2022 Annual Chapter Meeting Recap

Anita Chopra and Deepthi Mani, Co-Chairs, WA-ACP 2022 Annual Meeting

We had a hybrid chapter meeting last fall, with both live and remote speakers captivating the audience gathered in person and via zoom at Bell Harbor. We started off the main meeting with a COVID symposium with three brilliant speakers addressing therapeutics, post-covid conditions and pandemic preparedness.The meeting was packed with sessions focused on core clinical medicine and  workshops covering key areas including physician wellness, advocacy, volunteering  and  medical education. We were honored to have Dr John Vassall himself deliver in person, the titular annual John Vassall lecture on equity and justice, addressing racial disparities in health care. Another thought provoking session was the Society and Medicine plenary by Dr Priya Fielding Singh on food and nutritional inequality in America. As always, Dr Moe Hagman kept us entertained and on the edge with her power packed jeopardy contest. We had a lively debate session on diverticulitis and antibiotics with two compelling speakers–the audience had a tough time choosing sides, and the debate ended in a tie.

We are grateful for all the speakers and the audience who took the time  to come together as a closely knit  medical community, celebrating internal medicine despite the travails of the pandemic. We look forward to seeing you all again in November 2023.

2022 Abstract Competition

• Medical Student Poster
  • Taylor Kennedy, University of Washington (Non-toxigenic Corynebacterium Diphtheria Native Mitral Valve Endocarditis with Multifocal Septic Emboli)
• ACP Resident Poster
  • Joscelyn Hodge, Madigan Medical Center (Hint Hint Cough Cough: An Unusual Presentation of a Liver Abscess)
• SHM Resident Poster
  • Matthew Kon, Skagit Regional Health (A case of Ceftriaxone induced autoimmune hemolytic anemia highlights importance of inpatient drug monitoring)
• ACP Resident Oral Presentation
  • Ryan Liberg, Madigan Medical Center (A Heartbreaking Case of Constrictive Pericarditis)
• SHM Resident Oral Presentation
  • Alexandria Jaksha, Madigan Army Medical Center (A Case of “Slushy” Atrial Fibrillation)

Thank you to all our participating medical students and residents and the mentors who support them and to our judges and ACP staff for helping make the competition a success! We are looking forward to seeing you at our Spring Scientific Day in May.

Doctor’s Dilemma Winner

2022 Washington Chapter Awards

We have so many amazing Chapter members – in this unprecedented and historically challenging year we celebrate the following individuals:

2023 Annual Meeting Co-Chairs

We are excited to announce our next two annual meeting Co-Chairs who are already off and running planning this year’s event! Both individuals stood up a dynamite precourse for 2022 and are looking forward to carrying forward the legacy of staging one of the best ACP annual scientific meetings in the country.

• Nkeiruka Duze, MD FACP is a primary care internal medicine physician at Virginia Mason and within the Chapter is on our Executive Council and on our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion subcommittee. She co-chaired the Outpatient Pre-Course in 2022.
• Raman Palabindala, MD MBA FACP is a hospitalist and Regional Medical Director at Optum. He co-chaired the Inpatient Pre-Course in 2022

They will be supported this year by another amazing Planning Committee and the following Pre-Course Co-Chairs:

Outpatient Pre-Course

• Nina Tan, MD
• Anna Troncales, MD

Inpatient Pre-Course

• Ronald Huang, MD
• Sandra Law, MD

Wellbeing Corner

By Carrie Horwitch, MD MACP

Narrative medicine or expressive writing is a way to bring in the power of storytelling.

Story slam has been incorporated into ACP national and also WA ACP meetings for several years.

These practices encompass creating awareness, meaning and understanding of the patient story as well as our own as clinicians.  It can help to acknowledge patients uniqueness, improve empathy and improve communication through active listening.

Writing can also bring potential health/physical benefits ( Smyth –JAMA Vol 281, no 14, Simon Am J Med 2013, April).

I have been involved with a narrative writing group for several months and have found the experience to be quite rewarding – not only to help develop writing skills, but also to share stories from being a doctor that have had meaning for me.

We want to start a narrative medicine/expressive writing opportunity for our WA ACP chapter. We hope this will be a monthly meeting.

We invite you to join us on Thursday March 30 at 7pm- 8pm  for our first session.  No writing experience needed.

Please email Liz Truong liz@aminc.org if interested or Carrie Horwitch carrieho@comcast.net

Health and Public Policy Committee Update

By Stephanie Fosback, MD FACP & Chris Wong, MD, HPPC Co-Chairs

The Washington State ACP Health and Public Policy Committee (HPPC) continues to meet the second Monday of every month over Zoom.  The commitment of the physicians in this group and their passion for healthcare reform is contagious.  If you have interest in healthcare reform and all things advocacy, please join us!

