Medical Industry Executive Talks About Reopening California

Driven by a vision of providing better care, faster, Dr. Caesar Djavaherian co-founded Direct Urgent Care, a technology-enabled urgent care network serving the SF Bay Area. With the merger in 2018, he now focuses on clinic innovation and providing data-driven, accessible care to each and every Carbon Health patient. Carbon Health has a clinic in Pasadena on Colorado Boulevard.

Carbon Health has been testing patients since March. Pasadena Now asked Djavaherian what he thinks it will take to reopen to California/

Medically speaking, what do we need to reopen our cities and states (other than a complete cure or stop of the COVID-19 virus), can we reopen before the virus is completely finished or the spread is stopped?
The Singapore examples should frighten all of us. The country which acted swiftly and decisively to contain the virus is now reporting record rates of COVID-19 because it failed to identify clusters of people who were infected before opening the economy. Now their government officials are forced to backtrack. We can’t afford to make the same mistake. Citizens and businesses need to know that they will be safe from coronavirus before we can open up the economy. Ensuring that customers and employees are safe should be the top goal of all business leaders today and they need the tools to understand who is infected in their communities as well as in their workforce. To help them, medical companies like ours are offering a testing and monitoring protocol for business owners to use to keep not only their employees safe but also informing their customers that their businesses are safe to shop in.

How will wide testing help reopen California and other states? Although I understand testing is important, don’t we need vaccines and cures to reopen?
Again, going back to the Singapore example, widespread testing will help us see where this virus hides. Knowing that a significant portion of the population is completely asymptomatic makes testing that much more critical otherwise people will continue to unknowingly transmit the infection. Vaccines and cures are critical but I am worried that these will not come anytime soon. The economy can’t wait 18 months for these developments to save us. In the meantime, we need a smarter way to mitigate disease spread.

Are you saying that there are safety protocols that businesses, schools, and child care facilities can implement to reopen their business, school, etc.? How would those protocols help open a business, and what are the protocols?
Carbon Health has compiled protocols for businesses, childcare facilities, and schools to get back to work. These protocols which are a combination of testing plus symptom surveillance plus targeted repeated testing follow the best data out of the CDC, WHO, and reports from countries that are reopening their economies like Austria. There are safe methods of reopening business, but it takes both active surveillance in the form of testing and continued monitoring of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people.

Is contact tracing like mapping who came in contact with who, and when, and how the virus might spread, or be managed?
Yes exactly. Contact tracing works by calculating who was in contact with infected individuals and who they may take that infection to.

Please tell me how strategically enabled technology will help hospitals and health systems handle any future surges of COVID-19.
Our tools have evolved and so should our healthcare delivery systems. We don’t buy goods the same way we did during the 1918 flu pandemic, why should we deliver medical care the same way? Technology has revolutionized every industry for the better but in healthcare, it has slowed us down. The coronavirus pandemic is our call to deploy smarter technologies to monitor patients’ symptoms, deliver testing capacity, provide health care services including medication delivery, and do this all at scale. If we don’t use smart technology, like the ones created by Carbon Health and other health tech startups, to risk stratify and care for patients, we risk more deaths, a longer economic shut down all the while we force patients to come into clinics potentially picking up coronavirus or passing along their infection to our healthcare workers or other patients.