Mohammad Zain Ghani Hashmi, MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery, Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, Department of Surgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Carlos A. Camargo, MD, DrPH
Professor of Emergency Medicine & Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Conn Chair in Emergency Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital
Chief, Emergency Medicine Network
National Study to Characterize Telehealth Use for Trauma Care in U.S. Emergency Departments
Trauma centers are specialized hospital units with comprehensive resources to care for the injured. Receiving care from a trauma center within one hour after sustaining an injury can improve outcomes and save lives. Yet, 30 million (mostly rural) patients in the United States cannot be transported to, and treated at, a trauma center within a timely manner, leading to a disproportionately high number of deaths and inefficient care coordination. While building new trauma centers in rural areas can help improve access to care, this process is costly, time-consuming, and has not yielded significant improvements. An alternative solution to accessing trauma care in rural areas is to use telehealth specifically, teletrauma. Using audio-video links to connect with rural emergency department (ED) patients and their care team, trauma experts can help guide injury management decisions. Though initial results of this approach appear promising, more research is needed to understand how teletrauma is being applied at an individual level across rural EDs to care for injured patients.
With Stepping Strong Center funding, Mohammad Zain Ghani Hashmi, MD, and Carlos A. Camargo, MD, DrPH, will perform original data collection, data linkage, and geographical analyses to gain a deeper understanding of which EDs are utilizing teletrauma and how these EDs are treating injured patients with this method of care. This new line of research seeks to determine the benefits of using teletrauma and to help guide policies for rural trauma care.
Mohammad Zain Ghani Hashmi, MD, is an assistant professor of surgery in the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. Dr. Hashmi earned his medical degree from Aga Khan University in Pakistan before completing postdoctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins University and at the Cetner for Surgery and Public Health (CSPH), Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He completed his residency in surgery at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore and an additional trauma fellowship at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Hashmi’s clinical interests include trauma resuscitation and critical care and his research interests include trauma systems development, mitigation of injury disparities, quality improvement, and application of quantitative methods for trauma benchmarking.
Carlos A. Camargo, MD, DrPH, is a professor of emergency medicine and medicine at Harvard Medical School, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Conn Chair in Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the founder and chief of the Emergency Medicine Network (EMNet). Dr. Camargo earned his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco, and his Doctor of Public Health degree at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He completed his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and a research fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Through his work with EMNet, an international clinical research collaboration involving almost 250 emergency departments, Dr. Camargo performs clinical and health services research in emergency care.