don’t know what to do.

What’s more, many frontline physicians are living apart from family to protect them from infection. “So many physicians have called me crying. ... They can’t even come home and get a hug,” Dr. Mehta said. “What I’m hearing from a lot of people who are in New York and New Jersey is not just that they go to work all day and it’s this exhausting process throughout the entire day, not only physically but also emotionally.”

Physician burnout has held a steady spotlight since long before the COVID-19 crisis began, Dr. Mehta said. “The reason for that is multifold, but in part, it’s hard for physicians to find an appropriate way to be able to process a lot of the emotions related to their work,” she said. “A lot of that brews below the surface, but COVID-19 has really brought many of these issues above that surface.”

Frustrated that governments weren’t doing enough to support health care workers during the pandemic, Dr. Mehta, a radiologist in Charlotte, N.C., decided there needed to be change. On April 4, Dr. Mehta and two physician colleagues submitted to Congress the COVID-19 Pandemic Physician Protection Act, which ensures, among other provisions, mental health coverage for health care workers. An accompanying petition on change.org had received nearly 300,000 signatures as of May 29.
 

Don’t suffer in silence

A career in medicine comes with immense stress in the best of times, she notes, and managing a pandemic in an already strained system has taken those challenges to newer heights. “We need better support structures at baseline for physician mental health,” said Dr. Mehta.

“That’s something we’ve always been lacking because it’s been against the culture of medicine for so long to say, ‘I’m having a hard time.’ ”

If you’re hurting, the first thing to recognize is that you are not alone in facing these challenges. This is true with respect not only to medical care but also to all of the family, financial, and business concerns physicians are currently facing. “Having all of those things hanging over your head is a lot. We’ve got to find ways to help each other out,” Dr. Mehta said.
 

Where to find support

Fortunately, the medical community has created several pathways to help its own. Types of resources for health care workers on the COVID-19 frontlines run the gamut from crisis hotlines to smartphone apps to virtual counseling, often for free or at discounted rates.

The following list represents a cross-section of opportunities for caregivers to receive care for themselves.

Crisis hotlines

• Physician Support Line. This free and confidential hotline was launched on March 30 by Mona Masood, DO, a Philadelphia-area psychiatrist and moderator of a Facebook forum called the COVID-19 Physicians Group. The PSL is run by more than 600 volunteer psychiatrists who take calls from U.S. physicians 7 days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., with no appointment necessary. The toll-free number is 888-409-0141.
• For the Frontlines. This 24/7 help line provides free crisis counseling for frontline workers. They can text FRONTLINE to 741741 in the United States (support is also available for residents of Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom).

Resources from professional groups

• Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience. Created by the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, the Action Collaborative comprises more than 60 organizations committed to reversing trends in clinician burnout. In response to the pandemic, the group has compiled a list of strategies and resources to support the health and well-being of clinicians who are providing healthcare during the COVID-19 outbreak.
• American Medical Association. The AMA has created a resource center dedicated to providing care for caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The website includes specific guidance for managing mental health during the pandemic.
• American College of Physicians. The professional society of internal medicine physicians has created a comprehensive guide for physicians specific to COVID-19, with a section dedicated to clinician well-being that includes information about hotlines, counseling services, grief support, and more.
• American Hospital Association. The AHA’s website now includes regularly updated resources for healthcare clinicians and staff, as well as a special section dedicated to protecting and enabling healthcare workers in the midst of the pandemic.

Virtual psychological counseling

Not unlike the way telemedicine has allowed some physicians to keep seeing their patients, many modalities enable participation in therapy through video, chat, phone call, or any combination thereof. Look for a service that is convenient, flexible, and HIPAA compliant.

Traditional in-office mental health therapy has quickly moved to telemedicine. Many if not most insurers that cover counseling visits are paying for telepsychiatry or telecounseling. If you don’t know of an appropriate therapist, check the American Psychiatric Association or its state chapters; the American Psychological Association; or look for a licensed mental health counselor.

Because financial constraints are a potential barrier to therapy, Project Parachute, in cooperation with Eleos Health, has organized a cadre of therapists willing to provide pro bono online therapy for health care workers. The amount of free therapy provided to qualified frontline workers is up to the individual therapists. Discuss these parameters with your therapists up front.

Similar services are offered from companies such as Talkspace and BetterHelp on a subscription basis. These services are typically less expensive than in-person sessions. Ask about discounts for healthcare workers. Talkspace, for example, announced in March, “Effective immediately, healthcare workers across the country can get access to a free month of our...online therapy that includes unlimited text, video, and audio messaging with a licensed therapist.”
 

Online support groups and social media

For more on-demand peer support, look for groups such as the COR Sharing Circle for Healthcare Workers on Facebook. The site’s search engine can point users to plenty of other groups, many of which are closed (meaning posts are visible to members only).

Dr. Mehta hosts her own Facebook group called Physician Community. “I would like to think (and genuinely feel) that we’ve been doing a great job of supporting each other there with daily threads on challenges, treatments, pick-me-ups, vent posts, advocacy, and more,” she said.

For anyone in need, PeerRxMed is a free, peer-to-peer program for physicians and other health care workers that is designed to provide support, connection, encouragement, resources, and skill-building to optimize well-being.

For those craving spiritual comfort during this crisis, a number of churches have begun offering that experience virtually, too. First Unitarian Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, offers weekly services via YouTube. Similar online programming is being offered from all sorts of organizations across denominations.
 

Apps

For DIY or on-the-spot coping support, apps can help physicians get through the day. Apps and websites that offer guided meditations and other relaxation tools include Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer. Before downloading, look for special discounts and promotions for healthcare workers.

Additionally, COVID Coach is a free, secure app designed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that includes tools to help you cope with stress and stay well, safe, healthy, and connected. It also offers advice on navigating parenting, care giving, and working from home while social distancing, quarantined, or sheltering in place.

For practicing daily gratitude, Delightful Journal is a free app that offers journaling prompts, themes, reminders, and unlimited private space to record one’s thoughts.
 

Adopt a ritual

Although self-care for physicians is more crucial now than ever, it can look different for every individual. Along the same lines as keeping a journal, wellness experts often recommend beginning a “gratitude practice” to help provide solace and perspective.

Tweak and personalize these activities to suit your own needs, but be sure to use them even when you’re feeling well, said Mohana Karlekar, MD, medical director of palliative care and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn.

