Matt Lyon

Director, MCG- Center of Teleh

Professor

Academic Appointment(s)

Other Duties

Bio

Bio: Matt Lyon, MD, is the J. Harold Harrison, MD, Distinguished University Chair in Telehealth and Professor of Emergency Medicine. He serves as Associate Dean for Experiential Learning, Director for the MCG Center for Digital Health and the Executive Director of the Center for Ultrasound Education for the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University. He also serves as the Virtual Care Service Chief 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. Much of 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 is experimentally and clinically oriented, receiving federal grant funding and yielding several patents. He has extensive collaborations with industry to bring new devices to the market for brain injury assessment and is currently working with Space X on novel diagnostic tools for Space Flight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome.

Continuing on work that began in the early 2000’s, Dr. Lyon was charged with creating an integrated ultrasound education training program for undergraduate and graduate medical education for the Medical College of Georgia. In October 2016, he was named the Executive Director of the Center for Ultrasound Education. The mission of this Center is to utilize ultrasound as an educational tool, providing a cognitive scaffolding to improve medical education. His curriculum is fully integrated into the 4-year curriculum for the 4th largest medical school, as well as approximately 350 postgraduate medical residents from a wide range of specialties at Wellstar MCG Health and across the Wellstar GME programs and GME programs associated with the MCG regional campuses. By providing novel, nation-leading educational experience for MCG learners across the state in a distributed campus system, all MCG students graduate with competencies in point of care ultrasound (POCUS). Dr. Lyon also conducts a nationally accredited, post-graduate fellowship training program for clinician performed ultrasound (Advanced Emergency Ultrasound Fellowship) with up to 3 fellows per year from ​Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, among other specialties.

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, the Tele-ED program. 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 Wellstar MCG Health expand its telemedicine ecosystem to ambulatory and specialty services and created a medical student telehealth clinic to decrease hospital readmission of patients with chronic medical conditions. The Tele-ED program has been expanded to include inpatient care (Tele-Critical Care) and now includes 17 rural hospitals across Georgia, supporting rural hospital viability and patient centered care. 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 educational curriculum.