Medicine at Michigan: Engineering New Solutions
Medicine at Michigan: Engineering New Solutions
As you may already know, sepsis is an incredibly complex public health problem that represents more than one million cases annually, a mortality rate nearing 40-percent, and the single largest hospital treatment cost in the United States. Yet this disease flies largely under the radar.
In Locating Sepsis, a feature article in the Winter 2015 edition of Medicine at Michigan, U-M researchers speak about their efforts to “improve sepsis treatment and research at the bedside, in the lab and on the policy level, at diagnosis and after recovery.” These specialists from emergency medicine, physical therapy, computer science, information technology and engineering are working together to bring sepsis to the forefront. And MCIRCC is part of this collaborative, multidisciplinary strategy.
As summarized in the article, MCIRCC is helping to “Engineer New Solutions” with its 2014 Critical Care Grand Challenge: Sepsis program in which six multidisciplinary teams were awarded grant money to develop innovative sepsis solutions.
“The goal is to devise a ‘game-changer’ solution to basic problems like early diagnostics and noninvasive monitoring," statedMCIRCC Executive Director Kevin Ward, MD. "It's just really awesome to see the fresh perspectives when you bring a biomedical engineer, an electrical engineer, a materials scientist, or a computer scientist into the mix. They start getting the ah-ha moments about how you can address [critical illness] from a technology standpoint."
The article also includes contributions from the following MCIRCC members: