Monthly Newsletter | November 2022

Sujatha Sankaran is the Chief Medical Officer for Sonoma Valley Hospital, which is a small hospital in Sonoma Valley that is affiliated with UCSF Health. In this role, she will oversee existing clinical services and help plan new services and programs in partnership with the local Sonoma community and leadership at UCSF Health.

Cindy Lai was awarded the Academy of Medical Educators Service Award for contributing to the community and in support of the education mission overall.

Sangeeta Bhat was selected as the new Divisional Lead for Diversity in Recruitment and Hiring.

Andy Auerbach is PI on a multi-site team project "Achieving Diagnostic Excellence through Prevention and Teamwork (ADEPT)" Study" with Julia Adler-Milstein, Sumant Ranji, Peter Barish, Molly Kantor, James Harrison, Colin Hubbard, and Tiffany Lee which was awarded a 4-year $4M AHRQ grant. This is an effort to develop diagnostic centers of excellence in order to better measure diagnostic accuracy, to engage providers in a diagnostic learning health system, and to embark upon improvement in diagnosis.

Seth Blumberg was awarded a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (NIGMS/NIH R35). This 5-year $2M award funds computational models to improve understanding of the emergence of infectious diseases and support disease elimination efforts. Diseases of interest include antibiotic resistant infections, neglected tropic diseases such as trachoma, and vaccine-preventable diseases such as COVID-19.

Ben Rosner was awarded the designation of Fellow of American Medical Informatics Association (FAMIA) and will be inducted in May 2023.

Ben Rosner presented two talks at the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine conference in Minneapolis on October 17th, entitled "Identifying and Cataloging Diagnostic Feedback Tools for Implementation" and "Development of a National Public Repository for Diagnostic Feedback Resources."

Anoop Muniyappa, Sara Murray, and the Data Science and Innovation team launched the Inpatient and Ambulatory MyChart Activation Equity dashboards to understand disparities in patient MyChart access and support institutional efforts to improve digital health equity. The Inpatient MyChart Activation Equity dashboard can be used to view MyChart activation rates for patients on admission and discharge.

Natalia Loaiza and Yalda Shahram are excited to invite you to register for the 2023 Tea House Series.

Yalda Shahram and Shiecca Madzima are facilitating a workshop on building antiracist learning environments with professional development at the February 2023 National Medical Educators Conference.

DHM Social Activities

Lands End Trail Hike on October 29!

End-of-the Summer Event on November 6!

We held our annual DHM End-of-the-Summer Event at the San Francisco Zoo, but everyone had too much fun to take pictures.

"Everyone in the caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste: an Iranian immigrant feeling the need to mention that a relative had blond hair as a child; a second-generation child of Caribbean immigrants quick to clarify that they are Jamaican and categorically not African-American; a Mexican immigrant boasting that one of his grandfathers back in Mexico 'looked just like an American' — blond hair and blue eyes — at which point he was reminded by an African-American that Americans come in all colors of hair and eyes."

Wilkerson I. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Random House. 2020.p 269 

I confess to "the need to mention" my relatives with green eyes from the Northwest Azarbaijan province of Iran in conversations as a youth, at the height of post-9/11 and "axis of evil" racism. I never felt belonging in the "White" category, nor did I espouse all of it’s privileges — being told to "go back to your country" is a terrible feeling. While many Iranians may choose "White" as their race category, many choose "Other," like me. Without a way to count us, we become invisible. Many in the UCSF community may be of Iranian heritage, but we do not have any accurate counts — especially important now that there is a need for emotional and mental health support for the community due to the women-led anti-patriarchal uprising with hundreds of peaceful protesters beaten, arrested, and killed.

"SWANA is a way to describe the Southwest Asian and North African region in a geographical, non-political, non-religious and non-Eurocentric way."

In the name of inclusion and belonging, consider to add SWANA to surveys about race. We have learned with research in Health Equity that data is concrete and motivating as we work together towards building an antiracist institution.

Sarah Flynn is lead author and Armond Esmaili is coauthor in an article published in the October edition of The Hospitalist synthesizing the challenges and next steps to improving care for adult patients with in-hospital substance use. 

Ben Rosner, Andy Auerbach, Raman Khanna, Tiffany Lee, and colleagues were coauthors on a paper published in Digital Medicine describing how they implemented a digital health curriculum to teach health care trainees ways to identify, assess, and use digital health software tools in their future careers.

Michael Wang, Ben Rosner, and Glenn Rosenbluth had a paper published in Academic Medicine entitled "Where is the Digitally Silent Provider? Development and Validation of a Team-Centered Electronic Health Record Attribution Model of Supervising Hospital Residents."

Margaret Fang was a coauthor on an analysis published in JAMA Cardiology of the Get With The Guidelines-Atrial Fibrillation registry which showed that Black patients with atrial fibrillation were less likely to be discharged on oral anticoagulants.

Anand Habib, Rita Redberg, and colleagues cowrote an editorial in JAMA Internal Medicine that accompanied the revised USPSTF recommendations (published in JAMA) on the value of statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. They highlighted how the benefits for all-comers may be less substantial than conventional wisdom might suggest and the adverse outcomes underappreciated over the long term.

Raman Khanna, Sara Murray, and Julia Adler-Milstein, along with other UCSF faculty, coauthored a perspective piece on how to protect reproductive health information in the EHR.

Yalda Shahram wrote a Letter to the Editor published in the SF Chronicle entitled "Why it's important to stand in protest and solidarity with the women of Iran."

Margaret Fang, Annie Droste, and Brad Monash

- DHM Staff