Home base: Cincinnati, Ohio
ECMO background: Trained in adult ECMO
With our team since: 2023
What drew him in: The technical complexity and autonomy
This is the second post in our series spotlighting the traveling ECMO specialists on our team. (If you missed the first one, meet Katy here.) As we shared in that piece, our specialists fly into hospitals across the country on short notice, manage ECMO patients for a few shifts, and then fly back out, either home or straight to a different program in a different state.
This week, we’re catching up with Cameron, an ECMO specialist based out of Cincinnati who joined our team in 2023.
How did you end up doing ECMO, and how did you find Integration Health?
Cameron’s introduction to ECMO came early. During his role transition in nursing school (essentially a practicum for graduating students), he was paired with a nurse who happened to be an ECMO specialist. He spent 60 to 70 hours of that rotation learning how to manage patients on the circuit. “I just kind of fell in love with it,” he says. “I just thought it was so interesting, and I really liked the highly technical stuff.”
After landing at his home hospital, he pestered the ECMO coordinator for about nine months before she agreed to bring him onto the team. He was trained in ECMO in 2021 and ran adult cases there for the next two years.
Then he started looking around. He was exploring traditional travel nursing options when, on a whim, he searched “traveling ECMO specialist” and a job listing with Integration Health (then, Innovative ECMO Concepts) popped up. “I didn’t even think this position existed,” Cameron says. But it was exactly what he’d been hoping to find, a role that let him keep doing ECMO while getting the flexibility of travel. He applied, and by 2023 he was on the team.
Because Cameron came in with two years of adult ECMO experience, Integration Health’s training focused on rounding out his skill set. He went through extensive education and precepting on the pediatric and neonatal side, patient populations he hadn’t worked with in his home hospital role. Today he takes care of patients across the full age spectrum, from neonates to adults, and feels at home with each.
What does the job actually look like?
Dynamic. Cameron might be sitting at home in Cincinnati when a request comes in for coverage a few states away, and be on his way to the airport by lunchtime. The Integration Health logistics team aims to have a specialist on the ground within 24 hours of a call. When something comes up, things move quickly.
Tools like TSA PreCheck and CLEAR make that pace much easier to manage, and Cameron uses both. Living within reach of an airport helps too. “It would be really hard to do this job if you don’t at least live close to a regional airport,” he says.
Full-time specialists work at least twelve shifts a month, with additional pay for shifts beyond that. Trips generally run no more than four to seven days, often back to back, with shifts flipping between days and nights depending on what each account needs. The logistics team builds in enough rest between assignments to make those transitions safely.
What’s the hardest part of the job for you?
For Cameron, the hardest part has less to do with the flying or the schedule and more to do with the culture change.
“We don’t get a chance to really get to know the people or build relationships like you would as a traditional travel nurse, where you’re there for 13 weeks,” he says. A traveling ECMO specialist might be at a given hospital for two or three days at a time, and every hospital has its own way of doing things, its own preferences, its own workflows, its own personalities. Learning to navigate that unfamiliarity, quickly and repeatedly, is a real skill.
That short-window dynamic applies to patients too. Cameron might be with a patient during a critical stretch of their ECMO run, sometimes even present when they come off the pump, but the recovery that follows generally happens after he’s already on to the next assignment. “Sometimes we get to see that side a little bit,” he says, “but then after that, we don’t really get to see any of their additional recovery.”
Why do you think more clinicians don’t know this option exists?
Cameron’s own path is a case in point. He came into travel ECMO by accident, and he knows he’s not alone. “There are a lot of people that don’t even know what ECMO is,” he says. Within nursing, even fewer know that traveling ECMO is a career they can pursue.
That awareness gap matters because these traveling specialists are essential to supporting a therapy that’s growing fast. Adult ECMO runs reported to the ELSO Registry rose from around 850 in 2009 to 14,000 in 2021, a sixteen-fold increase in just over a decade.
When a hospital’s in-house team can’t stretch any further to meet that volume, the alternatives are all bad: refusing incoming transfers, mandating overtime, or declining to cannulate a patient who might otherwise have a chance at survival. Traveling specialists are often the resource that keeps programs from having to make those choices.
Three Years In
Cameron is one of a growing group of traveling ECMO specialists at IH, each with their own path into this work. Some came in with more than a decade of ECMO experience. Others, like Cameron, found the job by accident after a couple of years at the bedside and never looked back. What they share is a willingness to move fast, learn on the fly, and take care of some of the sickest patients in the country.
Cameron’s story is another data point on what this career actually looks like, and we’ll be sharing more of these conversations with our specialists over the coming months.
Interested in becoming a traveling ECMO specialist?
If you’re a nurse, respiratory therapist, or perfusionist interested in travel ECMO, we’d love to hear from you. We support new specialists with the training, precepting, and credentialing they need to ramp up safely, whether they’re bringing years of ECMO experience or exploring the specialty for the first time. See our open roles a https://integration.health/careers-opportunities/.
