A technology-driven transformation is taking place and producing a great impact on healthcare. Engineers are at the forefront of creating and bringing new technologies to healthcare in the process of this transformation. The specialty area of engineering involved in all aspects of healthcare is Healthcare Engineering. In our search of world’s visionary leaders making a difference, we identified Dr. Ming-Chien Chyu, Founding President of Healthcare Engineering Alliance Society (HEALS) and the pioneer in Healthcare Engineering.
A myriad of researchers and academics in technical fields like biomedical engineering have made remarkable contributions to the advent of different medical technologies and devices. Our research found that Dr. Chyu is one of very few engineers who have made contributions not just limited to particular medical technologies or devices in specific technical areas, but to an overall, widespread, profound, and long-lasting impact on healthcare as a whole. The programs and platforms Dr. Chyu established not only facilitate advancing healthcare through engineering and promote collaboration involving almost all areas of engineering and healthcare, but also help engineering students and young engineers succeed in the healthcare industry. His seminal works have served and will continue to serve as the cornerstone for the development of Healthcare Engineering as a field of specialty for years to come. Considering his long list of outstanding pioneering and continued contributions to the field, we concur with the other media sources that Dr. Chyu deserves the title of the Pioneer or the Father of Healthcare Engineering.
As an overarching effort to bridge the gap between healthcare and engineering, HEALS seeks to develop cooperative relationship with different engineering professional organizations, healthcare/medical professional organizations, the healthcare industry, and government for the purpose of promoting and facilitating mutually beneficial exchange of technical, scientific and professional knowledge, closer professional links among the organizations, and professional enhancement and lifelong learning opportunities for all members involved.
For his achievements in the field of Healthcare Engineering, Dr. Chyu was recognized by various magazines as one of the “Top 100 Innovators & Entrepreneurs” (cover story), “Best Inspiring Leaders of the Year”, “Innovation Excellence Award”, “Transformational Business Leaders of the Year” (cover story), “30 Most Inspiring Leaders to watch 2022”, “Most Visionary Education Leaders”, “Most Influential Leaders in Healthcare 2022” (cover story), “World’s Visionary Leaders Making a Difference – 2022” (cover story), and “10 Most Innovative Healthcare Leaders to Watch 2022”, among other honors. The Healthcare Engineering Alliance Society he founded was recognized as one of the “Most Influential Companies & Organizations” and “Top 10 Innovative companies/Organizations to watch in 2022”.
Landmark Contributions
As one of his many contributions, Dr. Chyu established a platform with the goal of assisting engineering students and young engineers in the healthcare sector to flourish, as well as assisting the sector to find suitable and qualified engineers. This platform is part of the Healthcare Engineering Alliance Society (HEALS), a global organization founded in 2016, under the leadership of Dr. Chyu, the Founding President. HEALS is dedicated to advancing all facets of healthcare through engineering approaches and methods, bridging the gap and promoting collaboration between engineering and healthcare, preparing engineering students and engineers for careers in healthcare, and assisting healthcare professionals in using engineering to address healthcare issues.
All service platforms in HEALS were initiated by and established under the direction of Dr. Chyu. He has spent years assisting medical doctors and other healthcare professionals whose inventions, based on their clinical experience and knowledge, have advanced to the point where they require assistance from engineers, researchers, consultants, or businesses to elevate to a level more conducive to FDA approval, manufacturing, and commercialization. On the other hand, Dr. Chyu has helped engineers, engineering professors, researchers, and companies connect with clinicians to make sure their inventions or products can really benefit patient outcomes. Based on such experience, he established a platform that allows healthcare professionals, engineers, researchers, inventors, consultants, investors, entrepreneurs, and companies to collaborate on projects leading to the commercialization of new medical devices and technologies.
This platform showcases a variety of technical projects that address unmet needs in patient care. These projects are typically submitted by clinicians, engineers, and medical devices and technology firms who are seeking collaborations on the conceptualization, research, design, prototyping, testing, clinical trial, regulation compliance, FDA clearance or approval, manufacture, capital funding, etc. Additionally, this platform offers fantastic chances for engineering students to gain experience by collaborating with doctors, engineers, and businesses on practical healthcare initiatives.
In order to help engineering students get ready for careers in the healthcare and medical technology industry and to foster the growth of young healthcare engineers, professionals and leaders in the field of healthcare engineering volunteer their time through the Healthcare Engineering Mentoring Program, a platform created by Dr. Chyu in HEALS.
Dr. Chyu has created a thorough, user-friendly medical device platform (Medical Device Net) that offers systematic state-of-the-technology information for all medical devices (currently over 270,000), including the most recent ones cleared or approved by the FDA. This platform is a powerful tool for the invention and development of new medical devices for student projects as well as for healthcare engineering professionals.
It might be difficult for engineering experts and students performing healthcare research to find the best place to publish their findings. Because there was too much healthcare information in their papers and it was difficult to locate qualified engineering reviewers to review their manuscripts, engineering journals might reject their submissions. On the other side, medical and biomedical journals could also reject them if there was too much engineering content and a lack of qualified reviewers. The same problem faces healthcare and biomedical researchers trying to publish their results involving engineering. To deal with such an issue, Dr. Chyu founded and served as the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Healthcare Engineering. It is one of the earliest journals to publish research on the nexus between engineering and healthcare. Additionally, it promotes interdisciplinary research in this area with a direct emphasis on patient outcomes.
