What’s the connection between snakebites and red meat allergies? What happens when you get botox injections within your body? How is iodine used to diagnose a stroke? How can a machine act as the heart and lungs outside of your body? These clinical questions have biomedical engineering answers. Within this course, we will connect the knowledge gained in your second year courses to both medical questions and your future classes. We will apply learned skills from courses such as Physiology I, Biomechanics, and Computational BME to case reports, operating room protocols, and clinical diagnoses. With the help of your classmates, we will explore how your learned skills are being used everyday by doctors and other medical professionals in hospitals and clinics!

As this is a one credit elective course, our mission is to expose you to the clinical side of biomedical engineering, to help the curious engineer gain context for their learning as well as provide insight to pre-med students. The main objectives of this course are:

1. To gain familiarity with medical terminology, medical devices, how hospitals operate, and to increase overall health literacy
2. To describe and recognize interactions between diseases and specific disease pathologies
3. To prepare for future BME courses by connecting learned knowledge to clinical situations
4. To gain clinical insights to aid in future career path planning 

Why did we create this course? 

We are 5 BME undergraduate students from the summer 2019 BME Clinical Scholars Program, and we are eager to share our experiences with you. The program consisted of 10 weeks in the UVa Hospital paired with third year medical students, observing surgeries, procedures, and consultations. Our perspective of the role BME plays in the clinical setting was greatly broadened and we want to share that insight with you. We are happy to answer any questions you have! 

• Jillian Butler - 3rd year
• Rebecca Della Croce - 3rd year
• Georgie Mackenzie - 4th year
• Jessica Mahoney  - 4th year 
• Vinny Sciortino - 4th year
• Dr. Brian Helmke - Associate Professor