One exercise she recommends is known as Three Good Things. “Every day, at the end of the day, think about three good things that have happened,” she explained. “You can always find the joys. And the joys don’t have to be enormous. There is joy – there is hope – in everything,” Dr. Karlekar said.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Nisha Mehta, MD, said her phone has been ringing with calls from tearful and shaken physicians who are distressed and unsettled about their work and home situation and don’t know what to do.

What’s more, many frontline physicians are living apart from family to protect them from infection. “So many physicians have called me crying. ... They can’t even come home and get a hug,” Dr. Mehta said. “What I’m hearing from a lot of people who are in New York and New Jersey is not just that they go to work all day and it’s this exhausting process throughout the entire day, not only physically but also emotionally.”

Physician burnout has held a steady spotlight since long before the COVID-19 crisis began, Dr. Mehta said. “The reason for that is multifold, but in part, it’s hard for physicians to find an appropriate way to be able to process a lot of the emotions related to their work,” she said. “A lot of that brews below the surface, but COVID-19 has really brought many of these issues above that surface.”

Frustrated that governments weren’t doing enough to support health care workers during the pandemic, Dr. Mehta, a radiologist in Charlotte, N.C., decided there needed to be change. On April 4, Dr. Mehta and two physician colleagues submitted to Congress the COVID-19 Pandemic Physician Protection Act, which ensures, among other provisions, mental health coverage for health care workers. An accompanying petition on change.org had received nearly 300,000 signatures as of May 29.
 

Don’t suffer in silence

A career in medicine comes with immense stress in the best of times, she notes, and managing a pandemic in an already strained system has taken those challenges to newer heights. “We need better support structures at baseline for physician mental health,” said Dr. Mehta.

“That’s something we’ve always been lacking because it’s been against the culture of medicine for so long to say, ‘I’m having a hard time.’ ”

If you’re hurting, the first thing to recognize is that you are not alone in facing these challenges. This is true with respect not only to medical care but also to all of the family, financial, and business concerns physicians are currently facing. “Having all of those things hanging over your head is a lot. We’ve got to find ways to help each other out,” Dr. Mehta said.
 

Where to find support

Fortunately, the medical community has created several pathways to help its own. Types of resources for health care workers on the COVID-19 frontlines run the gamut from crisis hotlines to smartphone apps to virtual counseling, often for free or at discounted rates.

The following list represents a cross-section of opportunities for caregivers to receive care for themselves.

Crisis hotlines

• Physician Support Line. This free and confidential hotline was launched on March 30 by Mona Masood, DO, a Philadelphia-area psychiatrist and moderator of a Facebook forum called the COVID-19 Physicians Group. The PSL is run by more than 600 volunteer psychiatrists who take calls from U.S. physicians 7 days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., with no appointment necessary. The toll-free number is 888-409-0141.
• For the Frontlines. This 24/7 help line provides free crisis counseling for frontline workers. They can text FRONTLINE to 741741 in the United States (support is also available for residents of Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom).

Resources from professional groups

• Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience. Created by the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, the Action Collaborative comprises more than 60 organizations committed to reversing trends in clinician burnout. In response to the pandemic, the group has compiled a list of strategies and resources to support the health and well-being of clinicians who are providing healthcare during the COVID-19 outbreak.
• American Medical Association. The AMA has created a resource center dedicated to providing care for caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The website includes specific guidance for managing mental health during the pandemic.
• American College of Physicians. The professional society of internal medicine physicians has created a comprehensive guide for physicians specific to COVID-19, with a section dedicated to clinician well-being that includes information about hotlines, counseling services, grief support, and more.
• American Hospital Association. The AHA’s website now includes regularly updated resources for healthcare clinicians and staff, as well as a special section dedicated to protecting and enabling healthcare workers in the midst of the pandemic.

Virtual psychological counseling

Not unlike the way telemedicine has allowed some physicians to keep seeing their patients, many modalities enable participation in therapy through video, chat, phone call, or any combination thereof. Look for a service that is convenient, flexible, and HIPAA compliant.

Traditional in-office mental health therapy has quickly moved to telemedicine. Many if not most insurers that cover counseling visits are paying for telepsychiatry or telecounseling. If you don’t know of an appropriate therapist, check the American Psychiatric Association or its state chapters; the American Psychological Association; or look for a licensed mental health counselor.

Because financial constraints are a potential barrier to therapy, Project Parachute, in cooperation with Eleos Health, has organized a cadre of therapists willing to provide pro bono online therapy for health care workers. The amount of free therapy provided to qualified frontline workers is up to the individual therapists. Discuss these parameters with your therapists up front.

Similar services are offered from companies such as Talkspace and BetterHelp on a subscription basis. These services are typically less expensive than in-person sessions. Ask about discounts for healthcare workers. Talkspace, for example, announced in March, “Effective immediately, healthcare workers across the country can get access to a free month of our...online therapy that includes unlimited text, video, and audio messaging with a licensed therapist.”
 

Online support groups and social media

For more on-demand peer support, look for groups such as the COR Sharing Circle for Healthcare Workers on Facebook. The site’s search engine can point users to plenty of other groups, many of which are closed (meaning posts are visible to members only).

Dr. Mehta hosts her own Facebook group called Physician Community. “I would like to think (and genuinely feel) that we’ve been doing a great job of supporting each other there with daily threads on challenges, treatments, pick-me-ups, vent posts, advocacy, and more,” she said.

For anyone in need, PeerRxMed is a free, peer-to-peer program for physicians and other health care workers that is designed to provide support, connection, encouragement, resources, and skill-building to optimize well-being.

For those craving spiritual comfort during this crisis, a number of churches have begun offering that experience virtually, too. First Unitarian Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, offers weekly services via YouTube. Similar online programming is being offered from all sorts of organizations across denominations.
 

Apps

For DIY or on-the-spot coping support, apps can help physicians get through the day. Apps and websites that offer guided meditations and other relaxation tools include Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer. Before downloading, look for special discounts and promotions for healthcare workers.

Additionally, COVID Coach is a free, secure app designed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that includes tools to help you cope with stress and stay well, safe, healthy, and connected. It also offers advice on navigating parenting, care giving, and working from home while social distancing, quarantined, or sheltering in place.

For practicing daily gratitude, Delightful Journal is a free app that offers journaling prompts, themes, reminders, and unlimited private space to record one’s thoughts.
 

Adopt a ritual

Although self-care for physicians is more crucial now than ever, it can look different for every individual. Along the same lines as keeping a journal, wellness experts often recommend beginning a “gratitude practice” to help provide solace and perspective.

