TECHNOLOGY IN MEDICINE
USING EVERYDAY TECHNOLOGY IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
AUTHOR Kathryn Vance
With the onset of COVID-19, our emergency rooms
and hospitals are more overwhelmed than ever.
Amongst this chaos, physicians and hospital administrators
are facing challenges they’ve never
seen before and having to make difficult decisions
with answers they would have never imagined. I sat
down to talk with Dr. Martin Huecker, emergency
medicine faculty at UofL Health - UofL Hospital,
about his experience over the last few months.
“You know, it’s kind of scary to go to work. It’s a weird feeling
going in,” he said. “We always know we could potentially catch a
virus or bacterial infection going to work, that’s part of my job. But
with this one, there’s so much mystery around it and we don’t know
exactly how to protect ourselves.”
While working in an ER always means no two days are ever alike,
the uncertainty and constantly evolving information surrounding
the novel coronavirus make it very difficult to know what to expect
day to day. Guidelines from the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention and the World Health Organization are changing in a
matter of days, and sometimes even hours. That continuous change
can sometimes make it difficult to focus on the usual demands of
the ER.
“Not only do we have to think about those new guidelines every
day, but also we have to think about managing our so-called ‘bread
and butter’ ER patients, like heart attacks and traumas,” he said.
“There have been instances of trauma patients coming into the ER
showing no signs of COVID-19, but after a screening test [UofL
Health is now testing all patients as a precautionary measure], results
came back positive. That patient who was in the ER for a trauma may
have now exposed several other patients and health care workers
to the virus as it aerosolized around the room.”
In addition to thinking about the constant influx of new information,
physicians must always think about conserving their PPE
due to the national shortages.
“The PPE question is always on everyone’s mind,” he said. “We’re
making decisions on how to protect ourselves and the patient based
10 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE