Allegheny Health Network: Combining Infectious Disease With Critical Care Medicine

We are continuing our new series, Media Day, where we spotlight individual medical institutions and infectious disease (ID) programs. Today, we spotlight the Allegheny Health Network (AHN) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

AHN’s Nitin Bhanot, MD, MPH, is director of AHN's Division of Infectious Disease and program director of the infectious disease (ID) fellowship program. He noted that one of the unique aspects of the AHN program is that they combine their infectious disease fellowship with critical care medicine.

“There are some commonalities between these two disciplines…. Both deal with multiple organ systems among our patients, and so we thought it would be unique to provide that synergistic combination, where the thought process and cerebral field of infectious disease are combined with procedural skill sets that our critical care medicine physicians have,” Bhanot said. “A lot of patients are in the ICU [intensive care unit] with infections with sepsis and septic shock, and are on antibiotics.... Who else but an ID physician and a critical care physician would be able to [treat] these patients?” Bhanot said.

AHN has a relationship with Lake Erie College of Medicine, Drexel University’s School of Medicine, and Duquesne University. Medical students from Drexel visit AHN for clinical rotations.

Bhanot says AHN’s fellows and trainees get involved in a number of areas.

“We do research in clinical infectious disease, infection prevention, and stewardship—and not just the faculty. We involve our trainees across all levels to be involved in this so that they can also learn how to do QI [quality improvement] projects, how to do research that benefits our patients, which is really the goal of the organization.

Allegheny General Hospital, which is the flagship hospital of AHN, has been recognized as a Center of Excellence by the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA). Bhanot explains that it is based on meeting certain metrics in antimicrobial stewardship. IDSA reviews the projects the institutions are doing, and after that analysis and detailed review, IDSA decides whether to offer that accreditation, Bhanot explained.

Look for the next episode when Cassandra Oehler, MD, talks about HIV clinical care at AHN, ongoing research around this subject, and how clinicians are using long-acting injectables.