COVID-19 Literature

The Problem: New literature on the virus has been published at a rapid rate. It is often difficult for healthcare providers to remain up-to-date on new discoveries about the virus when they are working overtime with higher patient loads. 

Our Approach: We wanted to create a document to summarize the current literature in an easy-to-digest and accessible manner for our local house staff. To achieve this, we recruited a team of dedicated medical/graduate students and scientists to read the latest COVID literature and submit short summaries to a Google form. We found that requesting summaries with the following section made them easier to read through: (1) Goal; (2) Methods (include study design, patient selection, outcome measures); (3) Findings; (4) Impact/Clinical Implications; (5) Limitations. These summaries are then selected and compiled into a single-page document to share with faculty and house staff via social media and email. In order to keep workload manageable for volunteers, seven small teams of 3-4 students each were asked to be in charge of disseminating the literature review summaries once a week (i.e. a team for Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc). Each team had two slide deck managers, who were in charge of copying and pasting the literature reviews from the Google form into a slide deck and coming up with one-line high-impact takeaways to title each slide. Each team also had one handout design/layout person who compiled select papers into visually appealing formats using Adobe Illustrator templates and one social media person who disseminated our reviews more broadly using Twitter.