Tweak and personalize these activities to suit your own needs, but be sure to use them even when you’re feeling well, said Mohana Karlekar, MD, medical director of palliative care and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn.

One exercise she recommends is known as Three Good Things. “Every day, at the end of the day, think about three good things that have happened,” she explained. “You can always find the joys. And the joys don’t have to be enormous. There is joy – there is hope – in everything,” Dr. Karlekar said.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Nisha Mehta, MD, said her phone has been ringing with calls from tearful and shaken physicians who are distressed and unsettled about their work and home situation and don’t know what to do.

What’s more, many frontline physicians are living apart from family to protect them from infection. “So many physicians have called me crying. ... They can’t even come home and get a hug,” Dr. Mehta said. “What I’m hearing from a lot of people who are in New York and New Jersey is not just that they go to work all day and it’s this exhausting process throughout the entire day, not only physically but also emotionally.”

Physician burnout has held a steady spotlight since long before the COVID-19 crisis began, Dr. Mehta said. “The reason for that is multifold, but in part, it’s hard for physicians to find an appropriate way to be able to process a lot of the emotions related to their work,” she said. “A lot of that brews below the surface, but COVID-19 has really brought many of these issues above that surface.”

Frustrated that governments weren’t doing enough to support health care workers during the pandemic, Dr. Mehta, a radiologist in Charlotte, N.C., decided there needed to be change. On April 4, Dr. Mehta and two physician colleagues submitted to Congress the COVID-19 Pandemic Physician Protection Act, which ensures, among other provisions, mental health coverage for health care workers. An accompanying petition on change.org had received nearly 300,000 signatures as of May 29.
 

Don’t suffer in silence

A career in medicine comes with immense stress in the best of times, she notes, and managing a pandemic in an already strained system has taken those challenges to newer heights. “We need better support structures at baseline for physician mental health,” said Dr. Mehta.

“That’s something we’ve always been lacking because it’s been against the culture of medicine for so long to say, ‘I’m having a hard time.’ ”

If you’re hurting, the first thing to recognize is that you are not alone in facing these challenges. This is true with respect not only to medical care but also to all of the family, financial, and business concerns physicians are currently facing. “Having all of those things hanging over your head is a lot. We’ve got to find ways to help each other out,” Dr. Mehta said.
 

Where to find support

Fortunately, the medical community has created several pathways to help its own. Types of resources for health care workers on the COVID-19 frontlines run the gamut from crisis hotlines to smartphone apps to virtual counseling, often for free or at discounted rates.

The following list represents a cross-section of opportunities for caregivers to receive care for themselves.

Crisis hotlines

• Physician Support Line. This free and confidential hotline was launched on March 30 by Mona Masood, DO, a Philadelphia-area psychiatrist and moderator of a Facebook forum called the COVID-19 Physicians Group. The PSL is run by more than 600 volunteer psychiatrists who take calls from U.S. physicians 7 days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m., with no appointment necessary. The toll-free number is 888-409-0141.
• For the Frontlines. This 24/7 help line provides free crisis counseling for frontline workers. They can text FRONTLINE to 741741 in the United States (support is also available for residents of Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom).

Resources from professional groups

• Action Collaborative on Clinician Well-Being and Resilience. Created by the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, the Action Collaborative comprises more than 60 organizations committed to reversing trends in clinician burnout. In response to the pandemic, the group has compiled a list of strategies and resources to support the health and well-being of clinicians who are providing healthcare during the COVID-19 outbreak.
• American Medical Association. The AMA has created a resource center dedicated to providing care for caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The website includes specific guidance for managing mental health during the pandemic.
• American College of Physicians. The professional society of internal medicine physicians has created a comprehensive guide for physicians specific to COVID-19, with a section dedicated to clinician well-being that includes information about hotlines, counseling services, grief support, and more.
• American Hospital Association. The AHA’s website now includes regularly updated resources for healthcare clinicians and staff, as well as a special section dedicated to protecting and enabling healthcare workers in the midst of the pandemic.

Virtual psychological counseling

Not unlike the way telemedicine has allowed some physicians to keep seeing their patients, many modalities enable participation in therapy through video, chat, phone call, or any combination thereof. Look for a service that is convenient, flexible, and HIPAA compliant.

Traditional in-office mental health therapy has quickly moved to telemedicine. Many if not most insurers that cover counseling visits are paying for telepsychiatry or telecounseling. If you don’t know of an appropriate therapist, check the American Psychiatric Association or its state chapters; the American Psychological Association; or look for a licensed mental health counselor.

Because financial constraints are a potential barrier to therapy, Project Parachute, in cooperation with Eleos Health, has organized a cadre of therapists willing to provide pro bono online therapy for health care workers. The amount of free therapy provided to qualified frontline workers is up to the individual therapists. Discuss these parameters with your therapists up front.

Similar services are offered from companies such as Talkspace and BetterHelp on a subscription basis. These services are typically less expensive than in-person sessions. Ask about discounts for healthcare workers. Talkspace, for example, announced in March, “Effective immediately, healthcare workers across the country can get access to a free month of our...online therapy that includes unlimited text, video, and audio messaging with a licensed therapist.”
 

Online support groups and social media

For more on-demand peer support, look for groups such as the COR Sharing Circle for Healthcare Workers on Facebook. The site’s search engine can point users to plenty of other groups, many of which are closed (meaning posts are visible to members only).

Dr. Mehta hosts her own Facebook group called Physician Community. “I would like to think (and genuinely feel) that we’ve been doing a great job of supporting each other there with daily threads on challenges, treatments, pick-me-ups, vent posts, advocacy, and more,” she said.

For anyone in need, PeerRxMed is a free, peer-to-peer program for physicians and other health care workers that is designed to provide support, connection, encouragement, resources, and skill-building to optimize well-being.

For those craving spiritual comfort during this crisis, a number of churches have begun offering that experience virtually, too. First Unitarian Church of Worcester, Massachusetts, for example, offers weekly services via YouTube. Similar online programming is being offered from all sorts of organizations across denominations.
 

Apps

For DIY or on-the-spot coping support, apps can help physicians get through the day. Apps and websites that offer guided meditations and other relaxation tools include Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer. Before downloading, look for special discounts and promotions for healthcare workers.

Additionally, COVID Coach is a free, secure app designed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs that includes tools to help you cope with stress and stay well, safe, healthy, and connected. It also offers advice on navigating parenting, care giving, and working from home while social distancing, quarantined, or sheltering in place.

