YHEM Residency

Dr. Jack Ko serves as the Director of Emergency Airway Management. Dr. Ko joined YHEM in 2019 after working in a busy community ED outside of Baltimore for almost 20 years.  He brings a wealth of valuable community emergency medicine experience to bolster the diversity of our faculty. He even worked through the transition from paper charts to the electronic medical record!

One of his longstanding clinical interests is expertise in airway management. He is one of our faculty that teaches the nationally recognized Difficult Airway course to our residents. Together with Dr. Aizad Dasti, he established our department’s airway registry. All video laryngoscopy intubations in the department are recorded and reviewed. Residents are provided with this video and detailed step-by-step feedback regarding technique. Learners at all levels benefit from this review. Those starting out get a chance to review anatomy and have discussions about where the difficulties were encountered. Advanced learners can practice rescue techniques with the same technical feedback. The ability to immediately revert back to video laryngoscopy maximizes both learning opportunity and patient safety.

Beyond technical feedback, this registry allows for data analysis. Residents are provided with data points like their overall average time to successful intubation. Further analysis specific to trauma and pediatrics allows for feedback in these niche airway scenarios. This specialized approach to coaching airway management gives confidence to our residents that they will graduate with the ability to manage any type of airway compromise that might show up in their future practice.