As another initiative, Dr. Chyu introduced the Healthcare Engineering Online Communities, which unite the engineering and healthcare communities and offer up-to-date knowledge on more than 500 topics, such as artificial intelligence, telemedicine, nanomedicine, engineering for cancer diagnosis, 3D printing in surgery, and many more.
Bridging the Gap
The healthcare sector requires more qualified engineers from a variety of engineering specialties. With the exception of biomedical engineering, the majority of the current engineering curricula (especially undergraduate curricula) addresses very little to no healthcare or biomedicine. Nevertheless, the healthcare industry needs to employ a lot more engineers from non-biomedical engineering fields, particularly chemical, computer, electrical, and mechanical engineers. However, the majority of engineering students are unaware of the job options available in the healthcare sector.
To bridge such a gap, Dr. Chyu started a program that invites medical doctors with expertise in healthcare engineering and medical technology innovation, particularly those few MDs with engineering degrees, to deliver lectures to engineering students. The topics of focus are healthcare issues and problems that need engineering solutions to improve patient outcomes directly. Engineering leaders from the healthcare industry, particularly the medical device and technology sectors, as well as medical school professors with degrees in engineering, are also invited as guest speakers. These experts with dual expertise are most qualified and effective in teaching healthcare to engineering students.
In helping prepare engineering students for jobs in healthcare, Dr. Chyu developed a healthcare engineering certificate program featuring the innovative “Cutting-Edge Courses Customized” (CeCoCu), which allows individuals to self-define the course topic, objectives, and scope of their learning, based on their backgrounds, interests, career strategies, and market opportunities. This certificate program was also designed to help practicing engineers transition from other sectors of industry to healthcare, as well as help healthcare professionals (physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals, etc.) learn to apply engineering to their practice, problem-solving, and advancing healthcare. Dr. Chyu works with healthcare engineering professionals and industry leaders on strategies to better train engineering students for healthcare jobs, and helps university professors and administrators improve their curricula.
At Texas Tech University, Dr. Chyu founded one of the first graduate programs in healthcare engineering in the world. Additionally, he was a trailblazer in the development of the first platform that helps engineers and engineering students find jobs and internships in the healthcare sector, as well as a platform that helps healthcare industry companies hire qualified engineers and engineering students.
Becoming an Expert
Dr. Chyu is a tenured professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and an adjunct professor in the School of Medicine at Texas Tech University, as well as the Founding President of the Healthcare Engineering Alliance Society. He has conducted research funded by the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, and U.S. Department of Agriculture, as well as national laboratories, professional societies, state governments, and private foundations. He has participated in superconductor research at Argonne National Laboratory, the design of the International Space Station at NASA Johnson Space Center, and served as a consultant for nuclear energy research at Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Chyu is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Healthcare Engineering (3.822) and has served on several national-level technical committees such as the chair of the Superconductivity Technical Committee in the Advanced Energy Systems Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He has authored 200 technical publications on engineering and healthcare. Dr. Chyu is a Fellow of ASME, a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Trustees, and has received over 30 awards/recognitions in the US and worldwide.
The Journey
When Dr. Chyu talked to people, everyone seemed to have strong feelings about the need to bridge the gap between healthcare and engineering, but very few could be committed to taking action and making a difference. Dr. Chyu may be one of the first who actually formulated and implemented ideas after consulting with hundreds of experts individually at the nexus between engineering and healthcare.
In the early years of his career, Dr. Chyu struggled to explain what healthcare engineering was to many of the people he encountered. Dr. Chyu, led 40 professional co-authors and with the help of more than 280 reviewers from around the world, first described healthcare engineering in a landmark whitepaper and on the current Wikipedia profile after speaking with hundreds of people. His definition and efforts have been the cornerstone for the growth of Healthcare Engineering as an academic discipline, an area of research, a field of specialty, and a profession for many years or decades to come.
Dr. Chyu keeps generating new ideas and improving HEALS’s services not only by communicating every day with members and followers of this society, but also by taking the initiative to reach out to people he has never met but who may help them generate new ideas. He shares, “We not only communicate with people who can help us, particularly those experts at the intersection of healthcare and engineering, but also with people who need our help. These are healthcare professionals (including physicians, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals, etc.); engineers and engineering leaders working in the healthcare industry (medical devices and technology, etc.); researchers, professors, and students in both healthcare and engineering; inventors, consultants, and entrepreneurs.” He believes that a great idea is usually generated after talking with multiple individuals. Through communicating and learning every day from experts who provide valuable advice and stimulating thoughts, as well as from people who need help, while keeping up with the latest technology and trends, the HEALS team learns what healthcare professionals need and how engineers can help, as well as how to create synergy between healthcare and engineering.
Dr. Chyu asserts, “It was an incredible journey from ‘not sure about what I am doing’ to exciting connections 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 Dr. Chyu down this road every day with great enjoyment.
“Dr. Chyu has been a pioneer in the field of healthcare engineering and was one of the early advocates for applying engineering practices to efforts to enhance the delivery of healthcare.” -James P. Bagian, MD, PE, US National Academy of Medicine, US National Academy of Engineering, former NASA Astronaut
“Dr. Chyu may have already secured a historical position in the development of healthcare engineering.”- Fazle Hussain, PhD, US National Academy of Engineering, The World Academy of Science.
Written by Steve Sanchez.
