disciplines worked in medicine to apply their particular expertise to help find solutions to problems in medical practice. The gap between engineering and medicine gave rise to an interdisciplinary field known today as biomedical engineering. Soon these pioneering engineers working in medicine, taking on the role of biomedical engineers, specialized further leading the way to numerous subspecialties. Clinical engineering, a sub-specialty of biomedical engineering, was first coined in 1969 by a cardiologist named Cesar Caceres. Clinical engineers are the engineers who work within a hospital or healthcare setting using engineering principles to help optimize healthcare delivery. Other fields such as biomaterials engineers, tissue engineers, and bioinstrumentation engineers found a place under the umbrella of biomedical engineering, solving problems in healthcare from their specialized engineering labs. However, with all the problem solving engineers performed at the hospitals, it may not compare with the impact the technologies brought about through engineering, on medical education. What role do engineers play in healthcare? As a clinical engineer, I worked at hospitals solving a wide range of problems through my classical engineering training. However, at one point, I realized that the mistakes being made in the workforce were due to biomedical engineering technicians not being taught a standard skills for their practice. Eventually these technicians would learn the ropes and through work experience, they would learn to either succeed by overcoming their short falls or succeed by hiding their shortcomings. I learned that if I wanted to improve the profession, and eventually improve the overall profession of clinical engineering, I would need to work at a place where I could influence their core beliefs and help them
establish common goals. I went into education at the community college. As a clinical engineer, I was well versed and skilled in the nature of the work of biomedical engineering technicians. I believed that the answer needed to start at the root of the problem. However, I did not realize how much education played a role in the future behavior of theses technician’s careers. I’ve trained biomedical engineering technicians and have helped in implementing the modern education technology used to teach medicine to nursing. Engineers of any discipline learned early on the importance of simulations prior to any fabrication. These same concepts have been applied to medicine including surgery. Engineers have taken many of the older models of education and improved upon them with high-tech medical simulation tools. Engineering in medical education: The influence of engineering in medical education is too numerous to mention here so I will mention some of the most recent. Surgery: What I’ve seen in newspapers and medical related journals is the introduction of robotics in surgery. However, robotic assisted surgery is not a common occurrence since the cost of a Da Vinci surgical unit, an Aesop Surgical Unit, or a Zeus Robotic surgical system are very high and technical support is virtually non-existent; non-existent as reported by BMETs in the hospitals. What can help a surgeon improve their skills safely and not by traditional practice (on patients), is with high tech simulation.