Infectious Disease Prevention and Public Response

Assess organization-level preparedness, policy, and responses to COVID-19-related impacts on service provision by the Opioid Treatment Programs in Arizona. We have obtained emergency preparedness plans from 5 substance use treatment organizations in AZ. We have developed a detailed organizational policy analysis instrument for use in content analysis of obtained plans.  

Surveillance for disease, investment in disease and injury prevention, and disaster planning should be basic elements of health professions education. Incorporating innovations such as telemedicine, used under duress during the pandemic, could alter educational and clinical approaches to create something better for students, residents, and patients.

The world's health care providers have realized that being agile in their thinking and growth in times of rapid change is paramount and that continuing education can be a key facet of the future of health care. As the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, educators at academic health centers are faced with a crucial question: How can continuing professional development (CPD) within teams and health systems be improved so that health care providers will be ready for the next disruption? How can new information about the next disruption be collected and disseminated so that interprofessional teams will be able to effectively and efficiently manage a new disease, new information, or new procedures and keep themselves safe? Unlike undergraduate and graduate/postgraduate education, CPD does not always have an identified educational home and has had uneven and limited innovation during the pandemic

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) likely emerged from a zoonotic spill-over event and has led to a global pandemic. The public health response has been predominantly informed by surveillance of symptomatic individuals and contact tracing, with quarantine, and other preventive measures have then been applied to mitigate further spread. Non-traditional methods of surveillance such as genomic epidemiology and wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) have also been leveraged during this pandemic.We demonstrate that genetic correlation analysis combined with SNVs analysis using wastewater sampling can provide a comprehensive snapshot of the SARS-CoV-2 genetic population structure circulating within a community, which might not be observed if relying solely on clinical cases.

Researchers are involved in the genesis of an NIH Program grant to expand this pilot work, using this experience as a framework for going forward. We have already collected 270 completed Quality of Life measures and a limited EHR data set from a Family Medicine clinic in Colorado. In addition, we are working with an ACO in New York state, using the same methodology, to collect panel wide data using the same measurements. We anticipate a Spring 2022 submission.