Working with ACP to shape policy:

• Industry-Free Meetings: Our ACP resolution on phasing out industry sponsorship at the ACP Annual Meeting has been approved by our chapter and is going to the Board of Governors to be considered for adoption. Washington State ACP is proud that we made our own state conference “pharma free” several years ago and hope that this precedent can inspire ACP’s national meeting to do the same.  Our committee hopes to show that as physicians we are free free of outside influence on our learning and are committed to help reduce the cost of drugs to patients who bear the burden of these “advertisements”.
• Paid Sick Leave: Our Paid Sick Leave resolution was adopted by the Board of Governors last year and will be worked on by ACP committees.  There is currently no federal guarantee of paid sick leave in the United States, leaving many workers having to choose between illness and work, and making it more likely people will work while sick or contagious.
• MSM Blood Donation: Our resolutions seeks to strengthen ACP’s policy by actively opposing the FDA’s ban on blood donations from people who identify as MSM.

Washington State legislative policy:

• Coordination between facility providers and PCPs:   The Washington State Medical Association (WSMA) resolution “B3”–The goal of this resolution is to protect individuals who are in care facilities from experiencing medication errors when they have multiple prescribing providers.- We brought this resolution to the WSMA house of delegates last fall and it was referred for further discussion and refinement, with the intent to balance the need for both care coordination and efficiency of care.
• WSMA Legislative Summit: WSMA’s annual Legislative Summit  is Feb 3, 2023, back in person in Olympia.  We have several members attending to help move healthcare in the right direction in Washington state.  The WSMA priorities include Medicaid reimbursement rate increases, abortion access and reproductive health, standardizing the prior authorization process, and preventing inappropriate scope-of practice increases.

Other goals:

Our committee is brainstorming how to help with homelessness and its criminalization, race/ethnicity issues in medical journals, non-compete clauses, social media harms, and reproductive access among other issues.

We are grateful to every Internal Medicine Physician and their work.  Thank you for all that you do every day.  We hope that we can work together to makes the lives of our patients and their physicians healthier!

Joey Parker’s Teaching Corner

A photojournalism professor in Florida once performed an experiment for a semester with his class. Half the class would be graded on a single picture turned in at the end of the year. It had to meet all kinds of metrics to be graded. The other half were graded on the number of pictures they turned in – they had to turn in 100 at the end of the semester. Interestingly enough, the half that were graded on quantity blew the other half out of the water. As it turns out, the students who only had to turn one photo in didn’t get much done. They were too busy trying to create the perfect photo. The other group went out and experimented with different lenses, color schemes, and back drops. They made mistakes and then improved upon those errors. Voltaire told us, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” We don’t need to be perfect teachers to be effective. We don’t need to have the perfect chalk talk, the perfect lecture, the perfect answer to learner’s questions – what we need is to start, to experiment, to teach from your “sweet spot” and see what works and what doesn’t. As we kick off 2023, don’t let the absence of a perfect teaching lecture get in the way of being present with your learners and teaching what you do know.

Membership Updates

From Gary Forbes & Mary Anderson, Membership Committee Co-Chairs

The committee has a broad mandate to support ACP members throughout their careers. Its principal tasks are recruiting and retaining members and supporting advancement to fellowship, as well as increasing members’ satisfaction with the offerings of the chapter. The state chapter is over 2600 members strong, with stable rolls despite the many challenges of the past 3 years.

We are looking for members in all regions of Washington State interested in helping the committee brainstorm ways the chapter might better support YOUR practice life, such as local or statewide CME offerings, or regional gatherings. Even if you are, like many of us, hesitant to add to an already busy life, your ideas are most welcome! Please consider contacting the committee at gforbes@jeffersonhealthcare.org with your thoughts.

We’ll communicate events as they are scheduled, and as always, thank you for your continued membership in the College.

Congratulations to the Parker Family!

Congratulations to ACP Members Joey Parker and Ana Parker on the birth of their second child! We welcome new baby brother seen pictured here with dad and proud big brother!

WA ACP Hospitalist Council Presents: Updates in Hospital Medicine

Monday, March 27th from 4:00PM – 5:00PM 

The WA ACP Hospitalist Council would like to invite you to an “Updates in Hospital Medicine” webinar on Monday, March 27th from 4pm-5pm.  Dr.Yilin Zhang  will be presenting an evidence-based review of notable or practice-changing articles in the field of Hospital Medicine published within the last year.

Dr Yilin Zhang is a board-certified internal medicine physician with a special interest in medical education and care for patients with complex chronic diseases such as end-stage liver disease and solid organ transplant. She received her Bachelors of Science in biology from Duke University and a medical doctoral degree from University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She completed her internship and residency training in internal medicine at University of Washington. She worked as an academic hospitalist in general internal medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center (UWMC) from 2016 – 2020. While on faculty at UWMC, she was involved in clinical education for the internal medicine residency program and the School of Medicine. This included the development of an online medical education website, teachIM.org. She is currently the clinical coordinator of inpatient medicine for the family medicine residency at Valley Medical Center.

Updates From National:

Group Rates for National IM2023!

If you’re interested in going as a group and saving some money, ACP offers a discounted rate for groups of ten or more; each attendee saves $125 on registration. Note that Resident/Fellow Members, Physicians in-training, and Medical Students cannot be included in the registrant list for group discounts.

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