Matt Lyon

Professor

Academic Appointment(s)

Bio

Matt Lyon, MD, is a Professor of Emergency Medicine and Executive Director of the Center for Ultrasound Education for the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. He also serves as Vice Chairman for Academic Programs and Research for the Department of Emergency Medicine and as the Medical Director for Telehealth at AU Health. Dr. Lyon is a graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology (Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering) and of the Medical College of Georgia (MD, 1999). He completed his residency in Emergency Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia in 2003.

Dr. Lyon is a well-established clinician, educator and researcher. He has a national reputation as an educator on the clinician use of ultrasound and is a frequent national and international speaker. His research has focused on clinical applications of ultrasound and sickle cell anemia. He has pioneered several new applications for ultrasound, including use of ultrasound for volume resuscitation in critically ill patients, use of ultrasound for respiratory complaints and for traumatic brain injury assessment. His brain injury assessment using ultrasound has been both experimentally and clinically oriented and has received grant funding and has several patents pending. He has extensive collaborations with industry to bring new devices to the market for brain injury assessment.

Continuing on work began in the early 2000’s, Dr. Lyon was charged with creating an integrated ultrasound education training program undergraduate and graduate medical education for the Medical College of Georgia. In November 2016, he was named the Executive Director of the Center for Ultrasound Education. The mission of this newly created Center is to utilize ultrasound as an educational tool, providing a cognitive scaffolding to improving medical education. His curriculum is fully integrated into the 4-year curriculum for all 920 medical students at MCG as well as approximately 350 postgraduate medical residents from a wide range of specialties at Augusta University Medical Center. These specialties include Anesthesiology, Emergency Medicine, Family Medicine, Internal Medicine, General Surgery, Pediatrics and fellowships in Pulmonary Critical Care, Surgical Critical Care, and Neonatal Critical Care. His efforts have produced a novel, nation-leading educational experience for MCG learners. Dr. Lyon also conducts a post-graduate fellowship training program for clinician performed ultrasound with up to 3 fellows per year.

Beginning in 2018 with funding through a USDA telemedicine grant, Dr. Lyon began a telemedicine program between AU Health and 5 rural Georgia emergency departments. This program aids rural emergency physicians in decreasing transfers to larger cities for time sensitive treatments. The telemedicine system includes the remote use of ultrasound for diagnosing a wide range of emergency conditions and aiding in the rural clinician in the performance of high-risk, low-volume procedures. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, Dr. Lyon helped initiate a telemedicine screening program that screened over 20,000 citizens in Georgia and South Carolina for appropriate COVID testing. Since that time, he has helped AU Health expand its telemedicine ecosystem to ambulatory and express care services and create a medical student telehealth clinic to decrease hospital readmission of patients with chronic medical conditions. With the importance of telehealth demonstrated by the COVID pandemic, telehealth education will be critical for future doctors. Dr. Lyon has the responsibility of incorporating telehealth into the Medical College of Georgia student curriculum.