Educator Carla Pugh, M.D., Ph.D., designs medical simulators equipped with sensors that provide a quantitative assessment of medical skills. Inspired from an early age to “heal” her toys, she earned a bachelor’s degree in Neurobiology from UC Berkeley and an MD from Howard University School of Medicine. She describes herself as a visual learner who has difficulty not using her hands to learn a new skill. Early in his medical training, he realized that there was a deficit in the quantitative measurement of practical or “haptic” skills. Dr. Pugh sought to fill this gap in medical training and realized that she first needed to learn more about how to educate effectively. He received his Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University and was the first surgeon to receive a Ph.D. in Education. Recently, she returned to Stanford University, where she became Professor of Surgery in the School of Medicine and Director of the Center for Clinical Technology Improvement.
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“Simulation training is underutilized in the medical field and Dr. Pugh has dedicated her career to filling that gap,” said Grace Peng, Ph.D., director of the NIBIB program in Mathematical Modeling, Simulation and Analysis.
As a grantee of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering for over ten years, Dr. Pugh has been working on creating new technologies to quantify haptic skills during medical training. His research uses simulation and advanced engineering technologies to develop new approaches to assessing and defining medical skills competency.
“She is an international expert in using motion sensors and trackers to measure performance. Her work is an excellent example of how simulation can be used to generate measurable metrics to test the performance of medical skills of both expert doctors and relatively inexperienced doctors,” said Dr. Peng.
Data for their research is collected using a combination of sensor motion trackers and videos to quantify practical medical skills.
She stated, “Most doctors want to know how their performance measures up to that of their peers.” Results from their breast exam simulators show that about 15 percent of doctors do not apply adequate force to feel an injury in a routine breast exam. Next, it looks to apply wearable sensors at the point of care and directly on patients instead of mannequins.
“I have hundreds of doctors lining up at medical conferences to test their sense of touch by performing routine exams like breast exams,” Dr. Pugh exclaimed.
Dr. Pugh holds three patents on the use of data acquisition and sensor technology to quantify and distinguish medical skill performance. Currently, over two hundred medical and nursing schools are using one of their sensor-enabled tools to educate their students with hands-on performance training. Dr. Pugh received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama in 2011.
Despite her many accomplishments, Dr. Pugh feels she is still striving for her greatest achievement. She believes translating the data she has collected to the point-of-care realm and placing sensors on patients to collect real-time data will be her biggest success. “It was essential for me to define the gold standard metrics for each of the different simulators I created before moving on to patients. By analyzing data collected from hundreds of doctors performing the same exam on identical mannequins, I was able to develop a performance database,” Dr. Pugh emphasized. Now that you’ve established standards, it’s time to move the sensors to patients and collect data in real time. “I believe this will redefine medical training and accurately represent what is needed to care for patients,” he explained.
While discussing the struggle of women in medicine and engineering, she noted that it is not always helpful to focus on the negative. Dr. Pugh noted, “One of the biggest struggles women face is being successful in the grant application process.” She added: “Evaluators have concluded that women are much less likely to reapply for a research grant after rejection.”
She encouraged everyone to follow Reshma Jagesi, MD, of the University of Michigan and her work on gender equity in medicine and research. Dr. Pugh said, “Dr. Jagesi is an excellent resource for navigating the path to success in a science and engineering career as a woman.” Many people told Dr. Pugh along the way that her simulators wouldn’t matter, so her advice to emerging young women in science and engineering is to “never give up.”
