Bhakti K. Patel, MD is an Assistant Professor in the Section of Pulmonary and Critical Care in the Department of Medicine. She is a proud product of Chicago Public Schools and attended medical school at the University of Michigan. She returned to Chicago for her internal medicine residency, chief residency, and pulmonary/critical care fellowship training at the University of Chicago. Dr. Patel attends in the Medical Intensive Care Unit and Procedure Service and also serves as an associate program director of the Pulmonary/Critical Care Fellowship Program.
She has distinguished herself as a clinical trialist focused on mitigating the complications of invasive mechanical ventilation. Her overall hypothesis is that many ICU complications are perpetuated by current standard care practices and that choosing mobility over immobility, mental animation over sedation, and spontaneous versus controlled respiration will improve outcomes. Her research career is built on this “less is more” approach to inform investigational trials and in parallel apply translational science to understand the biological mechanisms behind these interventions to broaden their applications to all patients. This approach has inspired her investigations of helmet ventilation in acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and early mobilization in mechanically ventilated patients. Her clinical trial of helmet noninvasive ventilation was recognized as among the top three clinical research achievements of 2016 and was awarded the Distinguished Clinical Research Achievement Award by the Clinical Research Forum. Dr. Patel is also the recipient of a Parker B. Fellowship Career Development Award and under the mentorship of Drs. Gokhan Mutlu and John P. Kress, she is investigating the mechanisms which underlie the development of ICU-acquired neuromuscular weakness.
On a national and international level, she has been an invited speaker at the American Thoracic Society meetings and the Lung and Diaphragm-Protective Ventilation Consensus Group. She is also active in medical education as an invited lecturer for the CHEST critical care board review and Pritzker School of Medicine’s Clinical Pathophysiology & Therapeutics course. She spends her free time learning new recipes, feeding her friends/family, and practicing yoga.