Vital Signs

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Vital Signs

Michelle Hanbidge at Department of Anaesthsia - resized

Photo courtesy Mortah Nabavi Niaki

25 July, 2012

It's a typical Monday morning just before 8 a.m. Michelle Hanbidge sits at her desk in the still-quiet Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care, and Pain Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston, MA) sifting through emails while her co-workers arrive at the building, just off the main campus of MGH, and call out their welcomes.

By 8:30 a.m. Michelle is analyzing data she's been compiling on a little pilot project she's been working on for the hospital and its partner institutions before she's called out to troubleshoot some of the technology of the project, or runs off to lead training seminars. The project, a hand-held vital signs capture system, gives medical personnel a way of entering a patient's vital measurements into an electronic medical record immediately at the point-of-care, ensuring that doctors and emergency personnel can obtain instant access to up-to-the-minute vital information.

It's a little tool with the potential to improve the care of countless patients.

For Michelle, it's is all just a typical day as a Clinical Engineering intern.

Clinical Engineering tends to conjure images of engineers crafting clever new walking canes and wheelchairs. But the field is vast, and ranges across every aspect of patient care—from how to ensure patients receive correct drug dosages to how to organize hospital systems for more effective overall care. "Students are learning skills related to running experiments, designing technologies, building prototypes, and statistical analysis of various types of health data," explains Associate Professor Alex Mihailidis, Coordinator for the Clinical Engineering graduate program and Associate Professor at IBBME and the Department of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy.

And the graduate student interns from UofT are making sizeable, lasting contributions to hospitals every year.

"I'm playing a lead role in evaluating the success of the vital signs capture system at the various pilots in terms of utilization, time savings, accuracy of vital signs recorded, resources used, and user feedback," explains Michelle. "I've also been teaching the biomedical technicians at Brigham and Women’s Hospital how to set up and update the handheld devices so they can upgrade their system."

In fact, the vital signs capture system is not the only project Michelle, just finishing her first year in the MHSc program at the Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering (IBBME), is working on as part of her internship. "I'm also involved in the user interface design for a media repository of operating room images and videos that allows surgeons to take pictures/videos during their procedures and then access them from any computer."

Every student in the MHSc program works a total of 1225 paid hours of internships as a major component of their degree. "The chance to learn these types of skills are unique to the clinical engineering program and help develop our students into well-rounded engineers," Mihailidis says. But the experiences the students come away with are their own, claims Hanbidge.

"Two people could walk away from the same internship with very different experiences," Hanbidge says, outlining the invaluable and unexpected "people" skills she's learned on the job. "But whatever it is you are working on, you quickly become the expert in it, which is a satisfying feeling."

Read about Clinical Engineering at IBBME.

University of Toronto Institute of Biomaterials and Biomedical Engineering

Vital Signs