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.
After completing LSU Health New Orleans’ Emergency Medicine Residency Program, Maslanka 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.
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 will 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.