A physician strike team to disseminate accurate and timely COVID-19 vaccination information and improve responses to patient questions

Background: Vaccination is an important component of the public health response to the pandemic, and a large health care system such as UCLA Health must optimize mechanisms to address questions from patients to expedite vaccine acceptance and administration. Local Problem In 2020-2021, COVID-19 vaccines were developed, studied, and approved at unusual speed, leading to both vaccine hesitancy and requests for urgent availability. This required up-to-date responses from physicians to questions through the online patient portal in the UCLA health care system. There was the additional risk of physician burnout due to the large number of questions. Intervention We developed a physician strike team that enabled accurate and timely dissemination of vaccine information in response to patient queries. The strike team served a dual purpose of answering patient questions quickly with accurate information, and reducing the workload for other physicians. Using a strike team of 10 early career physicians responding to a collection of patient messages, this large community-based health system was able to provide timely, high-quality responses to COVID-19 vaccine-related questions. Results: After the introduction of the physician strike team program in late January 2021 through April 2021, there was a significant reduction in the average number of messages and calls received by covered providers per month compared to the adjusted number of messages and calls they would have received had the pool not existed. The strike team provided a service with high satisfaction scores from both the participating strike team members and the physicians being covered by the strike team. Conclusions: The success of this small physician strike team to impact inbasket patient messages and calls in our institution suggests that a similar mechanism can be developed to centralize the replies to certain messages, which may reduce the workload and burnout of physicians.