AIM Operations
Important Clinical Links
Soarian (on campus or on VPN only - for off campus use App Store above)
NYS Prescription Monitoring Program/iSTOP
Columbia Library (for access to journal articles off campus)
Latest News from AIM
Farewell to Dr. Scharle
This is Dr. Scharle’s last week at AIM – please find her to say thank you and goodbye! In her eight years here she has provided dedicated, high quality patient-centered patient care, been recognized in numerous ways as an outstanding preceptor, and developed the incredibly successful medical student rotation. We will miss her dearly and wish her the best of luck in her new endeavors!
New faces around AIM
A warm welcome to our new permanent RN, Candace Belmore. She’s transferring from the inpatient team and we’re excited to have her a new RN in AIM. She’s almost done with orientation to each of the RN roles at AIM and is excited to join our team as a rotational staff member. You may have also seen Rosemary Sheridan around - she is our interim PCD while we recruit a replacement for Yesenia Cabral.
Shingrix
When you order the shingrix vaccine, use the prescription from the “ACN Internal Medicine” favorites list in Allscripts because it has instructions for the pharmacy to administer the vaccine. Reinforce with your patients that they must get the vaccine at the pharmacy. (Our RNs cannot give a vaccine that was dispensed from an outside pharmacy.)
GYN Update
Dr. Veleka Willis will be taking over Dr. Warsheski’s AIM GYN sessions on Mondays starting 4/1/2019.
IDT update
We are once again fully staffed with Health Priority Specialists (Cynthia/Gianni) and can return to the prior schedule of each module meeting every other week.
Documentation Reminders
Our notes have a few structured fields to allow for standardized documentation and safe/effective communication. Please do not free text the entire note in the first box. For safety reasons, import/check off the meds and allergies rather than free texting – this forces us to keep the medication list and allergies up to date.
Flu Shots
Curious about how we do as a practice with influenza vaccination? From October 2018-December 2018 we vaccinated 64% of AIM patients – the highest vaccination rate of adult practices in the ACN! Great work team!
Ambulatory Read of the Week
The war on ‘prediabetes’ could be a boon for pharma—but is it good medicine?
An interesting piece in the lay press discussing the cost of medicalizing an at-risk state with no actual health consequences. Changing from "impaired glucose tolerance" to "prediabetes" was undertaken in an effort to get people to take the risk of incident diabetes seriously, yet only 2% of prediabetic patients per year will actually progress to diabetes. When the fear of progression drives lifestyle changes it can only be a good thing — but when it becomes a target for more expensive pharmacologic interventions it's not at all clear that the benefits are worth what we pay for them, or the anxiety that labeling patients (whose lives are unlikely ever to be affected by this diagnosis in their lifetimes) brings. Food for thought!