| american_medical_association_telehealth_immersion_program | American Medical Association Telehealth Immersion Program | Latest_News | Shared_Content/News/Latest_News/2021/american_medical_association_telehealth_immersion_program | <div class="col-md-12">
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</div>
<h5>May 3, 2021</h5>
<h2>American Medical Association Telehealth Immersion Program</h2>
<p><em>From the American Medical Association</em></p>
<p>The Telehealth Immersion Program, part of the STEPS Forward Innovation Academy, is the American Medical Association's newest offering to guide physicians, practices, and health systems in optimizing and sustaining telehealth at their organizations. The WSMA is excited to participate as a collaborator of the program and would like to share this opportunity with those that are interested.</p>
<p>Using the <a href="https://physiciansfoundation.org/the-telehealth-initiative/">Telehealth Initiative</a> as a framework, the Telehealth Immersion Program will provide foundational information surrounding the telehealth landscape and offer deep dives into aspects of telehealth including, but not limited to, clinical use cases, integration with other health care technologies, the impact of telehealth related to elements of the quadruple aim, how to successfully scale and sustain telehealth in practice, and virtual care expansion opportunities. Through a series of curated webinars, interactive peer-to-peer learning sessions, virtual discussions, bootcamps, and on-demand resources, the Telehealth Immersion Program offers a comprehensive curriculum and enhanced experience navigating the world of telehealth alongside peers nationwide. This program is mission driven and available to physicians, practices, and health systems at no-cost. Interested in learning more? Register now for the upcoming program introductory session.</p>
<p><strong>Introduction to the AMA Telehealth Immersion Program</strong></p>
<p><strong>Date: </strong>May 11, 2021, 9-9:45 a.m. PDT</p>
<p><strong>Description:</strong> The AMA Telehealth Immersion Program is designed to support physicians, practices, and health systems in optimizing and sustaining successful telehealth programs. Join this webinar session to learn more about the program, what you can expect, and how to get involved/participate. <br />
<a href="https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_6PF7_Xq-SD6tQDXAnxevXw">Register now.<br />
</a></p>
<p>Visit the Telehealth Immersion Program <a href="http://www.ama-assn.org/telehealth-immersion">website</a> for more information and to <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital/telehealth-immersion-program-2021-events">sign up</a> for available sessions. Registration is now open for the following topics: <em>measuring the value of virtual care</em>, <em>clinical case study: telehealth for mental and behavioral health</em>, <em>healthcare technology &amp; the human connection</em>, and <em>implementing innovative solutions with an equity lens</em>. Additional sessions will continually be added. Please visit our website regularly for updates.</p>
<p>Contact the AMA at <a href="mailto:digital.health@ama-assn.org">digital.health@ama-assn.org</a> with any questions.</p>
</div> | 5/3/2021 12:00:00 AM | 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM |
| weekly_rounds_april_30_2021_making_progress_through_advocacy | Weekly Rounds: April 30, 2021 - Making Progress Through Advocacy | Latest_News | Shared_Content/News/Weekly_Rounds/2021/weekly_rounds_april_30_2021_making_progress_through_advocacy | <div class="col-md-12">
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<h5>April 30, 2021</h5>
<h2>Making Progress Through Advocacy</h2>
<p>Jennifer Hanscom, Executive Director/CEO</p>
<p>
Time has a way of marching on, as evidenced by the changing seasons of the Pacific Northwest and the refreshing signs of spring all around us. Even a pandemic can't change nature's progress, though it has clearly changed our behavior. Now more than a year on, most of us have learned to adapt and establish new behaviors like wearing masks, limiting social interactions, and keeping our distance.
</p>
<p>
But we have seen patient behaviors change along the way as well, with some delaying care, often to the detriment of their health. In the July/August issue of <em>WSMA Reports</em> we will explore how COVID-19 has impacted those behaviors, particularly the associated effects of postponing visits or annual checkups. Just recently, Crosscut published <a href="https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/04/poll-washingtonians-arent-quite-ready-post-pandemic-normal">Elway poll results</a> on Washingtonians' views on everyday behaviors during the pandemic. It's interesting reading.
</p>
<p>
In other news you'll want to know, here are three items of note:
</p>
<h3>As session ends, big wins for WSMA priorities</h3>
<p>
The 2021 Washington state legislative session ended last Sunday. It was an unprecedented session in that the Legislature met completely virtually—and did so successfully. I am proud to report that the WSMA achieved a 100% success rate in passing our priority policies and defending against those we opposed. On the budget side, generational investments were made in health care, including $140 million for Medicaid rate increases and nearly $150 million for foundational public health services in the next two years alone.
