News from
Family & Preventive Medicine

June 2020

Just 55 Words: 

White Coats for Black Lives

Emory University Hospital Midtown Family Medicine residents and faculty joined the Emory "White Coats for Black Lives" vigil at 1 pm on Friday, June 5th. Dr. Oguchi Nwosu, Dr. Liane Beck and several family medicine residents led by Dr. Neuman were among the hundreds of Midtown physicians and staff who knelt for 8 minutes and 45 seconds to honor George Floyd, protest racist violence, and recommit to working for a more just future. Dr. Nwosu said he was "touched by how the next generation is standing up for what's right. The Emory Midtown CMO estimated that 400-500 people participated at Midtown." The "White Coats for Black Lives" event was spearheaded by Emory School of Medicine students and took place at multiple Emory healthcare locations across the city as well as on the main campus quadrangle. Photos of the Emory Midtown FM team, and the event at Midtown, can be seen below.

Resources for Engaging in Anti-Racism Work and Practicing Solidarity

·         Resources for Engaging in Anti-Racism Work

·         We are Living in a Racist Pandemic

·         Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay – Chances are They’re Not

·         Affirming Black Lives Without Inducing Trauma

Resources for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) to Engage in Self-Care

·         Surviving & Resisting Hate: A Toolkit for People of Color

·         Self-Care Tips for Black People Who Are Struggling with this Very Painful Week

·         Self-Care for People of Color after Psychological Trauma

Updated news and information available at the Department of Medicine's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion website 

A Culture of Wellness: 

wellness is more than just exercise
and eating our vegetables

Emory offers a suite of resources around adult care, financial wellness, child care, and college planning, available for free to employees: https://www.hr.emory.edu/eu/work-life/specialized-research/index.html

Retirement Plan Counseling: meet with a retirement plan vendor by phone or zoom for free: https://hr.emory.edu/eu/benefits/retirement-plan-counseling.html

Discounts! Learn about the discounts available to Emory employees: https://www.hr.emory.edu/eu/rewards/employee-discounts/index.html

Meet our new Vice-Chairs 

of South Alabama Medical Center in Mobile and a fellowship in geriatrics and gerontology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His research interests include memory and cognitive deficits and dementia, delirium, and depression. Dr. Graham has a vision for our department to be as inclusive and equitable as possible. The joint vision of the leadership team is to make Emory Family and Preventive Medicine a destination of choice for diversity, equity, and inclusion and to be a model department where people feel supported at work and feel seen and valued. The ultimate goal is a department operating at its optimal efficiency and creativity.

Medicine at University of Alabama Hospitals in Birmingham followed by fellowships in palliative care and geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Her areas of expertise include developing and implementing training programs in communication skills.  In her new role as Vice Chair of Faculty Development, Dr. O'Neill looks forward to working with faculty across the Department both individually and corporately with goals of highlighting current strengths and achievements and helping facilitate the Department to reach even greater heights. 

Transformative Research

Congratulations on New Funding Awards! 

The Emory I3 Education Awards highlight, promote and disseminate innovations in medical education and training that enhance our mission. Four new awards totaling $52,500 were awarded to teams and TWO of those awards went to our Department! 

Dr. Sara Turbow (preventive medicine) for her project Transforming Interprofessional Education through Student Hotspotting: A Novel Population Health Approach to Address Social Determinants of Health Among High-Need, High-Cost Patients at Grady Health System.

Dr. Ali John Zarrabi and Dr. Paul DeSandre (palliative medicine) for their project Establishing a Museum-Based Education Initiative at Emory School of Medicine.

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Dr. Jodie Guest is one of the named collaborators on the new Emory COVID-19 Response Collaborative that has been funded by a $7.8M gift from the Woodruff Foundation. More on the Collaborative effort here.

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Dr. Megha Shah received official notice that her K23 award was funded. This is a 5-year career development grant funded by the National Institute on Minority Health and Disparities that protects 75% of Dr. Shah's time to develop her research program.  The goal of the K23 proposal is to provide necessary training in cultural adaptation, implementation science, and social network analysis to determine whether a social network-focused lifestyle intervention, based in a primary care setting, is feasible and acceptable for immigrant men from South Asia and West Africa and whether health behaviors will improve among participants’ social networks. The proposed work aims to develop a community-informed program, based on evidence-based lifestyle programs, adapted for the specific needs for immigrant men and to understand the diffusion of health behaviors among participants’ social networks, a potentially untapped resource for lifestyle behavior change.

