Good morning, everyone. My name is Luke John Day, and I'm the course director for today's infection control course. I wanted to extend a very warm welcome to all of you who are joining us remotely. While we are virtual at the moment, we look forward to the time when we can be having courses again in person. Endoscopy-related infection control practices have been an important part of endoscopy units, but this topic has become increasingly heightened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous infectious outbreaks attributed to endoscopes, and in particular duodenoscopes, have heightened our awareness around infection control practices within our endoscopy units. At the same time, we have seen multiple reprocessing guidelines, both here in the United States and abroad, be updated, as well as there's been a burst of research on infection control in the last five years. All of this points to the need to consolidate and digest this changing information. And that is the goal of today's course. This course is supported in part by an educational grant from Olympus Corporation of America and Pentax Medical. Also, we have several exhibitors today, which we encourage you to visit during the breaks. They include 3M Medical Solutions, Division of Good Morning, Boston Scientific, Medtronic, and Virgo Surgical Video Solutions. For this course, we have assembled leading experts in infection control from across the United States. These experts have contributed immensely to the field of infection control, and their research has been pivotal in developing multiple reprocessing guidelines that we currently use today. Our presenters will provide us with the most updated and evidence-based approach for maintaining and improving infection control in our units. Our goal today is simple. We want you to learn new endoscope reprocessing technologies and the data that supports or refutes them. Identify best practices in terms of staff training, reprocessing steps, and endoscopy unit leadership. Discuss and debate how endoscope reprocessing leverages a team-based approach, and learn about future endoscope reprocessing processes and tools that could enhance your endoscopy unit operations. The format of today's course is, one, we'll have a host of presentations that cover the entire spectrum of endoscope reprocessing infection control. At the end of each presentation, please feel free to enter any questions into the question and answer section on the bottom of your screen. At the end of each presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask additional questions and have further discussions with the presenter. And then at the end of the day, we'll bring it all together with a final panel of all of our course faculty to wrap up the day and provide some concluding and final thoughts. Before we start, I want to cover some general housekeeping rules. First, today's course is being recorded and will be available on GI Leap after the completion of it. Two, you all should have received PDFs of the slides for all of today's presentations. Three, please leave your microphone muted throughout the course. And then finally, please visit our virtual rooms and see our sponsoring exhibitors that I discussed earlier. Now let's begin our day. To help facilitate the day, we have two phenomenal UCSF GI fellows who will help introduce and moderate our sessions throughout the course. First, we have Dr. Shushrut Sujan Thiborgondam. Sujan went to medical school at the Cleveland Clinic and did his medical residency at Stanford University. He is a second year GI fellow at UCLA, and his interests include high-risk familial GI cancer syndromes and pancreatic cyst surveillance. He is continuing his training at UCLA and will be an advanced fellow starting next year in 2022 to 2023. Second, we have Dr. Dean Ehrlich. Dr. Ehrlich went to medical school at Tufts University School of Medicine and did his residency at UCLA. There, he was also the chief resident and is now a second year fellow at UCLA and serves as their chief fellow. He has a particular interest in device innovation and biodesign, and he will be completing a biodesign fellowship during his last year of GI fellowship. We are grateful for both of our Dr. Thibogondam and Dr. Ehrlich for helping us moderate today's sessions. I'm now going to hand it off to Dr. Ehrlich, who will kick us off with our first presenter.

infection control

endoscopy units

COVID-19 pandemic

endoscope reprocessing

educational grants