Dear Colleague:  

I am pleased to report that we are making progress with our campus hospital partners on addressing workplace well-being concerns identified in our faculty survey earlier this year.

One major update is the planned opening of a faculty lounge in University of Colorado Hospital (UCH). The faculty lounge will have a kitchen area, eating spaces, workstations for charting, and comfortable seating. The scheduled opening is summer 2025.

The hospital also has several initiatives that will improve our electronic health records in ways that support provider well-being:

• In-basket automation has allowed for streamlined message routing for primary care providers and led to approximately 13 fewer messages per day per PCP. 
• The medication refill expansion project has allowed a decrease of medication refill messages to providers, yielding nearly 60% reduction in time to complete medication refills at UCH ambulatory clinics. 
• And there’s more to come! Future Epic improvements will include integrated scheduling and referral intelligence to streamline referrals, as well as a unified patient appointment cancellation strategy that improves patient experience and optimizes provider schedules. 

The hospital is also using provider feedback to modernize consultation requests via DocLine. Emergent requests will be treated as transfer requests to ensure that patients can quickly access appropriate care within UCHealth. 

For non-emergent consult requests, specialists at UCH will be able to triage timing for responding to a request and select the most appropriate method for fulfilling the consultation. They may choose e-consultation to provide asynchronous, physician-to-physician recommendations or teleconsultation to discuss their recommendations with a requesting provider asynchronously. In both cases, the consulting physician may be able to bill for the work performed.

Our partners at Children’s Hospital Colorado (CHCO) and the Department of Pediatrics have focused on several initiatives to promote provider well-being too.

CHCO offers a robust Peer Support Program through the Faculty Well-being Advisory Committee, where more than 200 providers have undergone a two-hour peer support and coaching training program, and are available to their colleagues for support after adverse clinical events.

The Department of Pediatrics has initiated a faculty coaching program, where nine faculty members have become certified coaches and are available for professional coaching engagements. The program has offered over 70 coaching engagements resulting in over 600 hours of professional coaching. All participants said they would recommend this coaching engagement to peers.

The Department of Pediatrics is now in its second year of the Faculty Care Innovation Award Program, where small grants are awarded to faculty for interventions to improve faculty experience, efficiency, and well-being.

Highlights from the program’s first year include:

• The Pediatric Emergency Department code “Hot Debrief” process now includes in-the-moment emotional support and management of return to work after codes.
• Improvements in Epic to support efficiency, including streamlined patient education materials, improved medication reconciliation process, and conversion of MyChart messages to telehealth slots for physician faculty.

Current year’s projects include early integration of Palliative Medicine for preterm babies, capturing clinical effort and improving billing practices in Pediatric Infectious Diseases, streamlining referral review in Pediatric Endocrinology, expansion of eConsults in Pediatric Allergy, and hospital discharge instruction optimization in Pediatric Hospital Medicine.

These are all major investments in taking care of our faculty so we can take better care of our patients. We are pleased to partner with our hospital colleagues to make this remarkable progress. Thanks to all for working so hard on these projects. You are making a difference!

Clinicians Needed to Pilot AI Program
We recently announced a partnership between UCHealth and the School of Medicine to pilot Abridge, a technology that transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real time and integrates into electronic medical records. If you are interested in joining this important pilot program, please submit this form by Monday, December 2. To be eligible, you must be a physician, APP, or licensed mental health professional in a UCHealth or CU Medicine clinic seeing patients at least three half days per week. You also must own an iOS/iPhone device. Residents and fellows are not eligible for this pilot phase. We plan to offer the same program for child health faculty and Children’s Hospital Colorado soon.  

Recent Publications
Eric J. Lavonas, MD, Professor of Emergency Medicine, and George Sam Wang, MD, Associate Professor of Pediatrics, are co-authors of the 2024 American Heart Association and American Red Cross Guidelines for First Aid, a review article published November 14 by Circulation. The guidelines represent the first comprehensive update of first aid treatment recommendations since 2010. The guidelines cover first aid treatment for critical and common medical, traumatic, environmental, and toxicological conditions.

Michael A. Puente, MD, Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology, is corresponding author of an article published November 11 by Pediatrics that surveys the portrayal of characters with strabismus in animated films, finding that the characters are more likely to be portrayed negatively than positively. Medical student Jintong Liu is first author, and five co-authors are from the School of Medicine. An article in the Department of Ophthalmology newsroom provides more detail.

Sukumar Vijayaraghavan, PhD, Professor of Physiology and Biophysics, is corresponding author of a clinical commentary published this month in Biological Psychiatry that describes how scientists are expanding research of neuroglia and the potential connections between these cells and some mental health conditions. Andrew Novick, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, is a co-author. Additional detail is provided in an article in the school’s newsroom.

Lawrence A. Haber, MD, Professor of Clinical Practice of Medicine, is corresponding author of a Viewpoint article, “Threats to Women’s Health in Prisons and Jails,” published November 11 by JAMA Internal Medicine.

Faculty Update
Scott Laker, MD, Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs, Adult Health, was selected as President of the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. The association has an interview with Dr. Laker.

In Memoriam
David Robinson Clarke, MD, Professor of Surgery and Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery from 1976 to 2003 and Surgeon-in-Chief at The Children’s Hospital from 1993 to 2003, died October 26. In Dr. Clarke’s later career, he joined the Colorado Multiple Institutional Review Board in 2006 and served as Co-Chair of its Panel B from 2008 to 2024. Dr. Clarke’s life was marked by compassion, dedication, and an unwavering commitment to his family and his profession. Please see his obituary for additional details about his life and family, a memorial gathering on November 26, and ways to pay tribute.

Faculty Judges Needed
Please sign up to be a judge for the 39th Annual Virtual Student Research Forum Poster Presentations, which will be held on Tuesday, December 10, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Judges are needed for 1-hour shifts. For additional information, visit the Annual Research Forum website. For questions, contact Mary McGinnis at coloradoresearchtrack@cuanschutz.edu .  Faculty judges are critical to the success of this program, so please sign up today!Have a good week,

John H. Sampson, MD, PhD, MBA
Richard D. Krugman Endowed Chair
Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs and
Dean, University of Colorado School of Medicine