</p>
<p>
Kudos to our Olympia team for an incredible job, and thanks to our members who took time to testify or respond to our calls to action. Further, in addition to WSMA's <a href="[@]WSMA/About_Us/Leadership/Executive_Committee/WSMA/About/Leadership/Executive_Committee/Executive_Committee.aspx?hkey=1c7411ed-4943-4ccf-9929-d3669b24cef1&amp;_zs=B3aFd1&amp;_zl=jNvb7">executive committee</a> and <a href="[@]WSMA/About_Us/Leadership/Board_of_Trustees/WSMA/About/Leadership/Board_of_Trustees/Board_of_Trustees.aspx?hkey=0abc484b-c165-4fb1-90b5-1f72370b18d2&amp;_zs=B3aFd1&amp;_zl=kNvb7">board of trustees</a> providing valuable guidance and direction, our new legislative steering committee met with our Olympia team weekly to help us understand the practical impact of particular bills on the practice and business of medicine. We're grateful to the members of that committee for the time they gave to WSMA's legislative process this year:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Rodney Anderson, MD, Family Care Network</li>
<li>Barbara Detering, MD, Washington Permanente Medical Group</li>
<li>Nariman Heshmati, MD, The Everett Clinic</li>
<li>Garrett Jeffery, DO, PeaceHealth</li>
<li>Linda Kampp, MD, Virginia Mason Franciscan Health</li>
<li>Ryan Nachreiner, MD, Providence</li>
<li>Chris Quarles, MD, CHI Franciscan</li>
<li>Keren Rosenblum, MD, Vancouver Clinic</li>
<li>Katina Rue, DO, Community Health of Central Washington</li>
<li>John Scott, MD, UW Medicine</li>
<li>Doug Wilson, MD, Confluence Health</li>
</ul>
<p>
To get the inside scoop on this year's session and WSMA's priorities, don't miss our <a href="https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArcu-tqDgsHNF_ASfe4cCORSiKzadx5YI1">wrap-up webinar</a> hosted by the Olympia team on Friday, May 7 at noon, <a href="[@]Shared_Content/News/Latest_News/2021/wsma_sees_100_percent_success_rate_among_2021_legislative_priorities?_zs=B3aFd1&amp;_zl=mNvb7">read more here</a>, or keep an eye on your mailbox for our year-end Legislative Report.
</p>
<h3>Final budget includes audit of Washington Medical Commission</h3>
<p>
For the past year and a half, we have been receiving a steady stream of complaints from WSMA members who were not able to work due to delays in the licensure process at the Washington Medical Commission. We want you to know that we hear you and have actively been working on this issue with the leadership at the commission. And while the WSMA continues to work with commission staff in understanding the root causes of the delays—especially the fingerprinting process at the Washington State Patrol—we were encouraged to see that the Legislature included a budget provision to take a deep dive into the process by including a performance audit of the commission. Specifically, the state auditor's office is directed to: "… conduct a performance audit, which must address the length of time required to license individuals and comparatively analyze disciplinary processes with those of other states. The audit should address the obstacles contributing to inefficiencies and make recommendations for improvement." We will keep you apprised of developments as this progresses.
</p>
<h3>Big barrier reduced when prescribing buprenorphine</h3>
<p>
This week new practice guidelines were released that omit the eight-hour training requirement previously necessary to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid use disorder for physicians and providers who treat 30 or fewer patients for the condition. The training is still required for physicians, physician assistants, and other providers treating more than 30 patients at one time. To read more, <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2021/04/27/hhs-releases-new-buprenorphine-practice-guidelines-expanding-access-to-treatment-for-opioid-use-disorder.html">click here</a>. The new guidelines took effect on April 28. WSMA's advocacy on this was directed by policy that passed at the 2019 WSMA House of Delegates.
</p>
<p>
As you can see, your WSMA is always on the job supporting you and your interests. When you speak up, we not only listen, we take action. Your membership makes all the difference. Thank you!
</p>
</div> | 4/30/2021 12:00:00 AM | 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM |
| meet_dr_umair_a_shah | Meet Dr. Umair A. Shah | Latest_News | Shared_Content/News/Latest_News/2021/meet_dr_umair_a_shah | <div class="col-md-12">
<div class="col-md-5 pull-right" style="text-align: center;"><img src="/images/Newsletters/Reports/2021/may-june-reports-article-graphic-645x425.jpg" class="pull-right" alt="May/June 2021 cover of WSMA Reports" /></div>
<h5>April 29, 2021</h5>
<h2>Meet Dr. Umair A. Shah</h2>
<h5>
<em>Members only; sign-in required.</em>
</h5>
<p>
By Rita Colorito
</p>
<p>
The power of medicine to impact society has been the defining thread in the life and career of Umair A. Shah, MD, MPH, Washington state's new secretary of health.
