Tim Buchman, M.D., Ph.D.

tim-buchman

Dr. Buchman is the founding director of the Emory’s Critical Care Center (ECCC), which is integrating ICUs throughout the Emory Healthcare system. The Center has assembled clinicians, teachers and investigators from diverse disciplines to deliver the Right Care, Right Now, Every Time.  Dr. Buchman is past president of the Shock Society, the Society for Complex Acute Illness and the Society of Critical Care Medicine, the latter being the largest organization of critical care professionals worldwide. His research has spanned the bench-to-bedside continuum, including NIH-funded studies of physiological dynamics; of patient monitoring; of the genetics of sepsis and of ICU end-of-life care.

Before joining Emory, he served as the Edison Professor of Surgery and Director of Acute and Critical Care Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to his 15 years on the faculty at Washington University, Dr. Buchman directed the surgical intensive care unit and founded the trauma service at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he completed his surgical training.

Dr. Buchman’s current activity focuses on promoting situation awareness in critical care to achieve better health, better care and lower costs. He is the principal investigator on a Round 1 CMMI Healthcare Innovation Award entitled “Rapid Training and Deployment of Non-Physician Providers in Critical Care”. The award includes two innovations—telemedicine and the use of advanced practice providers—to efficiently deliver high-reliability care to locations where critical care physicians are in short supply. Now in its fourth year, the award has achieved its objectives of delivering better, smarter care to the federal beneficiaries it serves. Scaling and dissemination have started, with three Non-Physician Provider Program graduates recruited to healthcare systems in Michigan, Texas and Washington (state) to establish their own training programs.

Building a Triborough Bridge for Critical Care Medicine: Connecting Patients, Data and Real-Time Analytics

Abstract: Critical care accounts for about 15% of inpatient beds yet consumes around 30% of hospital costs. Demand for these critical care services is climbing in response to the aging population and their chronic illnesses.  The need for value-based, efficient care is apparent. Yet the care must be individualized and precise: decisions in the intensive care unit are matters of life and death. Data are plentiful in the ICU. Advanced sensors typically sample 2-5K data/sec across 10 continuously monitored channels. Up to 150 additional sparser data types are commonly available. Clinicians currently depend on primitive visualizations of these data, with few analytics and fewer decision support tools. Information that is both reliable and actionable is rare.

In this presentation, we will examine progress towards the transformation of ICU data into information– and further  into action –through  four convergent perspectives: ICU telehealth, population health, interoperability and patient-centered care. We will explore the convergence of knowledge-based (algorithmic) approaches and data-based (cohort) approaches towards precision medicine in the ICU. Finally, we will consider “smarter care” from the perspective of a new workforce—one that includes biomedical engineers and computational scientists—that must be engaged to deliver the best care today and better care tomorrow.