For practicing daily gratitude, Delightful Journal is a free app that offers journaling prompts, themes, reminders, and unlimited private space to record one’s thoughts.
 

Adopt a ritual

Although self-care for physicians is more crucial now than ever, it can look different for every individual. Along the same lines as keeping a journal, wellness experts often recommend beginning a “gratitude practice” to help provide solace and perspective.

Tweak and personalize these activities to suit your own needs, but be sure to use them even when you’re feeling well, said Mohana Karlekar, MD, medical director of palliative care and assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn.

One exercise she recommends is known as Three Good Things. “Every day, at the end of the day, think about three good things that have happened,” she explained. “You can always find the joys. And the joys don’t have to be enormous. There is joy – there is hope – in everything,” Dr. Karlekar said.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Even before Atlanta had an official shelter-in-place order, patients at the private plastic surgery practice of Nicholas Jones, MD, began canceling and rescheduled planned procedures.

After a few weeks, Dr. Jones, aged 40 years, stopped seeing patients entirely, but as a self-employed independent contractor, that means he’d lost most of his income. Dr. Jones still makes some money via a wound care job at a local nursing home, but he’s concerned that job may also be eliminated.

“I’m not hurting yet,” he said. “But I’m preparing for the worst possible scenario.”

In preparation, he and his fiancé have cut back on extraneous expenses like Uber Eats, magazine subscriptions, and streaming music services. Even though he has a 6-month emergency fund, Jones has reached out to utility companies, mortgage lenders, and student loan servicers to find out about any programs they offer to people who’ve suffered financially from the coronavirus crisis.

He’s also considered traveling to one of the COVID-19 epicenters – he has family in New Orleans and Chicago – to work in a hospital there. Jones has trauma experience and is double-boarded in general and plastic surgery.

“I could provide relief to those in need and also float through this troubled time with some financial relief,” he said.

Whereas much of the world’s attention has been on physicians who are on the front line and working around the clock in hospitals to help COVID-19 patients, thousands of other physicians are experiencing the opposite phenomenon – a slowdown or even stoppage of work (and income) altogether.

Many practices are temporarily closing to meet social distancing requirements, and some may end up closed for months, leaving doctors without a source of income. Even among those practices that remain open, the number of patients has declined as people avoid going to the office unless they absolutely have to.

At the same time, doctors in two-income households may have a spouse experiencing a job loss or income decline. Nearly 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the last 2 weeks of March, the largest number on record.

Still, while there’s uncertainty around how long the coronavirus crisis will last, experts agree that at some point America will return to a “new normal” and business operations will begin to reopen. For physicians experiencing a reduction in income who, like Jones, have an emergency fund with a few months’ worth of expenses, now’s the time to tap into it. (Or if you still have income, now’s the time to focus on growing that emergency fund to give yourself an even bigger safety net.)

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here’s how to stay afloat in the near term:
 

Cut back on expenses

Some household spending has naturally tapered off for many families because social distancing restrictions reduce spending on eating out, travel, and other leisure activities. But this is also an opportunity to look for other ways to reduce spending. Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need.

Some gyms are not allowing membership termination right now, but it pays to ask. If a service you’re not using won’t facilitate the cancellation, call your credit card company to dispute and stop the charges, and report them to the Better Business Bureau.

You should also stop contributing to nonemergency savings accounts such as your retirement fund or your children’s college funds.

“A lot of people are hesitant to stop their automatic savings if they’ve been maxing out their 401(k) contribution or 529 accounts,” says Andrew Musbach, a certified financial planner and cofounder of MD Wealth Management in Chelsea, Mich. “But if you’re thinking long term, the reality is that missing a couple of months won’t make or break a plan. Cutting back on the amount you’re saving in the short term will increase your cash flow and is a good way to make ends meet.”
 

Take advantage of regulatory changes

Although many physicians won’t qualify for direct payments via the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act (the $1,200 payments to individuals start phasing out once income hits $75,000 and disappear entirely for those making more than $99,000), there are other provisions in the stimulus bill that may help physicians. The bill, for example, boosts state unemployment payments by $600 per week for the next 4 months, meaning qualified workers could receive an average of nearly $1,000 per week, depending on their state, and there are new provisions providing unemployment payments to self-employed and contract workers.

The CARES Act also includes a break for federal student loan holders. Under that rule, you can skip your payments through September without incurring additional interest. Physicians in the loan forgiveness program will still get credit for payments skipped during this program.

Separately, the IRS has extended the tax deadline from April 15 to July 15, which means not only do you not have to file your taxes until then, you also don’t have to pay any taxes you owe until mid-July. The deadline for first quarter estimated tax payments has also moved to July 15. (If you’re expecting a refund, however, you should file ASAP, since the IRS will typically issue those within a few weeks of receiving your returns.)
 

Tap your home equity – if you’re planning to stay put

If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Interest rates have fallen recently amid economic turbulence, so if you haven’t refinanced recently you may be able to shave your monthly payment. If you need cash, a cash-out refinance, home equity line of credit, or a reverse mortgage (available if you’re over age 62) are among the lowest-cost ways to borrow.

“With interest rates so low, there can be a lot of benefit to refinancing and leveraging your house, especially if you’re planning to stay there,” says Jamie Hopkins, a director at the Carson Group. “The challenge is if you’re planning to move in the next few years. There’s a real risk that the housing market could go down in the next couple of years, and if you’re planning to sell, there’s a risk that you might not get back what you borrowed.”
 

Communicate early with your bank or landlord

If you don’t have the income to refinance, and you think you’re going to run into trouble making your housing payment, you should let your bank or landlord know as soon as possible. The CARES Act allows homeowners with federally backed mortgages to obtain a 180-day postponement of mortgage payments because of COVID-19 financial hardship, with the potential to extend for another 180 days. It also bans eviction by landlords with federal mortgages for 120 days.

Even if you don’t have a federally backed mortgage, you should still get in touch with your lender. Many mortgage servicers have their own forbearance programs for borrowers who can prove a temporary financial hardship. (Some banks are also waiving fees on early withdrawals on CDs and giving cardholders a reprieve on credit card payments.) Commercial landlords are also working with struggling tenants, so you may also be able to get some relief on your office lease as well.

“All of the lenders are setting up helplines for people affected,” says Amy Guerich, a partner with Stepp & Rothwell, a Kansas City–based financial planning firm. “The best thing you can do is contact them right away if you think that you’re going to have a problem vs. just letting the bills go.”
 

