Mit Patel, MD

I am applying for the SAEM Member-at-Large position because I believe I can strengthen the relationships that EM physicians maintain within and beyond their Department. To thrive in a lifelong healthcare career, I believe that all healthcare workers exercise curiosity, and to this end, professional organizations of each discipline (e.g., ANA for nursing, the APA for pharmacy, SAEM for EM, etc.) have built pathways channeling curiosity into inquiry into implementable solutions. As EM physicians, we naturally are multilingual in the language of healthcare. We understand that improvements in Door-to-Needle times, CLABSI rates, or Sepsis-related mortality, are achieved when working collaboratively. These avenues for collaboration present significant opportunities for personal growth for ourselves, professional development for our field and ultimately push the envelope forward on patient care. While individual RAMS members may be looking inward for novel ideas, I believe that sustained transformation in emergency care lies beyond traditional medical education. If elected, I will work on developing projects with input from our closest colleagues to achieve mutual goals for our organizations.

My name is Mit Patel, and I attended the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago obtaining my BBA in Information Systems. I was a Research Assistant to multiple PI’s performing research on a variety of topics from the impact of Airbnb on the lodging industry to identifying outcomes in Kidney Transplantation, and even onto the impact of heterochromatin on the Human Genome. I spent all 4 years on the Board of the Hindu Students’ Organization, a religious and cultural organization under Campus Ministry, tasked with building an accepting interfaith community at Loyola. I obtained my MD at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria where I gained an appreciation for Quality Improvement and Patient Safety and the tremendously impactful role that EM physicians play for healthcare organizations. Truthfully, the rigor of medical school was beyond my anticipation, and I found balancing academic clinical performance with research difficult. Now as a resident at Henry Ford Hospital, I’ve renewed my research endeavors by studying the impact of ED-initiated Buprenorphine on healthcare utilization, which I presented at the SAEM Midwest Regional Meeting in 2023. I have since led an investigator-initiated project examining the curricular effectiveness of a structured POCUS curriculum and a handheld ultrasound device on ultrasound usage by PGY-1 EM residents. I hope to present this research at the SAEM conference in 2024.

These scholarly activities have introduced to me an entirely new and previously obscured world within emergency medicine. Participation in these activities has made me a more complete physician, and I wish to engender professional development for future EM leaders as a Member-at-Large.