Advancements in technology have impacted our lives in every possible manner. From how we receive information to how we perceive information, from how we communicate to how we lead our mundane lifestyle – we are amidst a tech bubble.
Although perhaps undervalued in the eyes of the average person, the healthcare industry is no different in this technological revolution.
While data analytics and smart devices have already penetrated the healthcare industry, advancements in technologies such as AI and IoT are slated to not only reduce the overall cost, but also expand the reach of the industry and save millions of lives.
However, to facilitate this massive transformation, there’s a need for experts who can bridge the gap between healthcare and engineering.
Dr. Ming-Chien Chyu, Founding President of Healthcare Engineering Alliance Society (HEALS) is one such erudite personality who has been at the forefront of this unique intersection for over 15 years.
“Engineering has been playing a crucial role in serving healthcare, bringing about revolutionary advances in healthcare. Many healthcare problems have benefited from engineering solutions, while many advancements in healthcare stem from breakthroughs in engineering/technology. Healthcare engineering encompasses engineering involved in all aspects of healthcare,” mentions a passionate Dr. Chyu.
A transformational leader in every right, Dr. Chyu spearheads over 15,000 members and followers in a quest to bridge the gap between healthcare and engineering, advancing the industry, and promoting collaborative and innovative exchanges between the two domains.
As the Cover Feature of Exeleon’s Transformational Leaders issue, we dive into the journey of Dr. Ming-Chien Chyu and into the world of healthcare engineering.
A Broad Vision
As an engineering professor, Dr. Chyu helped many of his students explore job opportunities in the healthcare industry. In doing so, his interactions with healthcare industry employers and engineers in the healthcare sector led him towards a realization.
“I learned about the deficiency of the current engineering curricula and how engineering students need to be better trained to work in healthcare,” he recalls. Owing to this realization, Dr. Chyu began exploring the industry and introduced several programs that would tackle this burgeoning deficiency.
Furthermore, Dr. Chyu was inspired by his wife, Professor Chwan-Li (Leslie) Shen, Texas Tech University School of Medicine. He mentions, “I learned about the unmet needs facing healthcare professionals, which motivated me to develop innovative approaches and platforms to address those and other issues, and to introduce those challenges to the students in my class.”
Over the years, Dr. Chyu has garnered a lot of support from members of HEALS and his followers across the globe. Additionally, the support from the government (FDA and NIH in particular), healthcare industry, and Texas Tech University has further elevated the pursuit for his passion.
Talking about this journey, he mentions, “It was an incredible journey from ‘not sure about what I am doing’ to exciting connection with more and more people sharing the same passion and being able to help people with different needs on a daily basis. That is the major impetus that drives me moving down this road every day with great enjoyment.”
The Impact
Over the course of his journey, Dr. Chyu has helped medical doctors as well as healthcare professionals by elevating their inventions and developments towards manufacturing and commercialization.
As a professor in Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Chyu has worked in the field of healthcare engineering for over 15 years, founding several organizations and platforms to integrate healthcare and engineering, contributing to uplifting the industry. His achievements and innovative measures over the years have made him a pioneer in the healthcare engineering space and beyond.
Bringing Better Patient Outcomes with Clinical Inventions
Dr. Chyu paved the way for engineering professors and researchers to connect with clinicians to make sure their inventions can really benefit patient outcomes. He did so by creating a platform that empowered healthcare professionals, engineers, researchers, inventors, consultants, entrepreneurs, and companies to collaborate on projects leading to commercialization of new medical devices and technologies.
On the working front, the platform comes alive through a compilation of technical projects that addresses unmet needs. These needs are mostly in patient care, that originate from clinicians, engineers, and medical device/technology companies seeking collaborations on the research, design, prototyping, testing, clinical trial, regulation, FDA clearance/approval, manufacture, capital funding, etc. Moreover, the platform works as an excellent learning portal as it allows engineering students to work alongside clinicians, engineers, and companies on real-world healthcare projects.
Medical Device Platform to Provide Information in a Systematic Way
Making way into novel medical devices, Dr. Chyu established a powerful, comprehensive, user-friendly medical device platform that provides systematic state-of-the-technology information for all medical devices (210,000), including the most recent, cleared/approved by FDA.
A Journal for Engineers & Healthcare Professionals
Dr. Chyu cites one of the most crucial challenges that engineering researchers face while conducting healthcare research is finding the right platform to publish their results.
He mentions, “On one end, their papers might be rejected by engineering journals for too much healthcare contents and hard to find qualified engineering reviewers to review their manuscripts, and on the other hand, it can also get rejected by healthcare/biomedical journals for too much engineering contents and no qualified reviewers.” The same problem likewise persists for healthcare/biomedical researchers trying to publish their engineering papers.
