As you know, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense strain on global health systems. With our membership at the epicenter, many of you have experienced firsthand the shortages that result from a surging patient population – lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), access to ventilators, and increasing demand for more qualified health-care workers needed on the front lines to treat and care for patients. As the staff leader of your organization, I feel an immense responsibility to support our community through this crisis.
Dr. Robert Musacchio
In recent weeks, CHEST petitioned the federal and local governments on several issues, advocating for tax relief for COVID responders, expansion of liability protections, and the development of a provider relief fund. We will continue to collaborate with other societies and push such efforts. However, we also recognize an obligation to make a more tangible, real-time difference in the circumstances of our membership and the lives of the patients you are working to save.
An opportunity arose when we received a call from Dr. Doreen Addrizzo-Harris, Immediate Past President of the CHEST Foundation and Professor of Medicine at NYU Langone Health. In late March, New York City was seeing an uptick in patients with confirmed COVID infection in critical condition that was escalating by the day. The situation was beginning to resemble the trajectory of hotspots in Wuhan, China and Italy, and it was already taking a toll on health-care teams. Dr. Adrizzo-Harris asked whether there was any way to leverage the strength of the CHEST community to provide help. Already, our headquarters team had received unsolicited offers to travel to areas in need from our members. The question was how could we more proactively identify such willing and able clinicians.
We quickly drew upon our existing CHEST Analytics platform to target physicians outside New York City who might be well-positioned to travel. We harnessed our communication channels to get the word out. The response was immediate, with more than 100 people completing applications to join forces with their colleagues in New York. In the first 10 days of recruitment efforts, we added an additional 250 interested volunteers to the system. The positive response from members showed both the willingness of qualified medical staff to assist on the front lines but also highlighted deficiencies in other registration systems overwhelmed with requests in the face of this pandemic. Finding certified pulmonary and critical care physicians who are willing to step in where they are needed is time- and labor-intensive and detracts from health systems’ ability to focus on care. Watching the projections in other regions, we recognized other areas may soon need this same help.
With this in mind, CHEST approached ATS and our long-time partner PA Consulting to help us address the problem on a national scale. We felt we had the resources to leverage our databases and our analytic tools to create a more efficient process that would put physicians in hospitals where they could do the most good more efficiently. We knew that if we could apply our knowledge and deploy our heroic members, we could develop a solution that could save lives and relieve frontline clinicians. By leveraging the existing CHEST Analytics platform, the team created a solution that can be used by provider institutions, government agencies, and willing clinicians to quickly and effectively provide care where it is needed most. The team has engineered the solution to be scalable nationally and expandable to other critical care specialties (eg, anesthesia, emergency, nursing, respiratory therapy).
The Clinician Matching Network formally launched on April 14, 2020. It provides a two-way input that accepts sign up from individual clinicians and gathers needs and requirements from hospital systems, connecting health-care providers with the systems most in need of the specific support they are equipped to provide. We believe this has the potential to enable us to move ahead of the curve of the crisis.
I am very proud of the teams that lead this effort and have gained a greater appreciation of how CHEST, in partnership with other medical societies, can fully utilize data and analytics toward implementing public health solutions. The design and development of the Clinician Matching Network was accomplished in less than a week, leveraging a methodology that will enable the team to continuously improve and iterate through weekly releases, adding functionality quickly as the pandemic evolves.
In the weeks ahead, communications will be distributed to hospitals and hospital systems to help identify their staffing needs, encourage them to input their needs into the Clinician Matching Network, and expand the clinician-to-hospital matching effort. We aim to increase the number of collaborationg associations to grow the pool of clinicians who can be deployed to areas in need.
Please visit www.chestnet.org/clinician-matching to learn more, sign up to serve, tell us about the needs of your institution, or collaborate toward this cause.