Consider retirement account withdrawals

Standard personal finance advice holds that you should exhaust all other options before pulling money out of your retirement account because of the high penalties for early withdrawals and because money removed from retirement accounts is no longer compounding over time.

Still, the CARES act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. You’ll owe ordinary income taxes on the withdrawal, but you have 3 years to pay them or to return the money to your retirement account.

“That’s a great relief provision, especially for higher-income physicians who might have a higher 401(k) balance,” said Jamie Hopkins.
 

Be smart about credit cards

Although using credit cards that you can’t pay off every month is typically an expensive way to access money, getting a new card with a low or zero percent introductory rate is a short-term strategy to consider when you’ve exhausted other options. If you have good credit, you may be able to qualify for a credit card with a 0% introductory interest rate on new transactions. Pay close attention to the fine print, including the cap on the balance you can carry without interest and whether you’ll be required to make minimum payments.

The average 0% credit card offer is for 11 months, but there are some cards that can extend the offer for up to a year-and-a-half. If you choose to use this strategy, you’ll need a plan to pay off the entire balance before the introductory period ends. If there’s a balance remaining once the rate resets, you may end up owing deferred interest on it.

The financial ramifications of the coronavirus can feel overwhelming, but it’s important not to panic. While it remains unclear how long the current crisis will last, making some smart money moves to preserve your cash in the meantime can help you stay afloat.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Even before Atlanta had an official shelter-in-place order, patients at the private plastic surgery practice of Nicholas Jones, MD, began canceling and rescheduled planned procedures.

After a few weeks, Dr. Jones, aged 40 years, stopped seeing patients entirely, but as a self-employed independent contractor, that means he’d lost most of his income. Dr. Jones still makes some money via a wound care job at a local nursing home, but he’s concerned that job may also be eliminated.

“I’m not hurting yet,” he said. “But I’m preparing for the worst possible scenario.”

In preparation, he and his fiancé have cut back on extraneous expenses like Uber Eats, magazine subscriptions, and streaming music services. Even though he has a 6-month emergency fund, Jones has reached out to utility companies, mortgage lenders, and student loan servicers to find out about any programs they offer to people who’ve suffered financially from the coronavirus crisis.

He’s also considered traveling to one of the COVID-19 epicenters – he has family in New Orleans and Chicago – to work in a hospital there. Jones has trauma experience and is double-boarded in general and plastic surgery.

“I could provide relief to those in need and also float through this troubled time with some financial relief,” he said.

Whereas much of the world’s attention has been on physicians who are on the front line and working around the clock in hospitals to help COVID-19 patients, thousands of other physicians are experiencing the opposite phenomenon – a slowdown or even stoppage of work (and income) altogether.

Many practices are temporarily closing to meet social distancing requirements, and some may end up closed for months, leaving doctors without a source of income. Even among those practices that remain open, the number of patients has declined as people avoid going to the office unless they absolutely have to.

At the same time, doctors in two-income households may have a spouse experiencing a job loss or income decline. Nearly 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the last 2 weeks of March, the largest number on record.

Still, while there’s uncertainty around how long the coronavirus crisis will last, experts agree that at some point America will return to a “new normal” and business operations will begin to reopen. For physicians experiencing a reduction in income who, like Jones, have an emergency fund with a few months’ worth of expenses, now’s the time to tap into it. (Or if you still have income, now’s the time to focus on growing that emergency fund to give yourself an even bigger safety net.)

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here’s how to stay afloat in the near term:
 

Cut back on expenses

Some household spending has naturally tapered off for many families because social distancing restrictions reduce spending on eating out, travel, and other leisure activities. But this is also an opportunity to look for other ways to reduce spending. Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need.

Some gyms are not allowing membership termination right now, but it pays to ask. If a service you’re not using won’t facilitate the cancellation, call your credit card company to dispute and stop the charges, and report them to the Better Business Bureau.

You should also stop contributing to nonemergency savings accounts such as your retirement fund or your children’s college funds.

“A lot of people are hesitant to stop their automatic savings if they’ve been maxing out their 401(k) contribution or 529 accounts,” says Andrew Musbach, a certified financial planner and cofounder of MD Wealth Management in Chelsea, Mich. “But if you’re thinking long term, the reality is that missing a couple of months won’t make or break a plan. Cutting back on the amount you’re saving in the short term will increase your cash flow and is a good way to make ends meet.”
 

Take advantage of regulatory changes

Although many physicians won’t qualify for direct payments via the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act (the $1,200 payments to individuals start phasing out once income hits $75,000 and disappear entirely for those making more than $99,000), there are other provisions in the stimulus bill that may help physicians. The bill, for example, boosts state unemployment payments by $600 per week for the next 4 months, meaning qualified workers could receive an average of nearly $1,000 per week, depending on their state, and there are new provisions providing unemployment payments to self-employed and contract workers.

The CARES Act also includes a break for federal student loan holders. Under that rule, you can skip your payments through September without incurring additional interest. Physicians in the loan forgiveness program will still get credit for payments skipped during this program.

Separately, the IRS has extended the tax deadline from April 15 to July 15, which means not only do you not have to file your taxes until then, you also don’t have to pay any taxes you owe until mid-July. The deadline for first quarter estimated tax payments has also moved to July 15. (If you’re expecting a refund, however, you should file ASAP, since the IRS will typically issue those within a few weeks of receiving your returns.)
 

Tap your home equity – if you’re planning to stay put

If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Interest rates have fallen recently amid economic turbulence, so if you haven’t refinanced recently you may be able to shave your monthly payment. If you need cash, a cash-out refinance, home equity line of credit, or a reverse mortgage (available if you’re over age 62) are among the lowest-cost ways to borrow.

“With interest rates so low, there can be a lot of benefit to refinancing and leveraging your house, especially if you’re planning to stay there,” says Jamie Hopkins, a director at the Carson Group. “The challenge is if you’re planning to move in the next few years. There’s a real risk that the housing market could go down in the next couple of years, and if you’re planning to sell, there’s a risk that you might not get back what you borrowed.”
 

Communicate early with your bank or landlord

If you don’t have the income to refinance, and you think you’re going to run into trouble making your housing payment, you should let your bank or landlord know as soon as possible. The CARES Act allows homeowners with federally backed mortgages to obtain a 180-day postponement of mortgage payments because of COVID-19 financial hardship, with the potential to extend for another 180 days. It also bans eviction by landlords with federal mortgages for 120 days.

