Adebayo Fasanya

Pulmonary and Critical Care

Before earning his medical degree at Saba University School of Medicine, Adebayo Fasanya was a double major in Biology and Mathematics. Now he’s using his knowledge of medicine and math—plus studies in medical humanities—to pioneer holistic, multidisciplinary approaches to pulmonary care.

Does every patient going into intensive care need a chest x-ray? What protocols are most effective for weaning patients from a ventilator? How can medical specialists better coordinate their efforts to help patients with pulmonary embolisms, the third-largest cause of cardiovascular death? How should practitioners ethically implement new findings in genomics?

Today, these questions and many others just like them define the world of Adebayo Fasanya. A native of Nigeria—where he placed fifth in the country’s National Mathematics Olympiad—Adebayo earned his BS in Biology and Mathematics at the University of Toronto in 2008 and then headed immediately to Saba. Looking back, he says the transition to Saba was easy, but the experience was intense. “In terms of the weather, the people and the culture, Saba is very similar to Nigeria, but being a medical student was demanding and you had to work hard to excel in school and also to have a good time.”

For his clinical rotations, Adebayo went to Miami, Kansas City and Baltimore. “I felt it was beneficial to do work in multiple sections of the country as it really made me more culturally sensitive.”

Adebayo did his residency at Overlook Medicine Center in Summit, NJ, part of the Atlantic Health System and affiliated with Rutgers University. During his three years there, he was a principal investigator on projects involving breathing trial protocols and improving the hand-off between nurses and residents during rapid response calls. He created a new template for rapid response notes to encourage better documentation and communication.

This work has carried over into a three-year pulmonary and critical care fellowship at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh where along with cardiologists, radiologists and other pulmonary and critical care specialists, he is part of the hospital’s newly launched pulmonary embolism response team. He is also a principal investigator in a chest x-ray project: an effort to reduce routine daily chest x-rays in the medical ICU. His work has been presented in local and national conferences including the CHEST meetings of the American College of Chest Physicians. He continues to be involved in academic scholarship and has over seven peer-reviewed publications and several abstracts and presentations in local, national and international meetings.

Adebayo is also committed to expanding his approach to health care by combining his background in mathematics and clinical care with an enhanced understanding of medicine as seen from the standpoint of history, ethics, philosophy, literature, religion and art.  In 2015 he received a Certificate in Medical Humanities from Drew University in New Jersey.

“For physicians today, the advances in science and technology continually require us to understand and cope with new concepts and new situations.  We constantly need to ask ourselves not just what is possible, but what is right. I look to my studies in medical humanities for the insight and understanding to help make the right decisions for the patients under my care.”