Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2021 Virtual Critical Care Congress. Now here is Dr. Lewis Kaplan, President of the Society of Critical Care Medicine. Good morning and welcome. Thank you for the privilege of serving as your president. It's been a rather different year than the one I anticipated. When I assumed the SCCM presidency last year in Orlando, we were already aware of the emergence of a novel coronavirus and were concerned about global spread. We therefore invited Dr. Shi-Yung Peng, the Chief of Intensive Care at the Wuhan Hospital that treated the first patients to share what they learned about the virus and patient care. His virtual briefing foreshadowed how we would learn from one another for the rest of the year. Just like we are doing now through virtual platforms and across multiple time zones. Before the WHO declared SARS-CoV-2 infection to be a global pandemic, SCCM had activated its disaster response plan. Later in the program, we'll explore the innovative and truly impressive education, inquiry and related activities that have flowed from those efforts. Regardless of new science and novel programming, the realities of the pandemic are uniquely personal. Right now, please join me and share a moment together to remember colleagues, friends and perhaps family members who we lost to COVID-19. Since the first case of COVID-19 disease, we've worked to reduce virus transmission and provide care for the critically ill and injured. But we also did something together of singular importance. We built global communities of clinicians linked across digital and social media bridges. Many of you online with us today are in different countries, different time zones and different practices. Thank you for spending your precious time with us. In order to help remote learning better fit into your clinical duty schedule, we have evolved our format. Our virtual Congress now spends more days, but leverages shorter sessions. We hope that this makes it easier to expand your knowledge at a variety of convenient times. Despite challenges at work and at home, members have led and inspired others to meet those difficulties head on and succeed as a team. Accordingly, the society will recognize a number of individuals that have excelled in unique ways throughout this past year. A presentation showcasing all of our award winners can be found under the convocation and awards tile on the homepage of the 50th Critical Care Congress event website. I hope you will also join us for the American College of Critical Care Medicine virtual convocation at 3.15 PM central time on Friday, February 5th. Each of the events that you usually attended in person may be located and accessed using the event page. Among the number of members who have served others with distinction, there is one who is truly extraordinary. Allow me to introduce you to this year's Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Dr. Deborah Cook. Dr. Cook is a distinguished professor of medicine, clinical epidemiology, and biostatistics at McMaster University in Canada, where she is the academic chair of critical care medicine. She's an active intensive care consultant and practices at St. Joseph's Healthcare Hamilton. Dr. Cook also holds a tier one Canada research chair in intensive care medicine from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. She was a founding member and chair of the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group, an organization well known to you, whose inquiries have helped shape the delivery of critical care. Her dedication to helping others discover new knowledge inspired creating the National Deborah J. Cook Mentorship Award. This award celebrates her commitment to training emerging scholars. Dr. Cook's career is spectacularly impressive, with a CV that includes over 700 peer-reviewed articles, addressing randomized trials, life support technology, critical illness complication prevention, end of life care, and research ethics. A sampling of her prestigious honors includes fellowship in the Royal Society, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Distinguished Lectureship, and their coveted gold leaf prize for impact. Finally, and quite appropriately, Dr. Cook's scientific leadership in improving global intensive care led to her recent appointment as an officer of the Order of Canada, the second highest honor for merit awarded to Canadian citizens in recognition of lifelong contributions. Much like the team-based care that supports excellence in the ICU, we have a team that supports key activities like this Congress and SCCM's pandemic response efforts. That team is comprised of individuals, foundations, agencies, and corporations who have provided numerous and generous gifts, grants, and advertising or sponsorship support to SCCM this year. Many of you have been yearly donors in durable support of SCCM's mission. Your philanthropy is unparalleled and truly, deeply appreciated. Thank you. We have now come to one of my favorite parts of Congress, introducing you to the next SCCM president, Dr. Greg Martin. Dr. Martin is professor of medicine and the executive associate division director at Emory University in the division of pulmonary, allergy, critical care, and sleep medicine. He serves as the research director for the Emory Critical Care Center, the director of the Emory Georgia Tech Predictive Health Institute, and chair of the critical care committee at Grady Memorial Hospital. Moreover, he also co-directs the Atlanta Center for Microsystems Engineered Point of Care Technologies Program. That program is charged with accelerating COVID-19 diagnostics in the NIH RADx program. Dr. Martin's research has been continually funded by the NIH for more than 20 years, focusing on sepsis and the acute respiratory distress syndrome, spanning epidemiology and health services data science, biomarker-driven evaluations and device platforms, all the way through to randomized trials of new therapeutics. Indeed, Dr. Martin is a prominent national and international authority in the field of sepsis. He has multiple publications that have been cited more than a thousand times. In addition, he has received the Golden Apple Teaching Award and has been designated as a master clinician at Emory University. Dr. Martin is a true triple threat in critical care medicine. