Information Sharing and Communications

In late January, we sent our first all-member Coronavirus Clinical Alert. ACEP coordinated webinars with Washington state physicians who were some of the earliest to experience the COVID-19 surge and connected them with legislators to explain the situation firsthand.

In response to the need to rapidly share COVID-19 experiences, ACEP created the COVID-19 Community on the EngagED platform and extended its availability to the international audience. As of mid-June, the forum had 3,987 participants from 90 countries, with 642 conversation threads and 2,799 discussion posts. The COVID-19 Community alerted ACEP to issues we needed to tackle:

• PPE shortages and lack of hospital support for the use of self-purchased or donated PPE
• COVID-19 being used as a negative factor during custody disputes
• Confusion over regulatory policies

Daily summaries of the COVID-19 Community soon became unwieldly. That led to development of the Field Guide for COVID-19 Care in the Emergency Department. This definitive clinical guide is a frequently updated living resource. By July, this guide had more than 125,000 views, it had been independently translated into five languages, and it had been cited by more than 170 prominent online resources, including the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and the COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition.

The Clinical Alerts grew into the COVID-19 Center, a robust resource library that organizes more than 400 webinars, articles, podcasts, videos, and more by clinical topic. By July, the COVID-19 Center had more than 1 million views. The most accessed page is ACEP’s statement standing with our members against emergency physicians’ having their jobs threatened.

At the same time, ACEP’s public relations team was sharing your frontline experiences with the public. Externally, ACEP or ACEP chapters have been mentioned in COVID-related media stories more than 10,000 times in national and local print, online, and broadcast news outlets since March—a 500 percent increase over 2019.

Ms. Grantham is ACEP’s communications manager.