APHA and National Academy of Medicine Webinar: Crisis Standards of Care During COVID-19

Brought to you by the American Public Health Association and the National Academy of Medicine, this webinar series is exploring the state of the science surrounding the current outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States and globally, with a focus on the emerging evidence on how to best mitigate its impact. Hear from trusted experts in such fields as public health, infectious disease, risk communication, and crisis standards of care.

Webinar #4: Crisis Standards of Care During COVID-19
Wednesday, April 15, 5-6:30 p.m. ET

The fourth COVID-19 Conversations webinar will provide an overview of crisis standards of care during a pandemic, challenges for adapting such standards to rapidly evolving clinical care guidelines, practical considerations for state health departments and hospital systems, and ethical considerations for decision-making while enacting crisis standards of care.

The expert panel for this webinar includes:

• John L. Hick, MD, is a faculty emergency physician at Hennepin County Medical Center and an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School. He serves as the Associate Medical Director for Hennepin County Medical Services and Medical Director for Emergency Preparedness at HCMC. He is medical advisor to the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Medical Response System. He also serves the Minnesota Department of Health as the Medical Director for the Office of Emergency Preparedness and Medical Director for Hospital Bioterrorism Preparedness. He is the founder and past chair of the Minneapolis/St. Paul Metropolitan Health Compact, a 29-hospital mutual aid and planning group. The regional program was recognized with a $2.5 million competitive HHS preparedness grant in 2007. Hick traveled to Greece as part of a 15-member CDC/HHS team to assist with health care system preparations for the 2004 Summer Olympics. He continues to work with HHS and other agencies on issues of hospital surge capacity planning, adjusted standards of care in disasters, and preparedness for nuclear terrorism.

• Rebecca E. Gee, MD, is the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health, the state’s largest agency with a budget of $14 billion, and Gratis Assistant Professor at the LSU Schools of Public Health and Medicine. Her oversight responsibilities include public health and other direct service programs for citizens in needs such as behavioral health, developmental disabilities, aging and adult services, emergency preparedness ad the Medicaid program. Her Medicaid expansion work resulted in an additiona 500,000+ Louisiana residents being newly insured and the launch of a dashboard to measure access to health care services that has become a national model used in other states. She is an OB/GYN, trained policy expert and previously served as the director of the Birth Outcomes Initiative, where she led the charge to decrease infant mortality and prematurity statewide — an effort that in part led to a 25% reduction in infant mortality, an 85% drop in elective deliveries before 39 weeks and a 10% drop in NICU admissions.

• Jeffrey Kahn, PhD, MD, is the is the Andreas C. Dracopoulos Director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the inaugural Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy. He is also Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He works in a variety of areas of bioethics, exploring the intersection of ethics and health/science policy. Kahn has served on numerous state and federal advisory panels and is currently chair of National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Health Sciences Policy, and has previously chaired its committee on the Use of Chimpanzees in Biomedical and Behavioral Research; the committee on Ethics Principles and Guidelines for Health Standards for Long Duration and Exploration Spaceflights; and a committee on the Ethical, Social, and Policy Considerations of Mitochondrial Replacement Techniques. He also formerly served as a member of the National Institutes of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee. In addition to committee leadership and membership, he is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and an elected Fellow of The Hastings Center. He was also the founding president of the Association of Bioethics Program Directors. He is a co-principal investigator with Berman Institute faculty member Gail Geller, ScD, MHS, on GUIDE: Genomic Uses in Infectious Disease and Epidemics, an NIH-funded project to study the largely unexplored ethical, legal and social implications of genomics as applied to infectious disease.

• Lawrence “Larry” O. Gostin, JD, directs the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and is the founding O’Neil Chair in Global Health Law at Georgetown University. He served as associate dean for research at Georgetown Law from 2004-2008 and is professor of medicine at Georgetown University and professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. He is director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law. Among his appointed posts at WHO, he served on the Director-General’s Advisory Committee on Reforming the World Health Organization, is on the International Health Regulations Roster of Experts and has served on many WHO expert advisory committees including on the Pandemic Influenza Preparedness Framework and on the WHO/Global Fund Blue Ribbon Expert Panel: The Equitable Access Initiative to develop a global health equity framework. He co-chairs the Lancet Commission on Global Health Law. He served on two global commissions to report on the lessons learned from the 2015 West African Ebola epidemic and was senior advisor to the United Nations Secretary General’s post-Ebola Commission. Gostin also served on the drafting team for the G-17 Summit in Tokyo in 2016, focusing on global health security and universal health coverage.