Steven Mark Brown MD

Steven Brown ’77 has practiced medicine in rural areas for more than 10 years, not by meeting patients in an office or by their hospital beds, but virtually, monitoring them in hospitals from Missouri and Arkansas to Oklahoma and Wisconsin. Now with COVID-19, he has turned his living room into a command center for 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. shifts.

The pulmonologist, based in St. Louis, Missouri, has four computer monitors with a dedicated router and server plus a highly sophisticated video camera that allow him to keep tabs on around 100 patients nightly. He estimates that 15 to 20 percent of his patients may be new each time, many with COVID-19.

Although the native New Yorker says he was anguished not to return to his hometown when the pandemic hit there hard, he decided he could best serve to help rural ICU units connected to the Mercy Virtual Care Center. His employer allowed him to move operations to his home rather than continue at its physical hub, where its large medical team allows doctors to “see” patients where they are.

Brown, an early adopter of telemedicine, estimates he’s put in some 20,000 hours in the field. Many rural hospitals may have only two ICU beds but no ICU doctor, he says, “so I assist and keep the critical care local.”