202 - Kaiser's Chief Health Officer Dr. Bechara Choucair On COVID-19 Response
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 16 November 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kaiser Permanente, the largest not-for-profit health system in the US, has mobilized in response to COVID-19. Senior vice president and chief health officer Dr. Bechara Choucair talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about coaching for patients who test positive, contact tracing partnerships with local health departments, and a focus on addressing patients' social needs like rent and food so they can isolate and quarantine safely.
KEYWORDS: household transmission; pandemic response; health equity
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health |
| 0:32.7 | officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future |
| 0:47.2 | podcast episodes. Today, I speak to Dr. Bashara Choucare, the senior vice president and chief health officer of Kaiser Permanente. |
| 0:57.0 | We speak about how the Kaiser health system has responded to COVID, including through innovative |
| 1:03.0 | partnerships with public health agencies and a focus on addressing social needs. |
| 1:09.0 | Let's listen. |
| 1:10.0 | Dr. Choucare, thank you so much for joining me to talk about |
| 1:14.2 | Kaiser's work on the pandemic. Give me a sense of the scale of the number of patients that |
| 1:21.3 | Kaiser is responsible for. Well, thank you so much, Josh, for having me join your podcast here today. |
| 1:28.9 | So Kaiser Permanente, as you know, is the largest not-for-profit integrated health system in the country. |
| 1:37.2 | Every day, 12.4 million members trust us with their care and coverage, and we operate in eight states in Washington, D.C. |
| 1:47.0 | And over 200,000 Kaiser Permanente colleagues and over 22,000 physicians take care of those |
| 1:54.5 | 12.4 million members. So the pandemic is not a small matter for you. Absolutely not. |
| 2:02.7 | So tell me about the response within Kaiser and particularly interested what you do when you find out that one of your patients has COVID-19. |
| 2:13.9 | Well, one of the things that we've learned early on, Josh, in engaging with our members who are testing positive is many of those members were catching the virus from the household. And many of those members were passing the virus to their household. So we really realized early on that we have to pay attention to household transmission. |
| 2:37.8 | What can we do to prevent the cycle of household transmission has been a key part of our pandemic suppression strategies, if you want? |
... |
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