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The scientific and clinical importance of training spiritual health chaplains/clinicians in the delivery of compassion-focused, evidence-based care has received recent recognition from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the form of a new five year K01 career development award to Dr. Jennifer Mascaro, PhD, faculty appointed as a biological anthropologist in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine. Mascaro is also lead scientist for Emory Spiritual Health in the Woodruff Health Sciences Center at Emory University (George H. Grant, MDiv, PhD, Exec. Dir.). This award complements earlier PEACE grant funding from the Mind & Life Institute to Dr. Mascaro and her team to conduct a randomized trial of the impact of CBCT® (Cognitively-Based Compassion Training) on the well-being of chaplains and their hospitalized patients. The new K01 career award, through the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, is the first such award from the NIH, given to specifically study chaplain-delivered compassion interventions in a hospital setting. In particular, the K01 award will support Dr. Mascaro’s training in integrative oncology research methods and implementation science, which will allow her to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of a chaplain-delivered CBCT® meditation derived program for patients receiving hematopoietic stem cell transplant for cancer. 

Leslie Johnson semifinalist in BioRender Annual Graphical Abstract Contest

You can see Dr. Johnson's entry titled "The need for qualitative research in the time of covid-19" here.

Recent Publications

Ali, M.K., Shah, D.J. & del Rio, C. Preparing Primary Care for COVID-20. J GEN INTERN MED (2020). DOI: 10.1007/s11606-020-05945-5

Guest JL, Sullivan PS, Valentine-Graves M, Valencia R, Adam E, Luisi N, Nakano M, Guarner J, del Rio C, Sailey C, Goedecke Z, Siegler AJ, Sanchez TH. Suitability and Sufficiency of Telehealth Clinician-Observed, Participant-Collected Samples for SARS-CoV-2 Testing: The iCollect Cohort Pilot Study 
JMIR Public Health Surveill 2020;6(2):e19731. DOI: 10.2196/19731.

Rasmussen SA and Jamieson DJ. Caring for Women Who Are Planning a Pregnancy, Pregnant or Postpartum During the COVID-19 Pandemic. JAMA. Published online June 05, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.8883

Decker, H.C., Hubner, G., Nwabuo, A., Johnson, L., Texada, M., Marquez, R., Orellana, J., Henderson, T., Dicker, R., Plevin, R.E., & Juillard, C. (2020). “You don’t want anyone who hasn’t been through anything telling you what to do, because how do they know?”: Qualitative Analysis of Case Managers in a Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program. PLOS ONE. 15(6): e0234608. Doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0234608.

She Z, Gaglioti AH, Baltrus P, Li C, Moore MA, Immergluck LC, Rao A, Ayer T. Primary care comprehensiveness and care coordination in robust specialist networks results in lower emergency department utilization: A network analysis of Medicaid physician networks. J Prim Care Community Health. 2020. doi:10.1177/2150132720924432.

Educational Investments for our future

PM Residency adds 2nd Associate PD

FM Residency Annual Awards

The Family Medicine Residency held their certificate ceremony and celebration via Zoom on June 27th. During the ceremony, the following awards were announced.

Being of Service

Dr. Jodie Guest on WABE

Dr. Jodie Guest has made multiple media appearances recently thanks to her work on the front lines of Emory's  COVID-19 response. Her 23 minute interview on WABE's Closer Look with Rose Scott can be found if you click the red "play story" button in this link.

Pictured below: Dr. Guest being interviewed by Rose Scott.​

Evidence of our Awesomeness!

Dr. Susy Alfonso named Atlanta Top Doc 5th year in a row

Stay tuned - the link to full list of Atlanta Top Docs online will appear in our next newsletter.

Jason Freiji nominated for Staff Excellence award

Mr. Freiji has been nominated for the Excellence in Academic Innovation Award. This award recognizes a staff member or team who have displayed exceptional work and/or produced significant innovations for the Department of Medicine. The innovations will have resulted in meaningful work process improvements and/or work designs. Read more about the awards and nominees here. 

