Volume 35 | Issue 2

Hello SOCCA and happy summer!

It was great to see so many of you at the 2024 Annual Meeting, presented by IARS and SOCCA, in my old hometown of Seattle.  We presented what has to be the most extensive lineup of critical care content ever at a SOCCA meeting.  Many thanks to Allison Dalton and Kunal Karamchandani for an excellent group of topics and speakers.  Although the “feel” of the meeting is a little different, I hope you would agree the spirit is very much alive.  IARS has been a gracious partner in supporting the meeting.  The energy we bring to the meeting helps their own mission of education.  We make a great partnership!

It was great reconnecting with our members at the Annual Meeting in Seattle. We had a productive meeting and shared ideas to further enhance our community and outreach efforts. I am excited to announce the long-anticipated expansion of our social media presence. In addition to our existing presence on Twitter, we plan to connect with our members on LinkedIn and Facebook.

The strength of SOCCA lies in its members’ incredible talent and energy. Volunteering is one of the best ways to contribute to the Society. Each year, the SOCCA Nominations Committee reviews nominees and prepares an election ballot for available Officer and Director positions. During this election cycle, we will elect four members for the Board of Directors (for a 3-year term). Further details about SOCCA’s governance structure are outlined in our Society Bylaws.

SOCCA membership continues to grow, so it is an exciting time to be on the membership committee! The committee met at the annual meeting in Seattle in May and had extensive discussions about how best to continue to serve our members. We also had an in-person meet-up co-sponsored by Women in Critical Care (WICC) and Early Career Intensivists (ECI) workgroups, which was well attended by conference attendees. Given the success of this event, we will make arrangements to do something similar at the ASA and SCCM annually. 

In keeping with our mission of offering mentorship and an opportunity to build a community, WICC presented a new format on March 28th, the Fireside Consultancy. This Fireside Consultancy was led by Dr. Hua, Co-Chair of WICC where 4 WICC participants presented focused issues that they were facing.

Dr Matt Wiepking is the Program Director for the Anesthesia Critical Care Medicine Fellowship at the Los Angeles General Medical Center and the University of South California, he has served in this role for the past 2 years. 

Neuro-critical care constitutes a demanding, high-alert setting that requires expeditious decision-making by critical care teams in response to patient health status. The resource-intensive nature of neuro-critical care settings results in a substantial financial burden. As of 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported an annual national healthcare spending cost of $40.6 billion for non-fatal Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI), with Medicare-insured patients contributing more than 50% of this figure.¹

In 2022, the medical community was introduced to the capabilities of ChatGPT – a popular large language model (LLM) that performed exceptionally well in medical problem solving, scoring above 85% on both USMLE Step 1 and Step 2. ChatGPT is a chatbot composed of an advanced language model from the family of Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models designed by OpenAI (San Francisco, California) in 2018. It is currently the largest publicly available LLM.¹

The first public demonstration of an ether anesthetic in 1846 marked a turning point in our ability to provide safe and effective medical care. It birthed the specialty of anesthesiology as we know it today.1 While the footprint of anesthesiology has classically centered around the operating room, its practitioners quickly began bringing the expertise gained therein to other settings such as obstetrics, pain management, and critical care. Today, we are seeing a similar burgeoning of the depth and scope of the practice of critical care anesthesiologists (CCAs) beyond their traditional roles in the intensive care unit (ICU).