Becker's Hospital Review

56 CMO / CARE DELIVERY The 4 benchmarks needed to end social distancing By Gabrielle Masson U ntil there is a vaccine or effective treat- ment against COVID-19, states should direct efforts toward four major criteria that will help determine local progress, accord- ing to a report cited by e New York Times. e report was written by Scott Gottlieb, MD, former FDA commissioner; Caitlin Rivers, PhD, assistant professor at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security; Mark Mc- Clellan, MD, PhD, director of the Robert J. Mar- golis Center for Health Policy and professor at Durham, N.C.-based Duke University; Lauren Silvis, former FDA chief of staff; and Dr. Crystal Watson, senior scholar and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Criteria that will determine if and when areas can come out of lockdown: 1. Hospitals must be able to safely treat all pa- tients needing hospitalization without resort- ing to crisis standards of care. is is the first standard to meet and the focus of most health officials, according to the authors. Currently, there's no reason to believe any area meets this criteria, and many local outbreaks aren't predict- ed to peak for weeks. 2. A state needs to be able to test at least everyone with symptoms. Nationwide, about 750,000 tests would be needed a week, and that's not including areas with major outbreaks. On a smaller scale, states would need to test every person who may be infected and receive the re- sults in a timely manner. e third requirement cannot be achieved until the second one occurs. 3. e state can monitor confirmed cases and contacts. A robust system of contact-tracing and isolation is the only thing that can prevent outbreaks and sequential lockdowns, the au- thors wrote. Scaling up some areas' public health systems to handle such a task would take signif- icant time and money, NYT notes. Other coun- tries have used cellphone-tracking technology to determine who people have been near, but it's unclear if the U.S. would allow such a tactic. 4. Cases must continue to decrease for 14 days. It can take up to two weeks for COVID-19 symptoms to emerge, so if the number of cas- es drops steadily for that much time, officials can be reasonably sure suppression has been achieved, or that every infected person is infecting fewer than one other. n When checking for fever, remember 98.6 is no longer the norm By Anuja Vaidya A s more people check their body tempera- ture amid the coronavirus pandemic, it's important that they understand that the av- erage human body temperature has dropped in the U.S. According to study published in January in eLife, the average body temperature has decreased since German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich established the standard human body temperature as 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit in 1851. The study found that the body temperature of men born in the 2000s is on average 1.06 degrees Fahrenheit lower than that of men born in the ear- ly 1800s, and among women, average body tem- perature of those born in the 2000s is on average 0.58 degrees Fahrenheit lower than that of wom- en born in the 1890s. "People are stuck on the 98.6 number, but that number has always been wrong," Julie Parson- net, MD, study author and professor of medi- cine and of health research and policy at Stan- ford (Calif.) Medicine told the Seattle Times. "There's never been a real number because people vary." n Temporary physician staffing: Why and how often it occurs By Kelly Gooch A nationwide shortage of physicians and other healthcare professionals has made the use of temporary staffers com- mon at healthcare facilities, a study from Staff Care found. The healthcare staffing firm surveyed more than 200 healthcare executives/managers at U.S. hospitals, medical groups, federal- ly qualified health centers and other healthcare facilities last Au- gust, September and October. Respondents were asked about their use of temporary staff over the last 12 months. Seven survey findings: 1. Thirty percent of surveyed healthcare facility managers report- ed using temporary primary care physicians in the last 12 months. 2. Twenty-one percent of surveyed healthcare managers said they used temporary surgeons in 2019. 3. Most surveyed healthcare facility managers (72 percent) re- ported they are seeking temporary physicians. 4. Eighty-five percent of surveyed healthcare facility managers said they used temporary physicians some time in the last 12 months. 5. Seventy-one percent of surveyed healthcare facility managers said they use temporary physicians while recruiting permanent physicians. 6. Seventy percent of surveyed healthcare facility managers said they use temporary physicians to fill in for providers who have left. 7. Sixty-nine percent of surveyed healthcare facility managers re- ported using at least one temporary staffing provider in a typical month. n

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