Infectious Disease Care Through the Lens of Patient Context

Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Darilyn Moyer, who’s the Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer of the American College of Physicians. She’ll be discussing how social context shapes infectious disease risk and prevention. Here’s Dr. Moyer now.

Dr. Moyer:
I think context matters. I've been a doctor for 40 years. I've dealt with patient populations that have been quite skeptical of the healthcare environment, not because of old studies that happened, but because of their lived experience with healthcare, and context truly matters. The context of what area you're living in, who you're living with, and who you might impact matters. So, for as much as we saw people rail against it—“I, as an individual, don't want to do x, y, and z”—that individual does not live in a bubble. They impact other people's lives.

What happened early on in COVID in the United States was we saw people living in the communities who were working in nursing homes bringing COVID into those nursing homes because they were working multiple part-time jobs. They could not afford to stay home from work because they had no sick days. They may not have even had health insurance, so they were going to work sick and infecting patients. And so, the same thing happens in communities and in families. You may be living in a multi-generational family. Maybe you are a young and healthy person, but what happens when you're in contact with an immunocompromised person or a person who’s aged in your family whose immune system is not as good as yours?

We need to understand where this person is coming from, what their lived experience with healthcare has been, and the context of who they are, who they're living with, who they're personally with in their environment, what their professional domain is, et cetera. And especially with infectious diseases, which have no boundaries and don’t follow state or country lines—especially now in the globalization of our world. We live in this brave new world where there is potential for incredible transmission of highly infectious pathogens, like we saw with COVID-19, spreading rapidly.

Announcer:
That was Dr. Darilyn Moyer discussing the role of social context in infectious disease risk and prevention. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!