PM Alumni updates:

Dr.Elizabeth Rabold, MD, MPH recently checked in with the Division of Preventive Medicine. Here's what she has been up to: 

• I completed my thesis and MPH in December
• I was a finalist for the Shepard Award at Rollins
• I will be presenting work from my thesis at IAS 2020 in July
• I am finishing EIS this month and joining the Maternal and Child Health Branch at the Division of Global HIV and TB as a medical officer.  I will be supporting Zambia, DRC, Haiti, and Dominican Republic as they strive to reduce/eliminate mother to child transmission of HIV.
• I deployed to Wisconsin under the COVID response and helped to design and implement a household transmission study.  Some of our work products are in the finalization stage, and I am the first author on a manuscript about loss of taste and smell that will be published soon in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Don't miss events and opportunities!

Under-Represented in Medicine Faculty Development Program Deadline July 24

Our new Vice Chair for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Dr. Antonio Graham, would like to invite all Department of Family and Preventive Medicine URiM Faculty to apply to participate in the Under-Represented in Medicine Faculty Development program.  Dr. Graham participated in the inaugural pilot program and found it to be a valuable resource on how to get promoted and build networks across campus.  He notes that “having practical tools such as CV workshops and ‘how-to’ find opportunities to publish was/is very enriching.  If interested, I highly encourage you to apply.”  

This is a 5-month longitudinal career development program that will provide resources, information and tools important for academic success. The course will feature didactic sessions from diverse speakers, experiential components, along with peer mentoring and networking. Participants will also be paired with organizational leaders as coaches during this process.

The deadline is rapidly approaching on July 24. The application form and additional details are available here:  https://inside.med.emory.edu/faculty_affairs_dev/urim.html.  If you wish to discuss further or would like additional information, please do not hesitate to email Dr. Graham at agrah23@emory.edu.  

Applications reopened for Woodruff Health Educators Academy Fellowship in Educational Scholarship

Applications are reopening for the WHEA Fellowship in Educational Scholarship. This 18-month program is for health science educators who want to develop skills in educational research and scholarship and consists of expert-led workshops to develop educational research skills coupled with a mentored scholarly project to be conducted in the participants’ authentic education settings. Educators from all health science schools and from Emory Healthcare are eligible to apply. Learn more or apply by July 15. 

Important Zoom Security Features Starting July 19

Due to a heightened need for online security, Zoom has announced a 90-Day Security plan that includes a new change that will go into place July 19, 2020. This change will increase the security to both old and new meetings. 
 
Starting July 19, Zoom will now require a passcode and/or waiting room to be enabled for ALL meetings. This change does not affect webinars.

Here is a summary of how the changes will affect our users:

·         Emory’s global account settings will have the waiting room enabled by default for all meetings.

·         If you already have a passcode or the waiting room enabled on your existing meetings, nothing will change for these meetings.

·         If an existing meeting does not have a passcode or the waiting room enabled, these meetings will now have the waiting room feature enabled. (This is in lieu of a passcode for that meeting which would have required all old meeting information to be resent to attendees.)

·         If you do not want waiting rooms set as your default, change your meetings to include a password/passcode. View instructions here. 

·         If you choose to use the waiting room feature instead of the password/passcode, note that the Host of the meeting MUST log in to Zoom and allow the attendees into the meeting before they can attend. View instructions here. 

Please contact videoservices@emory.edu with any questions.

Call for Abstracts -
GA ACP Virtual Conference

The Georgia Chapter ACP is pleased to announce that abstract submissions are now being accepted for the virtual academic competition for the Georgia Chapter ACP Meeting October 23-25, 2020. All members to include Faculty and subspecialty Fellow members are invited to submit an abstract for the competition. If a colleague is not yet an ACP member, please encourage him/ her to join online and then submit their abstract entry for consideration.

The abstract competition is open for 2020 for all Georgia Chapter American College of Physicians members. Abstracts will be accepted into one of four categories: Clinical Vignette, Clinical Research, Basic Research, and Quality Improvement/ Patient Safety, or High Value Cost Conscious Care.

Abstract Submission Guidelines

Georgia Chapter Fellows and Faculty Abstract Form

The abstract submission deadline is September 20, 2020 at midnight. NOTE:This abstract timeline varies from the resident/ student abstract timeline of which that deadline is July 19, 2020.

Got news? Please send your announcements and photos to leigh.partington@emory.edu. The DFPM newsletter is published monthly.