Even if you don’t have a federally backed mortgage, you should still get in touch with your lender. Many mortgage servicers have their own forbearance programs for borrowers who can prove a temporary financial hardship. (Some banks are also waiving fees on early withdrawals on CDs and giving cardholders a reprieve on credit card payments.) Commercial landlords are also working with struggling tenants, so you may also be able to get some relief on your office lease as well.

“All of the lenders are setting up helplines for people affected,” says Amy Guerich, a partner with Stepp & Rothwell, a Kansas City–based financial planning firm. “The best thing you can do is contact them right away if you think that you’re going to have a problem vs. just letting the bills go.”
 

Consider retirement account withdrawals

Standard personal finance advice holds that you should exhaust all other options before pulling money out of your retirement account because of the high penalties for early withdrawals and because money removed from retirement accounts is no longer compounding over time.

Still, the CARES act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. You’ll owe ordinary income taxes on the withdrawal, but you have 3 years to pay them or to return the money to your retirement account.

“That’s a great relief provision, especially for higher-income physicians who might have a higher 401(k) balance,” said Jamie Hopkins.
 

Be smart about credit cards

Although using credit cards that you can’t pay off every month is typically an expensive way to access money, getting a new card with a low or zero percent introductory rate is a short-term strategy to consider when you’ve exhausted other options. If you have good credit, you may be able to qualify for a credit card with a 0% introductory interest rate on new transactions. Pay close attention to the fine print, including the cap on the balance you can carry without interest and whether you’ll be required to make minimum payments.

The average 0% credit card offer is for 11 months, but there are some cards that can extend the offer for up to a year-and-a-half. If you choose to use this strategy, you’ll need a plan to pay off the entire balance before the introductory period ends. If there’s a balance remaining once the rate resets, you may end up owing deferred interest on it.

The financial ramifications of the coronavirus can feel overwhelming, but it’s important not to panic. While it remains unclear how long the current crisis will last, making some smart money moves to preserve your cash in the meantime can help you stay afloat.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Even before Atlanta had an official shelter-in-place order, patients at the private plastic surgery practice of Nicholas Jones, MD, began canceling and rescheduled planned procedures.

After a few weeks, Dr. Jones, aged 40 years, stopped seeing patients entirely, but as a self-employed independent contractor, that means he’d lost most of his income. Dr. Jones still makes some money via a wound care job at a local nursing home, but he’s concerned that job may also be eliminated.

“I’m not hurting yet,” he said. “But I’m preparing for the worst possible scenario.”

In preparation, he and his fiancé have cut back on extraneous expenses like Uber Eats, magazine subscriptions, and streaming music services. Even though he has a 6-month emergency fund, Jones has reached out to utility companies, mortgage lenders, and student loan servicers to find out about any programs they offer to people who’ve suffered financially from the coronavirus crisis.

He’s also considered traveling to one of the COVID-19 epicenters – he has family in New Orleans and Chicago – to work in a hospital there. Jones has trauma experience and is double-boarded in general and plastic surgery.

“I could provide relief to those in need and also float through this troubled time with some financial relief,” he said.

Whereas much of the world’s attention has been on physicians who are on the front line and working around the clock in hospitals to help COVID-19 patients, thousands of other physicians are experiencing the opposite phenomenon – a slowdown or even stoppage of work (and income) altogether.

Many practices are temporarily closing to meet social distancing requirements, and some may end up closed for months, leaving doctors without a source of income. Even among those practices that remain open, the number of patients has declined as people avoid going to the office unless they absolutely have to.

At the same time, doctors in two-income households may have a spouse experiencing a job loss or income decline. Nearly 10 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in the last 2 weeks of March, the largest number on record.

Still, while there’s uncertainty around how long the coronavirus crisis will last, experts agree that at some point America will return to a “new normal” and business operations will begin to reopen. For physicians experiencing a reduction in income who, like Jones, have an emergency fund with a few months’ worth of expenses, now’s the time to tap into it. (Or if you still have income, now’s the time to focus on growing that emergency fund to give yourself an even bigger safety net.)

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here’s how to stay afloat in the near term:
 

Cut back on expenses

Some household spending has naturally tapered off for many families because social distancing restrictions reduce spending on eating out, travel, and other leisure activities. But this is also an opportunity to look for other ways to reduce spending. Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need.

Some gyms are not allowing membership termination right now, but it pays to ask. If a service you’re not using won’t facilitate the cancellation, call your credit card company to dispute and stop the charges, and report them to the Better Business Bureau.

You should also stop contributing to nonemergency savings accounts such as your retirement fund or your children’s college funds.

“A lot of people are hesitant to stop their automatic savings if they’ve been maxing out their 401(k) contribution or 529 accounts,” says Andrew Musbach, a certified financial planner and cofounder of MD Wealth Management in Chelsea, Mich. “But if you’re thinking long term, the reality is that missing a couple of months won’t make or break a plan. Cutting back on the amount you’re saving in the short term will increase your cash flow and is a good way to make ends meet.”
 

Take advantage of regulatory changes

Although many physicians won’t qualify for direct payments via the Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act (the $1,200 payments to individuals start phasing out once income hits $75,000 and disappear entirely for those making more than $99,000), there are other provisions in the stimulus bill that may help physicians. The bill, for example, boosts state unemployment payments by $600 per week for the next 4 months, meaning qualified workers could receive an average of nearly $1,000 per week, depending on their state, and there are new provisions providing unemployment payments to self-employed and contract workers.

The CARES Act also includes a break for federal student loan holders. Under that rule, you can skip your payments through September without incurring additional interest. Physicians in the loan forgiveness program will still get credit for payments skipped during this program.

Separately, the IRS has extended the tax deadline from April 15 to July 15, which means not only do you not have to file your taxes until then, you also don’t have to pay any taxes you owe until mid-July. The deadline for first quarter estimated tax payments has also moved to July 15. (If you’re expecting a refund, however, you should file ASAP, since the IRS will typically issue those within a few weeks of receiving your returns.)
 

Tap your home equity – if you’re planning to stay put

If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Interest rates have fallen recently amid economic turbulence, so if you haven’t refinanced recently you may be able to shave your monthly payment. If you need cash, a cash-out refinance, home equity line of credit, or a reverse mortgage (available if you’re over age 62) are among the lowest-cost ways to borrow.

