Dr. Vian Nguyen

Chief medical officer

Legacy Community Health, a federally qualified health center in Houston.

ON NEW CHALLENGES:

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of focus on education, learning about the virus, and then how to protect our patients and staff. What I’ve noticed over time … is that those things are still in the forefront, but an added layer of complication to all of this is that a lot of staff are getting sick. So not only are we still managing education, and keeping our patients safe, we’re dealing with staff shortages. And (access to) PPE, which has already been a top priority in terms of trying to get what is needed to have our staff be safe in the clinic, is compounded by so many other businesses outside of healthcare also trying to get the same supply. It feels like a really long nightmare.

ON TELEHEALTH:

Coming out of the pandemic we will learn that telemedicine is something that should stay in our healthcare system. We already feel some challenges there. We’ve gotten emails about how certain payers are going to stop covering telehealth visits at the end of July, at the end of August, and it really does feel very backwards to not embrace a technology that has actually helped us come out of this pandemic.