Chair Schulman on early patient identification and provider awareness

Okay.

How are the first symptomatic patients identified at the beginning of an outbreak or cluster?

What kinds of testing and care infrastructure are required to ensure that infected individuals are identified and receive care as quickly as possible and to ensure that DOHMH's outbreak response can be activated in a timely manner?

Yeah, let me first start by saying that we have an incredible team of epidemiologists at the health department that are doing the work every single day to identify these cases.

And they work in conjunction with data that's coming in from our many tools.

that can basically help to identify their patterns.

So it's both sort of intuition from the epidemiologists as well as them reviewing the information that's coming in from things like syndromic surveillance, which you know is

a tool that we have that allows us to ingest the information from all the ERs in the city.

In your testimony, you said that once you identify somebody, then you talk to all the providers in the area and, you know, et cetera, and all of that to be aware.

But is it possible to just make providers aware in general that if somebody comes in with flu-like symptoms, you know, they get tested right away for COVID, they get tested right away for the flu, if there's a way for them to be tested for Legionnaires?

Yeah, thank you for that question.

And that's exactly what we did this time.

So before this cluster began on June 1st, we did what's known as a health advisory out to all physicians in New York City.

We jointly did that with New York State to alert providers, facilities, and clinical laboratories that, you know, summer months are here.

Make sure to put this on your differential.

I'm an ER physician, and getting that kind of advisory for me would make this top of mind for me going into my ER shift.

And so that's why we do these health advisories.