Atlantic Health’s Interventional Pulmonology program uses robotic bronchoscopy and multidisciplinary collaboration to deliver faster, less invasive evaluation of pulmonary nodules, masses, pleural effusions, and airway abnormalities—while keeping referring providers closely connected throughout diagnosis and next-step planning.
My name is Bobby Patel. Uh, I practice at Morristown Medical Center and Overlook Medical Center, predominantly interventional pulmonary. Um, I graduated from a pulmonary critical care fellowship, uh, followed by a dedicated 1 year interventional pulmonary fellowship. I've been here for about 5 years expanding our interventional pulmonary program. Interventional pulmonary is a growing field, um, it's a subspecialty within pulmonary medicine. It aims to bridge some of the gaps between thoracic surgery, uh, pulmonary medicine, interventional radiology, uh, employing minimally invasive technologies to diagnose a variety of conditions in the lungs in the chest, and really anywhere in the thoracic cavity. We employ many different uh state of the art technologies to be able to minimally invasively diagnose uh a variety of conditions within the chest. Um, this can range from nodules to, uh, lung masses to pleural effusions, obstructions, uh, and a variety of other conditions. So this is really an exciting time for interventional pulmonary. As a specialty it's still in its infant stages even though it's been around for a couple of decades. What I see is hopefully an immense growth in our program continued growth really in a multidisciplinary fashion uh key example would be a robotic bronchoscopy uh robotic bronchoscopy is really, uh, been able to. Change the way we practice and the way we diagnose and look at nodules and other conditions within the chest. Interventional pulmonology is really um a multidisciplinary effort, uh, a lot of what we do. So once we see a patient with a a a condition within the chest, whether that's detected on an X-ray or a CT scan or another uh imaging modality, we really pull in our other um specialists such as thoracic surgery, intervention radiology, um, oncology, radiation oncology um to really determine what is gonna be the next best step for the patient for a potential diagnosis and treatment. So when a patient gets uh notified that they have an abnormal finding a lung mass or a nodule or fluid within their lungs, it can be very distressing at that time. So something I I really try to stress uh in in our office visit is to make them feel comfortable that we're gonna have a plan for whatever that finding is. So when a referring provider is thinking about. Maybe an abnormal CT image finding uh a nodule or a mass or something else that needs a minimally invasive procedure to help diagnose or potentially treat the patient, it would be a great time to contact inventinal pulmonary, um, what we'd be be able to offer is take a look at the imaging. Um, talk to the patient, meet with the patient, and really formulate a multidisciplinary plan moving forward, um, with the referring provider, uh, input and keeping them in the loop at all times.
