How HCPs Are Reacting to COVID19 – An Interview with Paul Bucca

In the wake of COVID-19, health care workers are on the front lines of the crisis--navigating keeping patients safe, while also keeping themselves healthy. As the pandemic progresses, health care workers become exposed to more risks. Darshan talks with Paul B., a clinician who has worked in multiple hospital departments, about how the disease is affecting essential workers. We'll also ask him about what precautions patients are taking to protect themselves.Screen reader support enabled. Narrator: This is the DarshanTalks Podcast. Before this week's interview with Paul B. on healthcare practitioner reactions to COVID-19, Darshan will introduce this episode with the recap for the week of Thursday, April 30th, 2020. Darshan: This has been a slower news week. It's interesting, and we'll sort of explore in greater detail, some of the conversations that are happening out there. One of the ones to keep in mind is a North Carolina testing lab just settled a whistleblower allegation for up to 43 million and those were primarily for claims that it billed for medically unnecessary lab tests. The settlement allegations suggest that the company improperly submitted claims to Medicare, TRICARE, and federal employee health programs for several different lab tests that were not medically necessary, they engaged in improper billing techniques, and they paid a compensation to three phlebotomy vendors that violated the physician self-referral prohibition, known as Stark Law. Under the settlement, the company agreed to pay $17 million. It also was the week in which people are starting to look at their companies themselves and in that vein, the EEOC basically came up with some general rules, the EEOC being the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and they came up with some rules and suggestions and guidelines. So as you may already know, they issued a guidance permitting employers to conduct temperature checks of employees to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. They've gone ahead and actually expanded that and the guidance now says that you have to make sure that the COVID-19 tests are accurate and reliable, you have to stay abreast of the latest public health information from the FDA, you must consider false positives or false negatives and understand that the accurate testing only reveals if the virus is currently present. A negative test does not mean that the employee will not acquire a virus later. However, there are some additional takeaways. Number one, if you are going to be doing these tests, you should have a policy and procedure to administer the test uniformly. If you are going to be performing the tests, they should be administered by a trained person or a trained third-party professional, you need to try to administer the test in the least invasive way possible and ensure that the appropriate disclosures are being made to the employees, including CCPA Disclosures, to the extent necessary. If you [inaudible 00:02:33], and CCPA for those of you who don't know, is the California Privacy Law. If using a third party to administer the medical tests, ensure that the appropriate consent and disclosures are obtained to share the data between the medical provider and the business. And the information that is received should be treated as confidential medical records. This was also the week in which people started looking forward. They came up with 10 new inventions that might help crush future pandemics. One of them is a digital tattoo for monitoring blood so that you could get real time measurements and do analytical assessments of a person's blood. Ideally, graphene might be useful [inaudible 00:03:17]. There are conversations about odorometers for monitoring smells.