Apple Highlights How Veterans Use iPad App T6 in Trauma Care

Veteran Nathan Christopherson, vice president of surgery for Northwell Health oversees all trauma centers including Cohen Children’s Medical Center.

He served as a combat medic in the Army for more than a decade. And because of that experience, he decided to introduce the app into the system’s emergency care. The system is the first civilian healthcare in the country to use the app.

“One of the most important parts of trauma care is how a patient moves through a medical system,” says Christopherson. “In the military, that’s going from managing the situation in the field, to transport, to arrival at a combat support hospital, and then onward — and one of the keys to optimizing that journey is the communication of data. We’ve taken those lessons and applied them to the civilian world, and T6 is a big part of helping us with that.”

A T6 co-founder, trauma surgeon Dr. Morad Hamee, used the history of military trauma medicine in developing the app. It allows medical teams to input and analyze patient data in real time on the tablet. In a hospital, details are displayed in a large screen for the entire trauma team to see.

The app was named from the concept of “golden hour,” which is a period time after a trauma injury where medical intervention will help secure the best outcome. That time frame is thought to be around 6 hours.

“When an unstable patient comes in with traumatic injuries and meets a big, multidisciplinary medical team assembled to treat them, the clock is already ticking,” says Hameed. “That point of intersection is a huge source of rich data if we could capture it. T6 was designed to do just that, in sufficient detail and relevance that we can actually improve our performance on the fly, and that’s never been done in healthcare.”

The app is being used in two Northwell Health’s Level I trauma centers with a full rollout by the end of 2022.