Christopher Palmer, MD

I am currently an Associate Professor of Anesthesiology (Critical Care) and Emergency Medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. I am also the Co-Medical Director for the Barnes Jewish/Washington University ICU Telemedicine program. I took a keen interest in Emergency Medicine during college as a member of the Virginia Tech Rescue Squad where I earned my EMT-Basic certification.  After medical school at SUNY Upstate University (Syracuse, NY) I matched into EM at the University of Cincinnati.  During Emergency Medicine residency, I was captivated by complex physiology in the acutely ill and desired additional continuity of care, which lead to critical care fellowship training at Washington University. I stayed on as faculty at Washington University where the initial focus of my career was resident/fellow education and collaboration in research projects. My niche in emergency critical care came into focus with the launch of the ICU telemedicine program in 2016 and my leadership role within it.  I have co-authored both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed work in telemedicine and lectured on a national stage.

Telemedicine is the future of healthcare, and importantly improves patient access to high quality care while remaining cost effective. I have helped build a telemedicine program that initially covered ~80 ICU beds at BJH, and now covers nearly 300 ICU beds across the BJC network. Through efforts to standardize critical care practices throughout the region and identify patient outliers, we have made tremendous progress to improve the care of critically ill ICU patients. However, critical care should be geographically agnostic, and given ICU bed capacity issues, more work needs to be done to bring intensivist level support outside the walls of the ICU, and this is the focus of my ongoing research.  

Given the secular ICU bed shortage and workforce crisis, providing critical care outside the walls of the ICU is becoming more necessary. An on demand tele critical care service (provided by the Tele ICU at BJC/WU) could alleviate some of these challenges via assisting busy bedside providers with alert monitoring, triage, and treatment support when consulted. A tele critical care consult service could be a feasible way to prevent lower acuity ICU admissions (easing ICU bed constraints), be seen as helpful to the bedside team in a variety of ways (including facilitating ICU transfer if indicated), and may ultimately improve patient centered outcomes by recognizing decompensating patients earlier and instituting critical care interventions promptly.  This can be done on the floors and in the ED across the entire BJC healthcare system given the scalability of telemedicine.  

On a personal note, I am 43 and married to my wife Caitlin, and we have two kids (girl – age 5, boy – age 2) and live in the suburbs.  I love working out and staying fit (home gym, Lifetime membership, Tough Mudders), traveling with my family, hiking, new experiences, parks and swimming with the kids, date nights with my wife, drinking wine and craft beer, golfing, the Buffalo Bills (diehard fan), gardening/landscaping/flowers, my 2 cats, and Bitcoin.  I write a free newsletter (https://cryptopulse.substack.com/about) about it to try and educate other healthcare professionals regarding this revolutionary savings technology.  Bitcoin is a mild obsession of mine and has allowed me to learn a tremendous amount about the traditional finance world, which I love to talk about.  

My mentorship role has been limited in the past, but I am open to mentoring junior faculty now that I am mid-career and have experience to lean on.  Having been at BJH since 2012, I know the ropes and the idiosyncrasies of the institution.  My career has been a series of fortunate breaks where opportunity was recognized and seized through hardwork.  I hope to help junior faculty identify their opportunities, follow their true passions, maintain an optimal work-life balance, and support/encourage/critique them appropriately during their early career years.