All COVID, All the Time Commonwealth Alumni/ae on the Front Lines of a Global Pandemic COVID-19 has left no industry, no country, and practically no individual unaffected. For these three Commonwealth alumni/ae, the pandemic came particularly close.
THE EPIDEMIOLOGIST: SUSAN BORUCHOFF ’73
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here’s no one to step into my shoes if I go down,” says Susan Boruchoff, M.D., ’73 As the—not “a,” “the”— epidemiologist for Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Boruchoff has served a critical role in combating the coronavirus in one of the nation’s most afflicted areas. So vital, in fact, that she had to stop seeing patients when the virus started tearing through the area in March of 2020, because the hospital couldn’t risk her getting sick.
Under normal circumstances, Boruchoff would balance her time between clinical, hospital epidemiology, and academic work, as she is also a Professor of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. Now it’s all COVID, all the time. Each day starts with Boruchoff checking in with the hospital’s COVID response teams, which rapidly evolved to provide the primary in-patient care as the first coronavirus patients began arriving in March. First it’s emergency-room doctors, then the people who do bed control (monitoring where patients are and if they need to be moved to a different floor), then the pulmonary specialists. Boruchoff also frequently joins administrative meetings with the hospital’s president, chief operating officer, chief medical officer, and others from finance to security to assess the hospital’s short- and long-term needs. That’s just the morning. In between WebEx or Zoom meetings, editing notes from her Infectious Diseases fellows, and filling out insurance paperwork, Boruchoff fields questions about individual patients or policies all afternoon and often into the evening. Boruchoff is not the decision maker, she insists—more like the cog in the center of a huge machine grinding away at a common goal: ensuring the hospital is responding efficiently and effectively to the virus. By necessity, the crisis has streamlined hospital processes, forcing Boruchoff and her fellow practitioners to develop a more unified approach to patient care that reduces redundancies. “It really feels like a much better way to practice medical care, where we talk directly with the primary doctors every day in a very focused, multidisciplinary, efficient patient-centered approach,” Boruchoff says. “It’s given me the opportunity to control an awful
16 CM Summer 2020
