| | APRIL 20238UTLOOKHealthcare Tech IN MY OPINIONBy Mainak Majumdar, Director, Intensive Care Services, Mercy Health AustraliaIntensive Care Medicine -The Original Tech Disruptor in HealthcareIntensive Care Medicine, by its very nature, has been both technology-reliant and data-rich as a specialty from its inception. Born amid a public health crisis, practitioners in this area have often been forced to innovate in desperate circumstances, developing and adopting emerging technologies that are now taken for granted, to manage severely disordered body systems and evaluate the effectiveness of therapies in real-time at the bedside.Amidst the ubiquity of Intensive Care support in modern hospitals, it is hard to remember that as a specialty, it is not even a century old. Its history is a litany of disruptors incorporating technology into clinical practice in unconventional ways.Back in 1952, with Copenhagen in the grip of a polio epidemic and paralysis of the breathing muscles a death sentence, Bjorn Ibsen decided to administer positive pressure ventilation through a plastic tube into the windpipe of a dying 12-year-old outside of an operating room environment. She recovered, and the hospital went on to replicate this practice for paralyzed polio patients across specially designated wards, mortality dropped from over 87 percent to under 15 percent and a new medical specialty was born. The desire to figure out whether the ventilator was working effectively triggered the re-exploration of gas laws, applied thermodynamics and electrochemistry from the 17th to 19th Intensive care has come a long way using technology innovatively and collecting and interpreting data in real-time to not just make life-saving interventions for individual patients but also transform healthcare into a more evidence-based, data-driven, quality-focused patient-centric systemMainak Majumdar
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