</p>
<p>
That seed was planted in Dr. Shah's life before he was even born. His parents emigrated from Pakistan to Cincinnati in 1960. The son of immigrants, Dr. Shah grew up watching his father cope with serious health challenges.
</p>
<p>
"One time, I remember he was in an incredible amount of pain and had to be taken into emergency surgery. I saw him going behind some doors ... and then a few hours later, the surgery was over, and he wasn't in pain. As a young boy, I attributed that to the doctors and nursesand health care professionals who took care of him," he says.
</p>
<p>
Despite those early experiences, Dr. Shah almost didn't go into medicine. He kept thinking about pursuing law. He nearly set on that path as an undergraduate at Vanderbilt. And then his mother had a devastating stroke.
</p>
<p>
That's when he made the mental shift to a career in medicine. "I felt so strongly that I wanted to help people through difficult times," he says. "I also started to recognize the absolute critical importance of not just medicine, but also public health."
</p>
<p>
In medical school, the history of smallpox eradication caught his interest and he began his foray into global public health. He traveled for a two- month internship at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Global health's symbiotic relationship with domestic health is something Dr. Shah hopes to highlight in Washington state.
</p>
<p>
Getting the public through health crises is something Dr. Shah has been doing throughout his 22-year career. Before taking the public health helm in Washington state in December 2020, Dr. Shah served as executive director for Harris County Public Health in Texas for seven years, managing a $100 million budget and 700 public health professionals, which grew to more than 1,500 staff during COVID-19. He not only led the community through numerous public health emergencies, he and his family (his wife and three children) have survived them, too.
</p>
<p>
As Houston residents, they've been through dozens of natural and man-made emergencies, including hurricanes, flooding, chemical incidents, novel H1N1, Ebola, Zika, and now COVID -19. Dr. Shah spent the bulk of 2020 fighting on the front lines of the pandemic, both as a physician and leading the public health response.
</p>
<p>
In late February, his family—including his wife (an accomplished dentist) and kids, all of whom stayed in Houston to see the school year through—saw so many people impacted during Texas' devastating winter storm. Even that couldn't disrupt Dr. Shah's whirlwind schedule as Washington's top doctor. Since late December, he's crisscrossed Washington state virtually and in person to meet with a wide net of public health and community stakeholders.
</p>
<p>
"I believe strongly that I am the secretary of health for the entire state of Washington," he says. "That's why it is so important for me to go to different parts of the state, whether it's Spokane, or Tri-Cities, Yakima, Mason [County], the Jamestown Tribe, Port Angeles, or the Puget Sound area. At the end of the day, it is important for me to understand and recognize what is happening in those communities."
</p>
<p>
Dr. Shah's lived experience is something he includes when given the opportunity to testify before local, state, and national legislators. In February, Dr. Shah testified in a virtual hearing of the U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on public health response capabilities, and the following month, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. His overarching message: Public health should be invested in and a fully funded, ongoing priority, not a line item.
</p>
<p>
Public health at the state level can't work as well as it should without committed and sizable federal funding and initiatives, says Dr. Shah. "Chronic underinvestment in public health, not just in Washington, but across the country, is a real issue," he says. "We're seeing it play out in the middle of COVID-19."
</p>
<p>
A big sports fan, Dr. Shah likes to use sports analogies when discussing public health needs. "Public health is the offensive line of the football team, yet everybody focuses on the quarterback, which is health care," he says.
</p>
<p>
His emergency department experience also deeply informed his view of theimportance of prevention. "I realized you could continue to just treat the trauma, or you could go out into the neighborhood and community and try to prevent it in the first place," he says. His other takeaway: Health happens outside of the four walls of a health care setting.
</p>
<p>
"I could tell Mrs. Johnson to exercise. And if Mrs. Johnson goes back into a neighborhood where there aren't parks, or it's not safe for her to walk, or if she has to take two buses to get her around town so time is short, how likely is it she is going to be able to exercise and come back losing weight the next visit?" he says.
</p>
<p>
"It's these social factors of equity—all the housing, transportation, education, and everything else ... that really drive health. And yet we spend so much of our precious dollars in this country on health care delivery, and not on prevention and public health," he says.
</p>
<p>
Equity, in fact, is the first of three core values, followed by innovation and engagement, that Dr. Shah says he will champion as Washington's public health leader. During WSMA's virtual Legislative Summit in February, he presented his big-picture priorities, which also include partnership, capacity building, and global-domestic health.