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Greg Martin, our 50th SCCM president. Lou, thank you for that wonderful introduction. More importantly, thank you for your superb leadership over an unexpected and tumultuous last year. And I wish all of you a warm welcome to 2021 and to our 50th Critical Care Congress. 2020 was a landmark year in ways that we will remember forever, not the least of which was COVID-19. Some moments in history mark the beginning of something new, something extraordinary that will shape the decades to come. Critical care medicine has played an important role in such times. In fact, the framework for our specialty was cast from the pressures of the polio pandemic. In 2020, the accomplishments of our society, our members, and our specialty were among the most impactful and influential contributions in health care. From me personally, and for SCCM, I thank each of you for what you have done. I am so grateful for the honor to serve each and every one of you, whether you are a longtime member of our society, a new member in training, or if you have not yet joined. I am a physician who specializes in – wait for it – critical care medicine, as well as pulmonology. I grew up in Kansas, the heartland of our country, and I now work at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I am the first physician in my family, and perhaps, like many of you, I was drawn to critical care medicine because of a personal experience with critical illness. In my case, my older brother was critically injured in a motor vehicle accident while we were in high school. That event exposed me to the ICU at a formative stage in my life, at a period where critical care medicine shaped my eternal curiosity. In college, I volunteered in a cardiovascular physiology lab, long enough to burnish my interest in cardiopulmonary physiology and long enough to snuff out any interest I had in animal research. But my interest in physiology carried through to medicine, where I was fortunate to have a series of capable and compassionate mentors. Many of you will know Dr. Gordon Bernard as one of the world's leading critical care researchers from Vanderbilt University. Or perhaps you recognize him as last year's SCCM Lifetime Achievement Award winner. I am fortunate to have had Gordon as a mentor at a key phase in my training, where he shaped not just my career interest in critical care, but he shaped the way I approach problems. He shepherded my interest in physiology to address clinically important questions about fluid management in ARDS patients. When I moved to Emory University, I found a phenomenal group of mentors who further shaped my career in ARDS and created the collaborative team that led me into the area where I now spend much of my time, focused on sepsis. At the time, as a young physician interested in ARDS, I naively asked the question, what most often causes ARDS? It wasn't a difficult question. The answer, of course, is sepsis. But the perspectives on how, why, when sepsis causes ARDS, and in whom sepsis causes ARDS, led to a lifelong commitment and a passion for understanding sepsis as one of the most common conditions we see in our ICU. Like all of you, the past year with COVID-19 has changed the way I spend every day. For me, it's a fortunate coincidence that I can now apply what I've learned about sepsis and ARDS to COVID-19. And because of the foundation laid by my mentors and my colleagues at Emory University, I have the privilege of helping to lead the NIH RADx program that's bringing innovative new COVID-19 tests to the world. And I also have the genuine pleasure of serving at Dr. Anthony Fauci's invitation on the federal panel that produces the continually updated treatment guidelines for COVID-19. Come back in time with me for a moment. Let's jump back in time to 1971, the year when our society was founded. The microprocessor was created that year, Walt Disney World opened, and Mariner 9 orbited Mars while Apollo 14 put astronauts on the moon. In that world of rapidly evolving technologies, the Society of Critical Care Medicine was founded. SCCM started 50 years ago with a vision for a professional society that was focused not on a single profession, but was dedicated to the entire professional team that cares for the critically ill. The first intensive care units were created 100 years ago. And as ICUs became more common, three thought leaders, Max Harry Weil, Peter Saffer, and William Shoemaker, gathered at a 1968 meeting in Atlantic City and conceived a revolutionary idea that allies from different specialties and professions should collaborate together in a patient-centered environment. Their ideas were unconventional, even controversial. Importantly, these visionaries put the patient and their needs at the center of the focus for an entire team of professionals. And by 1971, this group of futuristic intensivists had grown to 54 members. Our founders formally adopted a constitution, and the Society of Critical Care Medicine was born. Inspired by the mission to secure the highest quality care for all critically ill and injured patients, that humble motto has led SCCM to make an outsized impact in the field of critical care medicine. After being founded in 1971, the first annual SCCM Congress was held in 1972. And shortly afterwards, the Society published in JAMA the Guidelines for Organization of Critical Care Units. After our founders launched the premier critical care journal, Critical Care Medicine, we have since launched Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, and most recently, Critical Care Explorations. Since inception, the journals and our annual Congress have continued to grow, and our membership has flourished, from the specialty sections that represent each of the professions in the ICU, to our regional chapters and their local leaders, and our recently developed knowledge education groups to represent unifying cross-professional interests within critical care medicine. In striving to meet the needs of our global critical care community, SCCM has created a diverse array of resources produced in many languages. To address the need for critically ill patients around the world to receive high-quality critical care from trained