LSU Health Faculty Leads Section at Covid-19 Convention Center Medical Monitoring Station

Dr. Meghan Maslanka, Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Section of Emergency Medicine at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, has been appointed Medical Manager/ Operations Section Leader at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Medical Monitoring Station, which opened to COVID-19 patients this morning. After completing LSU Health New Orleans’ Emergency Medicine Residency Program, she was accepted into a Disaster Medicine Fellowship at Harvard/Beth Israel Deaconess before coming home to join the LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine faculty.

Dr. Maslanka worked with her fellow LSU Health New Orleans Emergency Medicine faculty colleagues Dr. Joseph Kanter, Assistant State Health Officer and Region 1 Medical Director at the Louisiana Department of Health, and Dr. Jennifer Avegno, Director of the New Orleans Health Department, to set up the step-down unit.

The monitoring station was developed to ease the burden on acute care hospitals. It provides a quarantined environment for COVID-19 positive patients to receive basic medical services including administering limited amounts of oxygen, blood glucose monitoring for diabetic patients, bedside care, IV fluid intervention if needed and taking vital signs among others. Patients must be transferred from a Region 1 Tier 1 or Tier 2 hospital; walk-up patients will not be accepted. Patient admission/transfers from hospitals are now being accepted 24/7.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans (LSU Health New Orleans) educates Louisiana's health care professionals. The state's health sciences university leader, LSU Health New Orleans includes a School of Medicine, the state's only School of Dentistry, Louisiana's only public School of Public Health, and Schools of Allied Health Professions, Nursing, and Graduate Studies. LSU Health New Orleans faculty take care of patients in public and private hospitals and clinics throughout the region. In the vanguard of biosciences research, the LSU Health New Orleans research enterprise generates jobs and enormous annual economic impact. LSU Health New Orleans faculty have made lifesaving discoveries and continue to work to prevent, advance treatment, or cure disease. To learn more, visit http://www.lsuhsc.edu, http://www.twitter.com/LSUHealthNO, or http://www.facebook.com/LSUHSC.

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