ACEP Scientific Assembly 2022: Annual Emergency Telehealth Section Meeting

- Thank you everybody. And I know people are probably sort of popping in and maybe popping back off again, but welcome everybody to our first monthly meeting of the year. So I'm Emily Hayden. I'm the current chair. You're stuck with me for two years, unless you guys do a mutiny and vote me out, which you can do and that's totally fine. But really excited to see people here. We have up to 300 people in our section. I don't expect all 300 here whatsoever, but at the same time it's definitely a topic that people are willing to join a section for from ACEP. So, it's a topic near and dear to my heart, and when I see many of the people on here, it's very much been a topic near and dear to your hearts for a while too. So, we're gonna have this monthly meeting cadence right now. We're gonna try to keep this at this time. And today, we're not gonna have a speaker, but on the other meeting times for the section, we are gonna plan to have speakers to talk about things that either are in line with what questions a lot of people bring up, as well as ones that may sort of not have been on the forefront of our minds, but might challenge us with what we think we should be doing or what we should be doing or shouldn't be doing in telehealth and emergency medicine. So sometimes people pull people from outside of our specialty and so on to present. So, hopefully to generate some good discussion at our monthly meetings. So, however, this meeting was going to be a listening session, but before then, I am gonna introduce that we have our new executive committee, and many of you guys are on here right now. And then maybe we'll do just a round of introductions for the rest of us too. So first off, I know Dr. Baker is driving, but he is our chair-elect, so thank you so much for running and congratulations. So in two years, he will take over this coveted position and be chair of this section. And then Sata where I saw you on there. There you are. I can see you now. Sata is our upcoming secretary for the... wait, did I say it wrong?
 
- Newsletter editor.
 
- Newsletter editor. See, I'm trying to just keep moving people up and up and up. So, Sata is our newsletter editor, which is awesome because it sounds like you also have been doing quite a bit of writing outside of some of this too. So this'll be exciting. And then Jolie, people didn't get a chance to meet her at our Scientific Assembly meeting. However, Jolie is a resident at Rochester, I believe, yes? Yep, and so she is just waiting into the world of telehealth and so she has offered to be the website manager for us. So thank you for that. And then Rishi, Rishi, you... and I'm saying this incorrectly?
 
- No, you're right.
 
- Oh, thank God I got one right today. And Rishi is our secretary coming up, so this is awesome. So we have our executive team on here so congratulations. We also have our counselor, which is Adithi, who I don't think she was gonna be able to make it today. I don't see her on her right now. And then also I'll... oh, she is, I see Adithi on here. Yep, there we go.
 
- I'm here. So yes, so Adithi is immediate past chair and also gonna be our counselors next chair. And then Dr. Mulligan is our alternate counselor, but she is teaching on Tuesday afternoon, so she could not be here today. So why don't we do this. I'm gonna have the people who are on, if you're able to, 'cause I know sometimes multitasking happens. So if you're able to, I'm gonna have... I'm gonna call out names and have you guys introduce yourselves, and where you're from and what maybe telehealth you do. And note to the executive committee, I'm also gonna call on you guys because people may not remember. And this is an opportunity for people on the group to remember who's in the group and who they might wanna reach out to, because maybe there's something you're doing that people would like to connect with you offline. So I am going to just start naming names off. I'll just briefly start though. Mass dental emergency medicine. I'm out here in Boston. Telehealth, been in the telehealth world since 2016. Before that I was medical simulation, and just fascinated with how our specialty, not only fascinated, but hoping and pushing for our specialty to be transforming using telehealth as one of the transformation agents. So Sata, I think you're next on my list, so if you wanna go ahead and unmute, introduce yourself and what you do in telehealth too.
 
- Hi, I'm Sata. I go by Sata Emily, I'm a physician at emergency medicine physician at Emory with Mike Roth. And since COVID hit, we've been doing a lot of telehealth over the spectrum of in-hospital, out of hospital and pre-hospital. Also, I have a background in medical informatics. I just got a degree in applied public health informatics. So that's also my interest. And in fiction writing as well. So that's all comes together to that newsletter editor position.
 
- Awesome, thank you. Rishi, I have you next on here.
 
- Yeah, nice to see everyone here. I'm Rishi. I'm emergency medicine faculty at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. I'm helping head up operations for our virtual urgent care and helping lend an operational hand to our hospital at home program as well. Super interested in these models of care, but more of an operations bent, but excited to learn from everyone here.
 
- Awesome. Milosh.
 
- Hi, everyone. My name's Milosh. I'm a fourth-year med student at Georgetown, currently under the guidance of Dr. Wong. And I'm excited to be here and learn more about telehealth as I also run emergency medicine just coming up.
 
- Awesome, and what year are you in medical school?
 
- I'm a fourth year.
 
- All right, so pivotal time, awesome. Mike Ross, do you wanna go next?
 
- Hey there. Mike Ross here. I'm at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm chief of observation medicine for Emory Healthcare with oversight of six observation units. Our active participation has been in virtual staffing of our observation units with telemedicine. We're also doing tele EMS in underserved counties in rural Georgia. We're starting to embark on direct to consumer telemedicine, but we're developing a full spectrum of services from pre-hospital to ED to post-acute care emergency medicine. And we're about to publish our tele CDU or our virtual care and ED observation paper and Annals next week. It should be available next week through Annals.
 
