In partnership with the Departments of Trauma and Psychiatry, we have ongoing projects administering programming around the Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program (HBVIP) and the Trauma Recovery Center (TRC) as well as conducting ongoing research projects involving HBVIP and the TRC.
We have a dedicated substance use disorder navigator to help individuals with substance use disorder. We also partner with the Whole Person Care Substance Use Disorder program to ensure that our patients receive the right care. We are working in partnership with the Bridge program to assess opiate use disorder. We are also researching medication-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder.
Dedicated didactic and interactive small group teaching sessions are set aside during conference and teaching rounds to strengthen residents’ foundations in understanding the social factors affecting our patients’ health. Some of the topics have included violence, housing, incarceration, food insecurity, immigration, language, and gender identity.
This study aims to determine the effect of a required educational intervention on the attitudes and understanding of third- and fourth-year medical students enrolled in the Emergency Medicine subinternship. In a randomized manner, students receive the educational intervention either at the middle or end of their rotation. The goal is to evaluate the ability of medical students to address social barriers to care faced by patients in the emergency department and how this changes after the required educational intervention.
Senate Bill 1152 (SB1152) was passed on January 1st, 2019. Proposed in California, this bill aims to improve the discharge process for homeless patients and decrease “patient dumping” by hospitals. Under this legislation, hospitals must provide patients who are homeless with food, weather-appropriate clothing, medications, referrals to social services, and transportation at the time of discharge. This project intends to quantify the impact of SB1152 on the hospital system as well as on patients experiencing homelessness.
We will analyze the impact of SB1152 on the medical system using emergency department (ED) length of stay. We will use 30-day ED revisit data to quantify the impact of SB1152 on homeless patients. The major concern with homeless discharge planning is that patients are discharged when they are too sick or insufficiently resourced to care for themselves and they end up back in the hospital.
This project started as a collaboration between Harbor-UCLA’s Department of Emergency Medicine and the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering to develop, study, and deploy an automated way of screening for social determinants in the emergency department. The chatbot (think Alexa or Siri) is web-based and can run on phones, tablets, or computers and asks patients about social needs. In the future, it will connect patients to resources via the 1 Degree platform (www.1deg.org). The project has now expanded to a multi-center study including Harbor-UCLA, Harborview Medical Center (Seattle, WA), and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Multiple studies have demonstrated the utility of emergency department-based social needs screening and navigation, yet best practice guidelines are lacking. This project, through a randomized controlled trial, directly investigates family preferences around screening during their child’s visit to the pediatric emergency department. Results may help inform patients and families of navigation programs not just within Harbor-UCLA but in other emergency departments as well.
The administration of Covid-19 convalescent plasma to high-risk outpatients within 1 week after the onset of symptoms of Covid-19 did not prevent disease progression.
