Casey Kim: CoviDigest Blasts to Health Professional Students (Podcast #50)
Casey Kim is a third-year medical student at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and is currently on the leadership of the Philadelphia Organization of Health Professional Students (POHPS), working on creating guidelines for medical professionals and the public on COVID-19, and CoviDigests, daily summaries of news and takeaways on coronavirus.
In the middle of her sub-internship rotation, Casey Kim opened her email and saw the news: students would be taken out of the clinics for all COVID-19 related patients. Since then, the medical education leadership has worked on creating opportunities for students to get involved in the clinic remotely, without having to come face-to-face with patients.
Kim decided to help leadership by creating those opportunities. Her interest in medical education had started in college when she worked with a non-profit organization in Chicago to tutor North Korean refugees and pass their GEDs. In medical school, she represented the student body in providing feedback on clinical courses and was enrolled in the medical education certificate to learn more about how the curriculum was developed. This, she thought, was the perfect opportunity to explore that interest while helping the medical faculty in a tangible way.
Her interest in medical education grew as she read articles on student-run campaigns and online posts about COVID-19. She got in contact with Ramie Fathy, who pitched his idea to start a Facebook group to inform other Philadelphia medical students about COVID-19, and she compiled informational resources that would be helpful. As more students got involved, she and Fathy started using Facebook as a platform to communicate with other medical students in Philadelphia and with the general public. This platform would later become POHPS, which we talked about in our last post.
She began CoviDigests as a way to efficiently disseminate information on COVID-19 in a short, efficient package, and cut through misinformation circulating on the internet. POHPS has received a lot of interest in collaboration — for example, Jefferson Medical School students have provided guidelines and updates to policies, and they are hoping to create a decentralized system to create and share content.
Kim emphasizes that knowing what proper personal protective equipment (PPE) the public needs is the most important, and what she has tried to focus on. However, the next most important thing is where to find the most accurate and reliable information as possible. Many guidelines are changed very frequently, and thus finding the most up-to-date information can be difficult. Kim hopes that the various sources of information she and other students are creating will help the public stay better educated on COVID-19.