Addressing the same, Dr. Chyu founded, as the Founding Editor-in-Chief, the Journal of Healthcare Engineering, one of the first journals that publish scientific articles in the intersection of healthcare and engineering and encourage collaborative research in this field focusing on impact on patient outcomes.
Alongside the journal, Dr. Chyu also introduced the Healthcare Engineering Online Communities that brings healthcare and engineering communities together. The information-rich portal provides relevant, up-to-date information covering more than 500 topics including the likes of AI, IoT, 3D Printing, Engineering for Cancer Diagnosis, Surgery, and Nanomedicine.
Also Read: Stan Samole: Fueling a New Chapter of Inclusivity
Where Medical & Engineering Specialties Amalgamate
Dr. Ming-Chien Chyu has made significant contributions to helping engineering students and young engineers succeed in healthcare industry and helping healthcare industry recruit qualified engineers. The healthcare industry needs more qualified engineers from various engineering disciplines in terms of both quantity and quality.
However, he mentions, “Most existing engineering curricula cover very little or no healthcare except biomedical engineering, but healthcare industry needs to hire far more engineers from other engineering disciplines than biomedical engineering, particularly computer, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineers.”
To bridge this gap, Dr. Chyu came up with a program that invites medical experts with knowledge of engineering and medical innovation to deliver lectures to engineering students. The course emphasizes healthcare issues and problems that need precise engineering solutions. Also invited as guest lecturers are engineering leaders from the healthcare industry as well as medical school professors with engineering degrees. These experts with dual expertise turn out to be most effective in teaching healthcare to engineering students. The transformational leader also works with healthcare engineering experts and industry leaders on how to better prepare engineering students for healthcare employment, as well as university professors and administrators on how to enhance their curricula.
A Healthcare Engineering Certificate Program
In helping prepare engineering students for jobs in healthcare, Dr. Chyu also developed a healthcare engineering certificate program featuring the innovative Cutting-Edge Courses Customized (CeCoCu), which allows individuals to self-decide the course topic, objectives, and scope of their learning, based on their own backgrounds, interests, career strategies, and market opportunities.
Dr. Chyu claims, “This certificate program was also designed to help practicing engineers transition from other sectors of industry to healthcare, as well as help healthcare professionals learn to apply engineering to their practice, problem solving, and advancing healthcare.”
Graduate Degree Program, Jobs, and Mentoring Platforms
Another feat among his long list of achievements was Dr. Chyu’s founding of one of the world’s first graduate healthcare engineering degree programs. He also pioneered the first platform that assists engineers and engineering students in finding employment and internships in the healthcare business, as well as a platform that assists healthcare industry firms in recruiting skilled engineers and engineering students.
The Healthcare Engineering Mentoring Program (HEMP), in his own words, is “a platform where healthcare engineering professionals and leaders volunteer to share their knowledge, skills, and experience to help engineering students prepare for occupations in the healthcare/medical technology industry, and to help young healthcare engineers thrive.”
The Healthcare Engineering Boom
The healthcare industry is currently one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing industries. With this fast-paced growth, the demand for healthcare engineering professionals is only going to increase. Dr. Chyu predicts, “As healthcare changes rapidly and becomes increasingly complex under technological, economic, social, and regulatory impacts, it is anticipated that Healthcare Engineering will play a role of growing importance in almost every aspect of healthcare and will also be a major factor that advances healthcare.”
He mentions that engineering students need to be encouraged to consider jobs in healthcare as it offers remarkable growth opportunities, interdisciplinary challenges, and favorable long-term career prospects and stability. Moreover, it enables these young minds to directly contribute to the welfare of human life and health as an engineer.
He advices aspiring engineers in this space by saying, “Irrespective of specialties, engineers need to work with and learn from healthcare professionals, particularly clinicians, about how to design and manufacture things that can really help clinicians in patient care. Proactively seeking close collaboration to the other side is the key.”
As technology continues to create new areas for engineers to work in healthcare, and the fusion of engineering with health sciences leads to a greater demand for engineers, Healthcare Engineering will be recognized as one of the most important professions where engineers make major contributions directly benefiting human health.
The Future
Going forward, Ming points out that Healthcare Engineering professionals will face challenges associated with issues such as the continued rise in healthcare costs, the quality and safety of healthcare, management of common diseases and pandemic, care of the aging population, the impact of high technology, increasing demands for regulatory compliance, risk management, and reducing litigation risk.
In such a scenario, healthcare engineers will play a significant role in creating, developing, and implementing cutting-edge devices and systems attributed to advances in electronics, information technology, miniaturization, material science, optics, and other fields.
Looking at his personal journey, Dr. Chyu concludes by mentioning that he will continue doing what he does between healthcare and engineering: “Everyone has been talking about it; I am just someone actually doing it.”
Visit Healthcare Engineering Website.
Contact Dr. Ming-Chien Chyu on LinkedIn.
