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Clinician Engineers – The Time is Now

Clinician Engineers – The Future of Healthcare?

The authors report the conflicts of interest below. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this letter.Read More

I. INTRODUCTION

Medicine historically relied on astute history and examination skills. As technology was lacking, ward rounds focused on debate and discussion of diagnoses and possible differential diagnoses based on the history and physical examination. Read More

Now in its 2nd year, the Clinician Engineer Hub, an international network aimed at bridging the gap between medicine and engineering has launched a series of educational material in webinar form.Read More

Learning hub launched to bridge gap between medicine and engineering
Earlier this year, the Clinician Engineer Hub was launched as an international engineering training programme for medical students and early career doctors.

The hub was set up by Dr Mads Bergholt, Lecturer in Biophotons in the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences, Dr Ali Yetisen, Imperial College London and Dr Neel Sharma, University of Birmingham to support doctors’ and medical students understanding of engineering-based solutions.

The hub aims to bring together the clinical and biomedical engineering field and provide medical students and early career doctors exposure to the world of clinical medicine, the challenges doctors face in diagnosing and treating patients and how to potentially solve these issues with cutting edge engineering solutions.

In its first programme earlier this year, international medical students were invited to spend a week at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham meeting patients on the ward, in the clinic or in the endoscopy department, observing patient treatments and learning how engineering principles could be used to improve current diagnostic and management approaches.

The students then spent a week at King’s and Imperial College gaining exposure to an array of theoretical and lab-based engineering methods including wearable sensors, tissue engineering and biomedical optics.

Dr Neel Sharma added: “We constantly use a range of engineering tools in medicine to diagnose and treat patients, from pacemakers to ventilators and dialysis machines, but often we’re unaware of how and why they work. As doctors, we experience first-hand limitations in how patients are diagnosed or managed. This knowledge, however, falls short without adequate engineering know-how. The Clinician Engineer Hub is an opportunity for future doctors and engineers to work together and better understand how each discipline can influence and inform the other, creating better patient outcomes in the long-term.”

Dr Ali Yetisen commented: “The hub offers a wide range of in-depth practical training to medical students and early career doctors to learn hands-on skills and will play a pivotal role in the stimulation of the cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial efforts to develop medical devices in the UK and globally.”

The programme, which is free for participants, will run again in December and feature robotics and training in 3D printing.

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The Clinician Engineer Hub is an international engineering training programme for medical students launched by academics from three UK universities.

The concept was created by Dr Neel Sharma, a clinician academic in the field of digestive diseases at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, to support doctors’ understanding of engineering-based solutions that are heavily relied on by the medical profession.

Co-founders Dr Ali Yetisen, Imperial College London, and Dr Mads Bergholt, King’s College London, collaborated with Dr Sharma to launch the Clinician Engineer Hub training programme.

International medical students were invited to spend a week at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham meeting patients on the ward, in clinic or in the endoscopy department, observing patient treatments and learning how engineering principles could be used to improve current diagnostic and management approaches.

The second week was spent at Imperial College London and King’s College London where students gained theoretical and lab-based exposure to an array of engineering methods such as wearable sensors, tissue engineering and biomedical optics.

Dr Selene Pirola and Rosalia Moreddu of the Department of Chemical Engineering delivered the sessions at Imperial, which explored topics including “Patient-Specific Computational Models of the Cardiovascular System” and “Personalised Medicine: Point-of-Care Diagnostics and Therapeutics”.

Dr Sharma said: “We constantly use a range of engineering tools in medicine to diagnose and treat patients, from pacemakers to ventilators and dialysis machines, but often we’re unaware of how and why they work.

As doctors, we experience first-hand limitations in how patients are diagnosed or managed. This knowledge, however, falls short without adequate engineering know-how.

The Clinician Engineer Hub is an opportunity for future doctors and engineers to work together and better understand how each discipline can influence and inform the other, creating better patient outcomes in the long-term.”

Dr Yetisen commented: “The Clinician Engineer offers a wide range of in-depth practical training to medical students to learn hands-on skills, and will play a pivotal role in the stimulation of the cross-disciplinary entrepreneurial efforts to develop medical devices in the UK and globally.”

Dr Bergholt added: “Clinical medicine as we know it is on the verge of undergoing significant changes. For instance, technologies such as laser diagnostics and artificial intelligence have the potential to revolutionise medicine by reducing subjectivity and improving the diagnostics for our patients. Clinicians with engineering expertise will be at the forefront of medicine in the future.”

The programme, which is free for participants, will run again in December and feature robotics and training in 3D printing.

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Becoming Clinician Engineers
The interaction between clinical medicine and medical engineering continues to increase in frequency and significance. Technology is present in every aspect of patient care, from prevention to diagnosis and treatment. How critical of a role will technology play in the future? Should this component of medicine be emphasized early in medical training and should medical students be trained to think like engineers? NEJM Resident 360 has invited experts from around the world to discuss this topic and explore some answers to these questions.