“With interest rates so low, there can be a lot of benefit to refinancing and leveraging your house, especially if you’re planning to stay there,” says Jamie Hopkins, a director at the Carson Group. “The challenge is if you’re planning to move in the next few years. There’s a real risk that the housing market could go down in the next couple of years, and if you’re planning to sell, there’s a risk that you might not get back what you borrowed.”
 

Communicate early with your bank or landlord

If you don’t have the income to refinance, and you think you’re going to run into trouble making your housing payment, you should let your bank or landlord know as soon as possible. The CARES Act allows homeowners with federally backed mortgages to obtain a 180-day postponement of mortgage payments because of COVID-19 financial hardship, with the potential to extend for another 180 days. It also bans eviction by landlords with federal mortgages for 120 days.

Even if you don’t have a federally backed mortgage, you should still get in touch with your lender. Many mortgage servicers have their own forbearance programs for borrowers who can prove a temporary financial hardship. (Some banks are also waiving fees on early withdrawals on CDs and giving cardholders a reprieve on credit card payments.) Commercial landlords are also working with struggling tenants, so you may also be able to get some relief on your office lease as well.

“All of the lenders are setting up helplines for people affected,” says Amy Guerich, a partner with Stepp & Rothwell, a Kansas City–based financial planning firm. “The best thing you can do is contact them right away if you think that you’re going to have a problem vs. just letting the bills go.”
 

Consider retirement account withdrawals

Standard personal finance advice holds that you should exhaust all other options before pulling money out of your retirement account because of the high penalties for early withdrawals and because money removed from retirement accounts is no longer compounding over time.

Still, the CARES act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. You’ll owe ordinary income taxes on the withdrawal, but you have 3 years to pay them or to return the money to your retirement account.

“That’s a great relief provision, especially for higher-income physicians who might have a higher 401(k) balance,” said Jamie Hopkins.
 

Be smart about credit cards

Although using credit cards that you can’t pay off every month is typically an expensive way to access money, getting a new card with a low or zero percent introductory rate is a short-term strategy to consider when you’ve exhausted other options. If you have good credit, you may be able to qualify for a credit card with a 0% introductory interest rate on new transactions. Pay close attention to the fine print, including the cap on the balance you can carry without interest and whether you’ll be required to make minimum payments.

The average 0% credit card offer is for 11 months, but there are some cards that can extend the offer for up to a year-and-a-half. If you choose to use this strategy, you’ll need a plan to pay off the entire balance before the introductory period ends. If there’s a balance remaining once the rate resets, you may end up owing deferred interest on it.

The financial ramifications of the coronavirus can feel overwhelming, but it’s important not to panic. While it remains unclear how long the current crisis will last, making some smart money moves to preserve your cash in the meantime can help you stay afloat.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Here are the stories our MDedge editors across specialties think you need to know about today:

Tips to keep your finances healthy during COVID-19

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here are some tips on how to stay afloat in the near term. Cut back on expenses: Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need. Tap your home equity: If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Consider retirement account withdrawals: the CARES Act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. Read more.

Nursing homes overhaul infection control

The toll that COVID-19 has taken on nursing homes and their postacute and long-term care residents has a multilayered backstory involving underresourced organizational structures, inherent susceptibilities, minimally trained infection prevention staff, variable abilities to isolate and quarantine large numbers of patients and residents, and a lack of governmental support. “Nursing homes have been trying their best to combat this pandemic using the best infection control procedures they have, but blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs,” said Joseph G. Ouslander, MD, professor of geriatric medicine at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Experts in both long-term care and infectious disease said in interviews that, through the rest of the pandemic and beyond, nursing homes need the following: “Infection preventionists” to lead improvements in emergency preparedness and infection prevention and control, well-qualified and engaged medical directors, a survey/inspection process that focuses on education, and more resources and attention to structural reform. Read more.

WHO backtracks on asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead and an infectious disease epidemiologist, caused a stir on June 8 when she said that countries are reporting that many of their asymptomatic cases develop into cases of mild disease. For patients with truly asymptomatic disease, countries are “not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare,” she said. But on June 9 – following a day of criticism – Dr. Van Kerkhove sought to clarify her comments on asymptomatic transmission during a live social media Q&A. She noted that while “the majority of transmission that we know about” is through individuals with symptoms, “there are a subset of people who don’t develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don’t have symptoms – we don’t actually have that answer yet.” Physicians and public health experts slammed the initial comments, saying that they created confusion. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, weighed in on the controversial WHO comments, telling Good Morning America on June 10 that Dr. Van Kerkhove’s initial statement that asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission is a rare event is “not correct.” Read more.

E-cigs linked to smoking relapse

The use of electronic nicotine delivery systems is associated with increased risk of cigarette smoking relapse among former smokers, results from a large longitudinal cohort study demonstrated. The findings come from a survey of adult former smokers who participated in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study (2013-2018). Adjusted hazard ratio (AHR) analysis revealed that the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems was associated with significant risk of cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.63) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.79). The use of other tobacco products was similarly associated with a significant risk for cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.97) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.82). “For the many clinicians treating former smokers who have successfully quit all nicotine products, the implications are that use of [electronic nicotine delivery systems] should be discouraged, just as use of all other tobacco products is discouraged,” researchers led by Colm D. Everard, PhD, reported in a study published in JAMA Network Open. Read more.

Formula feeding leads to early weaning

Breastfed infants who receive formula in the hospital are more than twofold more likely to wean during the first year, compared with infants who are exclusively breastfed, according to research published online in Pediatrics. The finding is based on an analysis of data from over 8,000 infants in the Minnesota Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). “Our study strengthens the evidence that formula supplementation of breastfed infants negatively affects breastfeeding duration,” said Marcia Burton McCoy, MPH, of the Minnesota Department of Health’s WIC, and Pamela Heggie, MD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Read more.
 

For more on COVID-19, visit our Resource Center. All of our latest news is available on MDedge.com.

Here are the stories our MDedge editors across specialties think you need to know about today:

Tips to keep your finances healthy during COVID-19

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here are some tips on how to stay afloat in the near term. Cut back on expenses: Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need. Tap your home equity: If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Consider retirement account withdrawals: the CARES Act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. Read more.