</p>
<p>
In a coronavirus-free world, Dr. Shah says he would have started his first 100 days focused on listening sessions to get at these core values—he pushed that down the road so he could focus on COVID-19. For now, pandemic response and vaccine rollout remain his top priorities. "The immediate goals are to protect Washingtonians and get us out of this horrific pandemic," he says.
</p>
<p>
Dr. Shah says he accepted Gov. Jay Inslee's appointment for several reasons. "Washington has always championed equity, championed taking care of its fellow Washingtonians," he says. The numerous opportunities for public- private partnerships in both domestic and global health also drew Dr. Shah to swap the sunny confines of Texas for the warmth of Washington's people, if not exactly its cold, rainy days—something he's still getting used to.
</p>
<p>
And then there's the innovation piece— the potential to tap some of the brightestminds at the intersection of technology and health located in Washington, particularly to create state-of-the-art public health data and response systems. "There's a real important opportunity for public-private partnership here," he says.
</p>
<p>
As Washington state's first secretary of health who is also a medical doctor, Dr. Shah wants WSMA members to know they've got a colleague in the public health sector.
</p>
<p>
"I'm somebody who has talked to patients, who has understood the challenges on the ground, in a health care setting, who knows what it's like to be in the middle of a code situation," he says. "Oftentimes public health and health care are in opposition to each other, but they're so intertwined. If we can really bring ourselves together, not because of a crisis, but because it really makes common sense, we have the opportunity to achieve the goal for everyone, which is optimizing their health."
</p>
<p>
He also knows firsthand the overwhelming exhaustion public health and health care professionals have felt throughout the pandemic. "My team had to force me to take a day away, around maybe September, I think, after about eight months of responding to the crisis," he says.
</p>
<p>
In the long term, Dr. Shah aims to transform public health "... to really think about how we can work together, not just in a traditional way, but in an innovative way with equity leading our efforts and engaging all partners and doing everything we can to champion health."
</p>
<p>
As Gov. Inslee rolls out his public health restructuring plan, Dr. Shah views his role and that of the Department of Health as supportive. "We want to provide information. We want to do what we can to explain where we think there are vulnerabilities in the system. We want to be good stewards of public funds. And we want to be subject matter experts providing what the data show," he says. "At the end of the day, our role is to champion the fact that public health must be prioritized."
</p>
<p>
The politicization and vilification of public health is another reason Dr. Shah believes in the power of positive engagement and communication. "We all know that COVID-19 has been politicized. And we've seen in this last year how horrific that can be. More than 500,000 Americans have died, and we have 5,000 Washingtonians who have died," he says.
</p>
<p>
One of his first retweets as the state's top doctor was on COVID-19 vaccine equity. "COVID-19 didn't start public health inequities, but it certainly has unearthed [them] and made them markedly worse," he says.
</p>
<p>
Dr. Shah is adept at social media and uses it often to overcome what he calls public health's "invisibility crisis." From his parents, he learned one shouldn't just call out a problem but work toward a solution. And his solution to this problem requires visibility, value, and validation.
</p>
<p>
"We must raise the visibility of public health. When there is visibility, people seevalue. When people value something, they tend to want to validate it with pro-health policies and/or pro-health resources," he says. "The problem is I never thought public health would see its visibility raised with the fourth 'v', which was virus. COVID-19 has raised the visibility of public health not in a way that's systematic or methodical ... So I really hope COVID-19 is an inflection point for allofusasanationandasaglobeaswe think about transforming health."
</p>
<p>
He offers this assessment of the past year: "2020 was like the first half of the football game and we didn't do so well. We were behind. We came back at halftime, which was right around the holidays, and with the new administration coming in, we have come out of halftime with new strategies and reenergized. Now we're in the second half. And we're hoping we don't see a further surge and continue to move in the right direction."
</p>
<p>
While we don't know yet how the pandemic will end, there is the one certainty in public health. "There will be another emergency lurking around the corner, and we have to be ready for it," Dr. Shah says.
</p>
<p>
For his part, Dr. Shah is committed to investing in the public health offensive line, so the next time, public health isn't stuck scrambling for the next crisis.
</p>
<p>
<em>Rita Colorito is a freelance journalist who specializes in writing about health care. She is a regular contributor to WSMA Reports.</em>
</p>
<p><em>This article was featured in the May/June 2021 issue of WSMA Reports, WSMA's print newsletter.</em></p>
</div> | 4/29/2021 12:00:00 AM | 1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM |