Alan Tung is on a mission to make breathing tube insertion easier.
As a fourth-year UBC anesthesia resident, he has performed many intubations – a life-saving procedure that involves inserting a breathing tube to allow a patient to breathe via ventilator. He and his colleagues are often performing this procedure under very challenging conditions, where blood or vomit fill the airway of a critically-ill patient and make a successful intubation difficult.
The ASAP Suction team, winners of the Faculty of Medicine’s Catalyst Award for Interdisciplinary Collaboration at the 2019 Great Hatch.
He brought this challenge to this year’s Great Hatch healthcare innovation event, where he led an interdisciplinary team of students with backgrounds in medicine, engineering, product design, and speech-language pathology to develop a solution. Called ASAP Suction, their model was awarded the Faculty of Medicine’s Catalyst Award for Interdisciplinary Collaboration at this year’s event.
Here, Dr. Tung shares his experience with the Great Hatch and what’s next for ASAP Suction.
How did you get involved with Hatching Health?
I first joined the Great Hatch competition last year, and I had lots of fun meeting people from totally different backgrounds and collaborating with them to create something new. The competition was an opportunity for me to get creative and approach problems in healthcare from a different angle from what I am used to in my work.
Tell us about your challenge and solution
We created ASAP Suction to help manage soiled airways during emergency intubation. The problem was identified during my clinical rotations, when I and others encountered vomit or blood in the mouth during this procedure. Vomit and blood make this procedure very challenging, and increase the odds of a failed intubation. I didn’t find any easy solution to this problem in the medical literature, so I brought the problem forward to Hatching Health.
ASAP Suction is our solution to this challenge. It is essentially a suctioning tool that can be integrated with the breathing tube to allow for simultaneous suctioning and intubation. It has a containment chamber to prevent contamination of the internal walls of the breathing tube when it is being removed after a successful intubation.
What’s next for ASAP Suction?
We have a working model, and we are currently working towards creating a prototype.
What advice do you have for other students interested in participating in the Great Hatch?
Definitely do the work to define the problem down to its root cause. It makes things easier to communicate that problem to the judges and to figure out the solution to the problem.
The UBC Faculty of Medicine is proud to be a gold sponsor of the Great Hatch. This annual weekend-long event brings together individuals from engineering, healthcare, design, and business to work in interdisciplinary teams to prototype solutions to healthcare challenges. To learn more, visit: www.hatchinghealth.ca.