Nursing homes overhaul infection control

The toll that COVID-19 has taken on nursing homes and their postacute and long-term care residents has a multilayered backstory involving underresourced organizational structures, inherent susceptibilities, minimally trained infection prevention staff, variable abilities to isolate and quarantine large numbers of patients and residents, and a lack of governmental support. “Nursing homes have been trying their best to combat this pandemic using the best infection control procedures they have, but blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs,” said Joseph G. Ouslander, MD, professor of geriatric medicine at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Experts in both long-term care and infectious disease said in interviews that, through the rest of the pandemic and beyond, nursing homes need the following: “Infection preventionists” to lead improvements in emergency preparedness and infection prevention and control, well-qualified and engaged medical directors, a survey/inspection process that focuses on education, and more resources and attention to structural reform. Read more.

WHO backtracks on asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead and an infectious disease epidemiologist, caused a stir on June 8 when she said that countries are reporting that many of their asymptomatic cases develop into cases of mild disease. For patients with truly asymptomatic disease, countries are “not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare,” she said. But on June 9 – following a day of criticism – Dr. Van Kerkhove sought to clarify her comments on asymptomatic transmission during a live social media Q&A. She noted that while “the majority of transmission that we know about” is through individuals with symptoms, “there are a subset of people who don’t develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don’t have symptoms – we don’t actually have that answer yet.” Physicians and public health experts slammed the initial comments, saying that they created confusion. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, weighed in on the controversial WHO comments, telling Good Morning America on June 10 that Dr. Van Kerkhove’s initial statement that asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission is a rare event is “not correct.” Read more.

E-cigs linked to smoking relapse

The use of electronic nicotine delivery systems is associated with increased risk of cigarette smoking relapse among former smokers, results from a large longitudinal cohort study demonstrated. The findings come from a survey of adult former smokers who participated in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study (2013-2018). Adjusted hazard ratio (AHR) analysis revealed that the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems was associated with significant risk of cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.63) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.79). The use of other tobacco products was similarly associated with a significant risk for cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.97) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.82). “For the many clinicians treating former smokers who have successfully quit all nicotine products, the implications are that use of [electronic nicotine delivery systems] should be discouraged, just as use of all other tobacco products is discouraged,” researchers led by Colm D. Everard, PhD, reported in a study published in JAMA Network Open. Read more.

Formula feeding leads to early weaning

Breastfed infants who receive formula in the hospital are more than twofold more likely to wean during the first year, compared with infants who are exclusively breastfed, according to research published online in Pediatrics. The finding is based on an analysis of data from over 8,000 infants in the Minnesota Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). “Our study strengthens the evidence that formula supplementation of breastfed infants negatively affects breastfeeding duration,” said Marcia Burton McCoy, MPH, of the Minnesota Department of Health’s WIC, and Pamela Heggie, MD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Read more.
 

For more on COVID-19, visit our Resource Center. All of our latest news is available on MDedge.com.

Here are the stories our MDedge editors across specialties think you need to know about today:

Tips to keep your finances healthy during COVID-19

If you’re among the more than half of Americans with less than 6 months of expenses saved for a rainy day, here are some tips on how to stay afloat in the near term. Cut back on expenses: Look through your credit card bills to see whether there are recurring payments you can cut, such as a payment to a gym that’s temporarily closed or a monthly subscription box that you don’t need. Tap your home equity: If you have good credit and still have some income, you might consider refinancing your home mortgage or opening a home equity line of credit. Consider retirement account withdrawals: the CARES Act has provisions making it less financially onerous to pull money from your retirement accounts. Under the new law, you can take a distribution of up to $100,000 from your IRA or 401(k) without having to pay the 10% early withdrawal penalty. Read more.

Nursing homes overhaul infection control

The toll that COVID-19 has taken on nursing homes and their postacute and long-term care residents has a multilayered backstory involving underresourced organizational structures, inherent susceptibilities, minimally trained infection prevention staff, variable abilities to isolate and quarantine large numbers of patients and residents, and a lack of governmental support. “Nursing homes have been trying their best to combat this pandemic using the best infection control procedures they have, but blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their backs,” said Joseph G. Ouslander, MD, professor of geriatric medicine at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. Experts in both long-term care and infectious disease said in interviews that, through the rest of the pandemic and beyond, nursing homes need the following: “Infection preventionists” to lead improvements in emergency preparedness and infection prevention and control, well-qualified and engaged medical directors, a survey/inspection process that focuses on education, and more resources and attention to structural reform. Read more.

WHO backtracks on asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission

Maria Van Kerkhove, PhD, WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead and an infectious disease epidemiologist, caused a stir on June 8 when she said that countries are reporting that many of their asymptomatic cases develop into cases of mild disease. For patients with truly asymptomatic disease, countries are “not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare,” she said. But on June 9 – following a day of criticism – Dr. Van Kerkhove sought to clarify her comments on asymptomatic transmission during a live social media Q&A. She noted that while “the majority of transmission that we know about” is through individuals with symptoms, “there are a subset of people who don’t develop symptoms, and to truly understand how many people don’t have symptoms – we don’t actually have that answer yet.” Physicians and public health experts slammed the initial comments, saying that they created confusion. Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, weighed in on the controversial WHO comments, telling Good Morning America on June 10 that Dr. Van Kerkhove’s initial statement that asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 transmission is a rare event is “not correct.” Read more.

E-cigs linked to smoking relapse

The use of electronic nicotine delivery systems is associated with increased risk of cigarette smoking relapse among former smokers, results from a large longitudinal cohort study demonstrated. The findings come from a survey of adult former smokers who participated in the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) Study (2013-2018). Adjusted hazard ratio (AHR) analysis revealed that the use of electronic nicotine delivery systems was associated with significant risk of cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.63) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.79). The use of other tobacco products was similarly associated with a significant risk for cigarette smoking relapse among recent former smokers (AHR 1.97) and among long-term former smokers (AHR 3.82). “For the many clinicians treating former smokers who have successfully quit all nicotine products, the implications are that use of [electronic nicotine delivery systems] should be discouraged, just as use of all other tobacco products is discouraged,” researchers led by Colm D. Everard, PhD, reported in a study published in JAMA Network Open. Read more.

Formula feeding leads to early weaning

Breastfed infants who receive formula in the hospital are more than twofold more likely to wean during the first year, compared with infants who are exclusively breastfed, according to research published online in Pediatrics. The finding is based on an analysis of data from over 8,000 infants in the Minnesota Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). “Our study strengthens the evidence that formula supplementation of breastfed infants negatively affects breastfeeding duration,” said Marcia Burton McCoy, MPH, of the Minnesota Department of Health’s WIC, and Pamela Heggie, MD, of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Read more.
 

For more on COVID-19, visit our Resource Center. All of our latest news is available on MDedge.com.