Is it possible to receive care from clinicians who aren’t even in the room with you? What if quality care could be provided to patients in underserved areas while the physician is across the country?
With new and improved clinical care models, such as telemedicine coupled with data-rich environments, technology-enabled virtual care is becoming more of a reality.
Telemedicine, when applied to intensive-care units, provides the ability to remotely monitor critically ill patients and identify adverse events that are often challenging for bedside clinicians to detect.
As a research assistant in the departments of biomedical engineering and systems and industrial engineering under Vignesh Subbian, I work in an interdisciplinary team setting where we extract actionable information from clinical data to enhance and develop telemedicine in the intensive-care unit.
In other words, we take physiological and other clinical data from multiple sources as a means of improving care for critically ill patients in ICUs.
This allows for early detection of adverse events and potentially mitigates harm to patients with severe conditions. For example, a patient with a traumatic brain injury admitted to the ICU can be continuously monitored to detect any unstable physiological events that could lead to secondary complications and diminish patient recovery.
As an aspiring physician, I am elated to be working on this groundbreaking digitalization of health care and look forward to continuing to contribute to the facilitation of enhanced health care and medical services in the years to come.