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The Clinician Engineer Hub, founded by Dr Neel Sharma of the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy, aims to educate medical students and early career doctors about the diagnostic and treatment challenges in clinical medicine and how to potentially solve these issues with engineering.

Dr Sharma, a clinician academic registrar in the field of gastroenterology at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham, along with two engineering colleagues, Dr Mads Bergholt (King’s College London) and Dr Ali Yetisen (Imperial College London), recently established the Clinician Engineer Hub.

The international hub aims to bring together the clinical and biomedical engineering field and provide talented medical students and early career doctors exposure to the world of clinical medicine, the challenges doctors face in diagnosing and treating patients and how to potentially solve these issues with cutting edge engineering solutions.

Dr Sharma said: “As a doctor in training I recognised that practice is changing. While traditionally we focused purely on history taking and physical examination of patients, currently we utilise an array of engineering technologies to diagnose and treat our patients. For example the CT scan for imaging, the endoscope, cardiac stents, dialysis machines or ventilators. However, clinicians are simply tech adopters with no training in how these devices work.

“As clinicians treat patients and can recognise limitations in current practice, I felt there was a strong need to gain appropriate engineering training to produce more advanced solutions. Clinicians would never treat patients without appropriate medical training however currently we are adopting technologies without training in the engineering field.”

Dr Yetisen, one of the Clinician Engineer Hub’s co-founders, commented: “The Clinician Engineer Hub will also offer a wide range of training opportunities to medical students and early career doctors in medical device regulation, quality standards and commercialisation of medical devices.”

The two-week programme, which is free for participants, was first launched in August. International medical students were invited to spend a week at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham where they gained an understanding of current engineering devices and their limitations. During the second week at Imperial College London and King’s College London, they gained expert theoretical engineering teaching and lab exposure on various methods such as optics and wearable devices. The programme has already received recognition by AMEE, the premier international organisation in medical education and will be featured as a forum discussion by the NEJM in early 2020.

Dr Sharma added: “We believe that doctors trained in engineering methods can then move on to develop new solutions for the betterment of patient care.”

The programme will run again in December and feature robotics and training in 3D printing.

https://www.uhb.nhs.uk/news-at-uhb.htm

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In February 2019, we launched The Clinician Engineer hub. This is the first international collaboration that aims to educate a new generation of clinicians with engineering expertise. Clinicians utilise engineering solutions for every patient as opposed to the former days of a simple history and physical examination. We use CT scans for imaging, cardiac stents for heart attacks, dialysis machines for kidney failure, ventilators for respiratory compromise, endoscopy for digestive bleeding. The list is endless. However, clinicians have limited knowledge of how these engineering solutions work. As front line workers, a thorough understanding of engineering can help to recognise limitations in current engineering platforms and develop new solutions accordingly. Clinical medicine is on the verge of undergoing a significant revolutionary change through transformative engineering technologies. Clinicians that understand these engineering concepts therefore and the pathway from prototyping to the patient will be at the forefront of medicine in the future.

The vision that drives this Topical Collection is a major gap in the current journal landscape for bringing engineering technology to the patient. Several important topics are poorly understood by the majority of clinicians and engineers with the consequence that fewer engineering technologies reach the patient:

How to foster a clear pathway for new medical engineering technology to reach the market and ensure impact for patients?
What is the state of regulatory frameworks? Journals with regulatory frameworks do not exist although it is an inherent part of any clinical translation.
How do commercialisation strategies impact the pathway to final product?. This includes entrepreneurship activities undertaken by clinicians.
We introduce here The Clinician Engineer, a multidisciplinary Topical Collection, to provide answers to all these questions. The aim of this Topical Collection is to offer a precise high impact publication channel for medical engineering technologies that are rigorously researched, reach the market and more importantly benefit the patient.

The synergy that The Clinician Engineer will offer between engineering, regulatory frameworks and commercialization will break new ground for articles aiming to specifically impact our patients.

The scope of this Topical Collection includes the following

Research articles: clinician-led multidisciplinary research articles with a clearly defined clinical pathway. Topics may include point-of-care or implantable medical devices, biosensors, imaging, robotics, tissue engineering, AI and drug development
Perspectives: perspective articles on research topics, regulatory frameworks and commercialisation, entrepreneurship.
Reviews: reviews on research topics, regulatory frameworks, entrepreneurship and commercialisation.
Guest editors

Dr Neel Sharma
Dr Ali K Yetisen
Dr Mads S Bergholt
Papers must describe original research and must not be simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings.

All submissions should follow the instructions available at: https://www.springer.com/journal/42452/submission-guidelines

Authors can directly submit their papers at https://www.editorialmanager.com/snas During the submission procedure, please select the title of this Topical Collection from the section/category (drop down menu) in Editorial Manager.

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