Randall C. Wetzel

Randall C. Wetzel, MD, is Professor and Chairman of Anesthesiology Critical Care Medicine at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. He directs the Laura P. and Leland K. Whittier Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (VPICU) – a telemedicine network advancing critical care delivery. Trained at St. Bartholomew's Hospital (MD) and Johns Hopkins (MS Business), his career spans over 40 years with $18M+ in research funding.

His pioneering work fuses critical care medicine with informatics innovations:

• Founded VPS, LLC managing quality/data for 120+ hospitals
• Developed big data infrastructure for granular PICU analytics
• Created the VPICU telemedicine network transforming regional critical care

Research focuses on advanced analytics in pediatric critical care, including machine learning models for:

• Real-time mortality prediction
• Ventilator weaning optimization
• Cardiac death forecasting post-extubation
• BiPAP/HFNC failure anticipation

With 94 peer-reviewed articles, 45 book chapters, and editorship of "Critical Heart Disease in Infants and Children," he has shaped pediatric intensive care standards. Current work examines multi-institutional data ecosystems through the PICU Data Collaborative and acute kidney injury prediction models.