Yao Sun
Yao Sun, MD, PhD, has joined the UCSF School of Medicine's Department of Pediatrics as an associate professor of clinical pediatrics in the Division of Neonatology.
Sun also will serve as director of Clinical Programs for the William H. Tooley Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF Children's Hospital, working in partnership with Neonatology Division Chief David Rowitch, MD.
A neonatologist and perinatologist, Sun's special interest is medical informatics, a field at the juncture of medicine and computer science. He comes to UCSF from Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center, where he was director of neonatology.
Sun envisions a "fully connected intensive care nursery" in which all of data associated with a patient's treatment is collected, stored and organized to inform their care.
"There is a huge amount of information generated within an intensive care nursery," Sun said. "There are a lot of people who are interested in various parts of that information. If we can collect and store and organize it in a useful way it can help us diagnose and treat patients."
Sun said that there might be any number of audiences for the information -- and they're not all physicians conducting research into the care of premature and fragile newborns. An important audience will be those patients' parents.
Prior to his tenure at Kaiser, Sun was the director of the newborn medicine informatics program at Children's Hospital, Boston, and instructor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He holds a doctorate of medicine from UCLA and a doctorate of computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Need to Stay Connected
The renowned William H. Tooley Intensive Care Nursery has a long history of innovation dating back to the 1950s. UCSF's reputation for delivering and treating some of the most fragile and premature infants attracts women from great distances to deliver their babies at the medical center.
Those infants often remain hospitalized for long periods of time. Their mothers may have other children at home or other responsibilities that do not allow them to remain at their babies' bedsides throughout their hospitalizations. But a fully connected intensive care nursery would allow parents to remain "plugged in" with their babies and their babies' caregivers.
A first step to creating a connected nursery is to begin collecting electronically monitored physical data such as blood pressure, respiration, heart rate, and oxygen saturation, Sun said. A second step will be revamping the Division of Neonatology website to create a secure portal where families can access information about their infant's care. Eventually the comprehensive data capture would include laboratory values, imaging studies, clinical documentation and genetic information.
"If we can give these parents medical audio-visual contact and allow them to communicate with their infants' physicians and ask questions it could have tangible benefits when these babies go home," Sun said, "because they will know their babies better."
Sun imagines a time when parents will be able to use a secure Web portal to obtain the details of their infants' treatment and actually see their babies using audio-visual conferencing - almost like "MySpace" pages for babies in the nursery.
The UCSF Fetal Treatment Center already has implemented a service that allows patients from throughout the world to receive second-opinion evaluations via a secure web portal system called INSIDE. Sun said he is consulting with the Fetal Treatment Center staff about their technology. See
story.
Other consumers of the data would include local and remote clinicians, research investigators and administrators and regulators.
The fully connected nursery is part of a larger vision for a future of continuing innovation in the nursery, Sun said.
Neonatology Division Chief David Rowitch is planning for a neurological ICN that will address the lack of research and treatment for the care of infants at risk of or suffering from neurological injury. Birth-related neurological injury is the number one cause of mental retardation in the United States and the rate of cerebral palsy is increasing. Yet little research has been focused on developing new therapies to treat and potentially prevent them.
"My knowledge and expertise dovetails nicely with Dr. Rowitch's vision for the nursery to help better define what we need to do to change the direction of neonatal critical care," Sun said.
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