professionals, SCCM created the Fundamentals of Critical Care Support, or FCCS, course. Since its inception in 1994, the Fundamentals program has trained more than a quarter million health care professionals in multiple languages from 33 countries. We continue to grow our collaborations with members and organizations around the world, and to improve our ability to reach and support clinicians far from our Chicago headquarters, in 2020 we established a new office in Asia. Our society has led the way in developing and disseminating strategies to save lives, and to improve the quality of life for critically ill patients and their families. Perhaps the most enduring example comes from the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, our international collaboration we launched in 2002 with our close partner, the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine. The campaign has progressively expanded its scope to encompass four editions of evidence-based guidelines, results from more than 30,000 patients around the world, and the deployment of a performance improvement program on a global scale. More recently, SCCM established the value of a bundled strategy to liberate critically ill patients from the ventilator. The ICU Liberation Bundle may be the most effective and most cost-effective intervention in intensive care, with its application producing a shorter time on the ventilator, increased patient survival, less delirium and coma, fewer ICU readmissions, and improved ICU discharge disposition. ICU liberation complements our Choosing Wisely campaign that focuses on the efficient delivery of the most important care in the ICU. Our past president, Dr. Jerry Zimmerman, espoused the less-is-more paradigm for ICU care and implementation of the Choosing Wisely program with the Critical Care Society's collaborative. And now, for our 50th Congress, his team has fashioned the next five elements in the Choosing Wisely campaign to be released in critical care medicine for us to further improve care in 2021. These initiatives provide patient and family-centered care with better outcomes, and they're bolstered by the Thrive Collaborative. Thrive was instrumental in characterizing the post-intensive care syndrome, or PICS, and SCCM has made PICS a common expression in our critical care lexicon and helped to develop strategies that may one day eliminate PICS as a consequence of critical illness. Our successes at SCCM are in no small part due to our diversity. In our heritage, and equal to our founding principle to represent the breadth of the critical care team in our society, is our formal commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout our many programs and activities. In this regard, the Society was once again an early leader, when in 2000 our first female president, Carolyn Beckus, took office, followed two years later by our first president from the nursing specialty, Maureen Harvey. And not long afterwards, Judy Jacoby, our first president from the pharmacy specialty, took the reins. These and other remarkable women leaders at SCCM laid the groundwork for our women in critical care, KEGG, one of the first and most active groups of its kind in critical care medicine. Your elected council leadership are equally diverse, with a mix of individuals from the many specialties that make up our ICU teams, and equally diverse in important areas such as ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and employment setting. We measure this diversity across all Society programs, both from the committee and the participant standpoint, believing deeply that the more diverse is our Society, the more effective we will be as a team, and the more effectively we will care for the full breadth of critically ill patients and their families. Just as this novel coronavirus has affected you and me, and everyone else we know and care about, it's also affected SCCM. When we met last year in Orlando during the 49th Critical Care Congress, we knew that this new coronavirus was on the march and had already struck in China as our colleagues in Wuhan cared for the first large-scale outbreak of what would become a global pandemic. In response, SCCM rapidly launched a wide variety of free resources to help you as we face this unprecedented challenge. SCCM's guidance on preparedness, staffing strategies, mechanical ventilation, and resource allocation were read by hundreds of thousands. Our free virtual training program for non-ICU clinicians was taken by over 500,000 people in four languages. We worked closely with many government agencies to help guide their response, and we partnered with dozens of health care associations as we worked to deliver key resources to clinicians everywhere they were needed. And while there is light at the end of the tunnel, the pandemic continues to roil the globe, and SCCM is regularly adding resources to the COVID-19 Rapid Resource Center, which you can find online at the link shown on your screen. Over the past few months, we've seen remarkable improvements in survival of even the most severely ill patients with COVID-19. And among the things that have made the difference is our resourcefulness and our teamwork in caring for these patients. We've navigated a tsunami of COVID-19 information, and we've adapted our treatment protocols, and we've coordinated the places and the people and the equipment needed to save lives. There's no question we're increasingly successful and saving more lives every day. Saving people's lives is what we do. But we've seen with each surge of COVID-19 comes an imminent threat to our workforce. Stress, depersonalization, loss of empathy, anxiety, depression, and burnout. In a record short time, we've made incredible strides with managing patients with COVID-19. The next hurdle we must address is the wellness of our team members. It's important now, right now, today. And it's even more important for tomorrow, for the next generation of intensive care nurses, advanced practice providers, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, dieticians, and intensivists. Despite the dark and challenging days, we need to remember the bright spots, too. If any of the spikes on the coronavirus represent a bright spot, it's from the creative innovation, the flexible adaptation, and