- Congrats, awesome. The more we can get our data and our programs and our outcomes and operations and all these things out there, the more this is just gonna help specially. So awesome, congratulations on that. Let's see,
 
- Thank you. I think the next one here, Dr. Baker Michael. Mike, are you able to speak right now? If not, yep, there we go.
 
- [Baker] Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, this is Michael Baker. I'm the chair-elect for the section. I appreciate everybody's confidence in that. I appreciate being able to learn from Emily over the next year or two how to run the section. So looking forward to that. I am core faculty at the St. Joseph Emergency Hospital, University of Michigan Emergency Medicine Residency program. And I also work for Envision where we're doing some work with not just emergency medicine and ET3, but also other areas like internal medicine, hospitalist services, things like that as well. So it's fantastic perspective for me to get to learn from all these different lines of telehealth and how we might be able to apply some of that to the emergency center sphere.
 
- Awesome, thank you. Ryan McBride, I have you next on my list here.
 
- Hi, I'm Ryan McBride. I'm the staff liaison for the section. I'm based in the ACEP DC office. I'm also the congressional affairs director over here. I'm not a physician, I just play one in DC.
 
- And you keep trying to push through great legislation for telehealth and emergency medicine, so we appreciate you.
 
- We are working on it.
 
- Awesome, Jolie, you're next on my list here.
 
- Great, I'm Jolie Merriman. I'm a senior resident at the University of Rochester Medical Center. I'm actually a career changer. I'm one of those. I did graduate work in architecture and design originally from Boston, but used to work at a firm in San Francisco doing healthcare design. And yeah, I am really interested in issues of geospatial layouts of cities and equity and access, and telemedicine is just this amazing tool to cut through a lot of geospatial barriers. I've done a feasibility study, a qualitative one, looking at a possible telemedicine partnership overseas and questions around regulation and formalization of that kind of programming made me really excited to help with the website and just learn about what other people are doing and all the different pieces that go into furthering telemedicine, so thanks.
 
- Awesome, thank you. Next on my list, I see Lulu.
 
- All right, hello, Lulu Wang. And I have Emily here to thank for my introduction to telehealth, actually back when I was a resident under her tutorship, but I'm faculty in emergency medicine at the MedStar Georgetown Hospital system and the director of telehealth education with a particular focus on undergraduate medical education and faculty curricular development. Operationally focused on post acute remote patient monitoring and our post-discharge chat follow up program. And am also the Associate Program Director for Telehealth Fellowship. Happy to be here.
 
- Awesome, and also she is the SAEM Telehealth Interest Group chair, and has been working on quite a bit on that side in terms of formalizing some curriculum for telehealth too. So it's good to have the collaboration of both sides here. So, all right, next on our list here, Kevin Curtis.
 
- Hi everybody. Sorry I wasn't at ACEP, but nice to see you all. I'm at Dartmouth Health in New Hampshire. Been here for 20 years. We've probably been doing emergency medicine for longer than a couple of you have been alive, but, and so I act as medical director of our center for telehealth and also of our tele emergency service line. And we kinda offer services in northern New England, so ICU and ED in neuro stroke and psychiatry and ICM and virtual urgent care and pharmacy and outpatient virtual visits. So look forward to working with all of you and seeing what 2.0 looks like, or maybe we're on 3.0.
 
- We won't know until we're looking back, right? Awesome . Thanks. Kenneth Holbert, you're next on my list here.
 
- Anyway, I'm an emergency practicing physician in Tennessee, have legislative contacts, and the main reason that I joined this group is to let our legislators know what are currently possible and then what is being previewed in some of the other states as to the capabilities of telehealth and it's expansion.
 
- Awesome, great. I like that work that you're trying to do. I spoke over you. What did you just say at the end there?
 
- Also a counselor for our class session, so.
 
- Awesome, all right. Counselor for Tennessee
 
- Yes.
 
- so you said? Awesome, great. All right, looks like next on my list here I think Nat, Nat Lyon, Lyon?
 
- Hey, it's Matt.
 
- [Emily] Oh man. Oh, whoops.
 
- No, it got covered up or something, I don't know. Hey, I'm Matt Lyon from Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. And I'm the service chief for virtual care for the health system.
 
- Awesome, welcome. Carly.
 
- Hi, I'm Carly Dar. I am a chair of a telemedicine committee. I'm part of Independent Emergency Physicians. We are a private group in Detroit Metro Area. Actually, we staff five hospitals and three health systems. So I'm working across different health systems. We also do some urgent care and observation stuff, so a broad catchment. So looking for kind of some help and thoughts from other people who've done more of this before than I have.
 
- Awesome, Carly. And yeah, that's one of the reasons of doing the introduction now. We're not gonna be able to do this every single monthly meeting, but it's really nice to know sort of who's out there, who's doing things so you can sort of ping them or if you don't know how to get a hold of 'em, feel free to reach out to me. I can always connect people with that. So let's see here. All right, awesome. Frank, you're next on my list here.
 
- How's everybody doing? My name is Frank Layatte. I'm from the University of Pittsburgh. And my interest in telehealth is probably is primarily through tele EMS, and we do both traditional stuff like online medical commands as well as some non-traditional stuff like inflight consultation to commercial airlines. And we do quite a bit of upstream management. So when we're doing interfacility transfers essentially beaming in to help flight crews and paramedic teams.
 
- Awesome. Frank, actually, your connection's not great. And the last thing you said, you just accidentally muted yo...