Many Pomona College alumni in health-related fields are responding to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Satasuk “Joy” Bhosai ’05 shares her story:
“I serve both clinical and non-clinical roles at Duke. Clinically, I’m a hospital medicine physician and instructor for Duke University Health System in North Carolina. Outside of clinical duties, I serve as chief of digital health and strategy for the Duke Clinical Research Institute, which is a large research organization involved in conducting several clinical trials. As well, I’m associate director for the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, which is a great nonprofit that was started by McKinsey & Company and the World Economic Forum, to help curate and scale innovations worldwide.
“As a hospitalist, I'm trying to leverage our network to get health workers around the nation PPE [personal protective equipment]. I’ve worked with a company called Prometheus, which I think is amazing, because I know Prometheus is painted in the dining hall in Frary! Prometheus is a company that actually doesn’t even specialize in making PPE, but works on carbon neutral fuels. But they have great machinery and lots of materials and they were able to make and provide thousands and thousands of disposable plastic face shields for health workers in New York and to various hospitals around North Carolina. Prometheus has been really great because they've been donating face shields in smaller quantities and just started charging only at cost for larger orders. And so they are a great example of how even if you traditionally don't make PPE or hand sanitizers, you can pivot in times of need. I have colleagues working tirelessly to contact manufacturers and get face masks made. Luckily, since we're in North Carolina, there's a lot of great manufacturing. Some of the mills have shifted production to make much-needed PPE. This grassroots approach helps me feel at least there's some light in all of this. Seeing people band together has been really nice.
“I'm also working on telemedicine strategies to be implemented so that contact between infected patients and providers can be minimized while encouraging open lines of communication. So we can use, say, video conferencing tools and telemedicine tools like video chats and digitally enabled stethoscopes to augment and interact with the patients while being able to minimize exposure risk if able. It helps conserve PPE, protects staff and also ultimately protects the patients because if the staff remain COVID-19 negative, then you're not passing it on to other patients.
“We also have an innovator network here at Duke in the Innovations in Healthcare group. It consists of 99 innovators working in over 90-countries worldwide. And so within our network, we're trying to connect all of the great innovations together into one cohesive COVID-19 platform that can be scaled worldwide. A number of our innovators work with hundreds of thousands of community health workers in places like India, Bangladesh, Kenya, China and Chile. So an example would be there's an innovator group that has a COVID-19 risk assessment model, and we have one innovator that has close to 6 million users in their network, but they don't have a specific aspect of a COVID monitoring tool. We're coming out with an initiative to try to really propel COVID efforts in global settings in a cohesive fashion. Our group is trying to assist in COVID efforts for countries where access to health resources are limited.
“Pomona has taught me the importance of working in cross-functional and interdisciplinary teams. I think especially at times like this, those learnings have really provided the foundation for collaborative work. I think that's how Pomona really encourages students to grow and work with others. I absolutely adore Pomona and will be always be thankful for these lessons.”