Dr. Romero is an emergency medicine physician who completed his medical school at New York Medical College (NYMC) and subsequent emergency medicine (EM) residency at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). As a biomedical engineering undergraduate, he was initially interested in medical devices and the design process needed to develop from idea to manufacturing. Dr. Romero worked for Medtronic for two years prior to medical school. While in medical school Dr. Romero worked at the IBM Watson research facility in Yorktown Heights, NY. Here, he was exposed to clinical informatics (CI). While at IBM Dr. Romero worked in the medical adjudication team. The work consisted of vetting Watson’s (a supercomputer developed for natural language processing) answers to medical questions and classifying the errors when present. At IBM Dr. Romero worked with a few of his NYMC classmates and functioned as subject matter experts. This period at IBM triggered his interest in clinical informatics.
Upon completion of medical school Dr. Romero completed his EM residency at UIC. After residency Dr. Romero accepted a position at a small democratic emergency practice to develop his own practice style as an emergency physician. After four years in private practice Dr. Romero decided to continue to follow his dream of completing a CI fellowship. While at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Dr. Romer plans to leverage his experience in private practice to improve workflow for emergency medicine physicians. Dr. Romero is interested in studying and applying technology to alleviate the cognitive demand of emergency physicians on tasks that are not direct patient care. The average emergency physician experiences tens if not hundreds of interruptions in each shift. These interruptions range from phone calls to EKG reviews, and nurse questions. While all these interruptions are part of working in the emergency department (ED) and cannot be eliminated, Dr. Romero would like to work on ways to decrease these interruptions.
In his spare time, Dr. Romero enjoys triathlons and has completed a few races ranging from sprints to Olympic distances. Dr. Romero enjoys live music with his wife and daily walks with his 3-year-old hound, Toby who currently demands 2 a day in the park.
Education
Undergrad: Florida International University – Biomedical Engineering – 2008
Medical School: New York Medical College – M.D. – 2015
Residency: UIC Chicago, IL – Emergency Medicine – 2019
