Dan Buckland MD PhD
Resident, Emergency Medicine, George Washington University Hospital, Washington DC
Research Affiliate, AeroAstro, MIT, Cambridge, MA
Title: Engineering Problems in Clinical and Space Medicine
Engineers and Physicians are taught to approach questions and analyze failure in different ways, this affects the types of problems that are addressed and whether countermeasures or solutions found to those problems are ever applied. Using a survey of clinical space medicine topics as an outline, this talk will discuss differences in the training and mindset of these different professional classes as well as a multitude of issues that are ripe for analytical problem solving approaches, such as human factors issues in delivery of clinical care, adaptation of automation in medical workflows, telemedicine, remote medicine, and emergency medicine. Solutions to these problems should lower the medical requirements needed for exploration class missions and commercial space flight, as a wider variety of chronic and acute diseases would be able to be managed in-flight rather than selected out in the astronaut recruitment process.