facilitating new connections and partnerships that will endure long after the pandemic. SCCM has deepened our close working relationship with the U.S. CDC and established new relationships with the Indian Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, and USAID, to name but a few. And perhaps more importantly, we've seen how our global critical care community has come together to respond during a time of crisis. Our many dedicated member volunteers stepped to the forefront to develop and share resources through our COVID Resource Center, and I want to thank each and every one of them. Many of these key resources were the foundation of the successful COVID-19 What's Next Conference we organized with many partner organizations last fall. The presentations, including by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Brett Giroir, remain available to you on the SCCM website. The conference and our COVID Resource Center were graciously supported by individual donors and corporate partners who immediately stepped forward to provide essential funding. And I want each of them to know that we could not have done it without you. And finally, to all the dedicated professionals who have worked tirelessly and even graciously volunteered to help others in this time of need, thank you. COVID-19 will not go away in days, weeks, or even months, but it will relent. And our path forward from COVID-19 rests on the key discoveries that improve the care and outcomes for our patients. Research is a key component of the SCCM mission, and our SCCM Weill Research Trust has funded incredibly innovative and groundbreaking research to find the next important advances in critical care. In the last five years alone, we've funded more than $1 million in research projects to investigators, both new and established. These projects have been published in high-impact journals and have helped to launch the careers and to accelerate discoveries that will change the way we practice. In 2017, our society committed $3 million to establish the SCCM Discovery Research Network in order to facilitate clinical research in critically ill patients and to serve as a multi-professional clinical trials network. A shining example that many of you will know is the Virus COVID-19 Registry that was developed and deployed by Discovery over a few days early in the pandemic thanks to the hard work of our talented and energetic members and our exceptional staff. It's become one of the largest registries of COVID-19 anywhere in the world, with information on approximately 50,000 adult and pediatric patients from more than 20 countries. Discovery has now received funding from private foundations, government agencies, and corporate partners of over $2 million because of the collaborative and proactive nature of its programs. The Virus Registry alone has spawned collaborations between SCCM, academic and community hospitals, and other medical societies like the American Heart Association and the American College of Radiology. If you're not aware of Discovery or already involved with the Virus Registry, check out the website shown on your screen. Thank you for all you do, every single day, pandemic or none, to secure the highest quality care for all critically ill and injured patients. And thank you for entrusting me to serve as your president. No one makes his or her way to this platform alone. I've benefited from the help of many, and I would like to recognize them. Thank you particularly to the most amazing SCCM staff who have been led for more than 20 years by our CEO, Mr. David Martin. The people who make SCCM such a powerful society also make it a special place to work together. And our society would not be the global powerhouse that it is without each and every member of our team putting their heart and soul into the array of successes you see today. I'm a better intensivist and a better person for having met all of the incredibly talented critical care colleagues who volunteer their time to serve on the SCCM Council, and so many of our leaders on SCCM committees and within our regional SCCM chapters, as well as our international collaborators and colleagues. For those of you who already know me, you know that my path to this stage was not linear. Because like the diversity of our multi-professional team, I thrive on the breadth and variety of activities to challenge me every day. For those who have aided me to possess the skills to guide SCCM, I thank you all. In particular, and in addition to those I've already mentioned, I want to thank Dr. Jonathan Sevransky, Dr. Annette Esper, Dr. Craig Cooper-Smith, and Dr. Tim Buckman, as well as my colleagues at Emory University and Grady Memorial Hospital, and each of my mentees who have indelibly shaped the things I do and made it possible for me to be here today. And most importantly, I owe a huge thanks and a debt of genuine gratitude to my family, who like all of you, are not able to be in the same room as me. That's purely due to COVID. My wife, Stephanie, who is the most understanding and critical care educated orthopedist on earth. Our children, Forrest and Sydney, who are in virtual college and of which I am so proud. My parents, Tom and Nancy Martin, who nurtured my curiosity and made it possible to become who I am today. Stephanie's parents, Steve and Rosie Bankson, and my brother, Mike Martin. Each of them, in their own way, have made my career and my contributions with SCCM possible. The extraordinary accomplishments of our society over the past half-century rest on the shoulders of our entire team, and our successes in the next year rest in your hands much more than in mine. Working together is our greatest strength. My commitment to you, SCCM is here to provide the highest quality critical care for our patients through the multi-professional team of providers we all rely upon. If there's something, anything, that SCCM is not doing or that we should be doing better, I want you to let me know. Thank you for the honor and privilege of serving as your 50th president. Welcome to our 50th annual Critical Care Congress. Thanks, Greg. We're all looking forward to your presidency during SCCM's 50th anniversary year.

COVID-19 pandemic

critical care medicine

virtual platforms

diversity

wellness

SCCM President