How COVID-19 Rapidly Transformed Clinical Practice at the Harold Schnitzer Diabetes Health Center Now and for the Future

摘要

Similar to other institutions, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic dramatically changed our practice at the Harold Schnitzer Diabetes Health Center (HSDHC) at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). On March 7, 2020, the first positive COVID-19 result returned for a patient at OHSU. The earlier experiences in Washington and California prompted our institution and the entire state of Oregon to employ immediate and comprehensive preventive measures. HSDHC acted promptly to reduce face-to-face encounters for the safety of our patients and staff and to reduce institutional use of personal protective equipment. We switched the vast majority of our visits to digital visits including both virtual visits (video) and scheduled phone visits. Face-to-face diabetes visits were restricted to patients being newly started on insulin therapy. For the first time ever, on March 24, 2020, there were more virtual visits than face-to-face visits at OHSU. At the HSDHC, we completed 98 virtual visits and 99 phone visits in the week ending April 3, 2020. In April 2020, HSDHC was performing a higher rate of digital visits than any other specialty at OHSU and we project 75% of our digital visits will be video soon.