“Say ‘yes’ with enthusiasm!
So many opportunities were
presented to me after I agreed
to try new things or take on
new responsibilities.”
Dr. Vanessa Walker is a critical care physician
above all else. Her days involve working in
the intensive care unit for Sutter Health, caring
for the sickest of patients. She goes on rounds,
does high-risk procedures such as intubations,
and helps guide patients and their families
through tough decisions and, often, the end-oflife
process.
The rest of Walker’s workdays are spent
handling her administrative duties as medical
director of the Sutter Health Valley Area’s electronic
ICU, a telemonitoring program in which
doctors and nurses from hubs in Sacramento and
San Francisco monitor ICU patients through live
interactive video, remote diagnostic tools and
other technologies. The goal is to provide all patients
at the 10 hospitals in the Valley Area’s eICU
(which spans from Crescent City to Los Banos)
with around-the-clock access to the same level of
care and expertise, whether someone is at a small
rural hospital or a large urban one. The system
also helps alleviate some of the workload of the
bedside team.
In her role, Walker has led Sutter’s efforts to ensure
its hospitals can handle ICU surge capacity in
response to the coronavirus pandemic; the eICU
has laid the groundwork for ramping up staff and
resources to provide mass critical care. “Instead
of having four nurses, you’re going to have eight
nurses. … When you’ve done all the groundwork,
it makes it so that it’s scalable,” Walker says.
Walker, 38, was raised in Folsom, attended
Kansas City University, completed her residency
at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine,
and, while in fellowship training at Duke
University, earned a master’s degree in Management
in Clinical Informatics. The application of
information technology to health care became her
passion. “This is where the future of medicine is
heading,” she says.
Walker, a private practice physician and
partner with Pulmonary Medicine Associates in
its Roseville office, began working in the Sutter
Roseville Medical Center ICU and the Sutter
Health eICU in 2014. She let it be known that if
the eICU medical director position ever became
available, she wanted it. “I just said it over and
over again,” Walker says. In May 2019, she got
the position.
Started in 2004, Sutter’s eICU was only the second
one in the United States, but it never reached
its full potential, Walker says. She led the transformation
of the program, which relaunched Feb. 1,
in time to meet the demands of an unprecedented
public health crisis.
Walker’s job has become even more challenging
during the pandemic — she goes to work
knowing she is at risk of catching a deadly disease.
New policies limiting visitors and requiring the
isolation of patients with COVID-19 have also
been emotionally hard: “There is nothing that can
replace a daughter holding her elderly mother’s
hand or a husband who’s been married to his wife
for 50 years, they’ve never slept apart, and he can’t
hold her hand when she’s sick and dying. That
breaks my heart.”
BY SENA CHRISTIAN
July 2020 | comstocksmag.com 37