Courtesy Photo | Capt. Tyler Carruth, medical provider for the Texas Medical Command at Contingency...... read more read more
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BASRA, Iraq – Capt. Tyler Carruth remembers being introduced to computers at a young age when his parents bought him a Commodore 64, one of the first home computers. He tinkered on it, marveling at what today seems primitive.
Carruth grew up inspired by his experiences going to work with his father, a doctor and family practitioner. A love of computers combined with his experience in the medical field helped determine Carruth’s mission to make computers work to improve health care.
After graduating high school, Carruth jumped into college at Louisiana State University, but he was missing something.
“After a year of college, I needed maturity, discipline, and a means to pay for it,” said Carruth.
The Baton Rouge native joined the Louisiana Army National Guard in 1993 as a combat medic. When he graduated from the LSU Health and Science Center’s physician assistant program in 2000, he was commissioned as an officer in the Army.
“It gave me great direction, and I got to do great things,” said Carruth.
While looking for a job in Texas, Carruth was offered the opportunity to work for NASA at the Johnson Space Center, training astronauts and cosmonauts bound for the International Space Station. Carruth said there at JSC, he trained shuttle crews, who were mostly engineers and pilots, in labs, hospitals, and parabola flights, which are meant to mimic the effects of the weightlessness in space.
“My job was to train astronauts and cosmonauts and help them with basics; everything from CPR, all the way up to how to suture in space, how to do pretty invasive medical procedures,” he said. “All with a caveat: you are teaching them to do it in microgravity, where there’s no such thing as placing something on the table.”
“Trying to improve healthcare and outcomes for the crews was very important,” added Carruth.
While working for NASA, Carruth was invited by his mentor, Sriram Iyengar, to come to the graduate program at the University of Texas.
“I was working in medicine with my eye on technology,” said Carruth. “The more I thought about it the more I started to get into programming.”
Carruth worked with Iyengar at UT to help develop Guideviews, a program that works on almost any computer platform including smart phones, designed to guide a person through a medical procedure; for instance, how to treat decompression sickness, a common medical emergency aboard the ISS.
“What Guideviews would do is take a procedure and encode it fully in multimedia,” said Carruth. “And really that kind of cemented this passion of mine for using technology and data analytics and decision-support tools to improve health care.”
“My interest is data analytics,” he said. “It’s using massive amounts of future medical outcomes data and current claims data and mining this information to be able to recognize patterns, and then to develop programs that can assist in improving health care.”
Carruth returned home to Baton Rouge to work for the Department of Health and Hospitals for the state of Louisiana as the health information technology projects lead. There he was responsible for helping create a financial incentives program to get medical providers in the state to adopt electronic health record systems to replace their old paper files.
“If everybody starts adopting electronic health records and using them in a meaningful way, you can improve health by being able to track and report diseases, and better manage patient care,” said Carruth. “It makes health information portable and starts to cut down on costs by getting rid of redundant tests and medical error.”
When the Telemedicine Advanced Technology Research Center in Fort Detrick, Md. offered a grant to military medical officers for research projects to improve health care for service members, Carruth applied for and was awarded the grant of more than $241,000.
Sponsored by Brooke Army Medical Center, Carruth plans to use the grant to build software for the Guideviews program on nine tactical combat medical care procedures, based on courses medical personnel in the military must take before deploying to a combat zone.
Carruth, a father of three sons, deployed to Iraq with the Texas Medical Command in December 2010 in support of Operation New Dawn as a medical care provider. There he was responsible for testing a blue-tooth enabled electrocardiogram for Blackhawk helicopters.
The device was designed to wirelessly transmit vital medical data about a casualty during a medical evacuation.
He spent nights on his deployment playing chess with fellow service members and Iraqi locals, doing what he called “Kung-Fu of the mind.” He even plans to start a non-profit organization when he returns home to introduce disadvantaged children to chess in schools.
Carruth has made a career of getting a foothold for programming in health care. He has come a long way since tinkering with his Commodore 64, to training NASA astronauts, serving in Iraq, and helping create software and programs to help save lives.
| Date Taken: | 08.08.2011 |
| Date Posted: | 08.13.2011 08:24 |
| Story ID: | 75300 |
| Location: | BASRA, IQ |
| Web Views: | 394 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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