Medical Director of the Physician Associate Program
Dr. Ryan Stanger is a board-certified cardiac anesthesiologist and serves as the Medical Director of the Berry College Physician Associate Program. He earned his M.D. from the Medical College of Georgia and completed anesthesia residency at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He finished a Cardiothoracic Anesthesia Fellowship at Emory University before accepting a position at Advent Health Redmond in 2011.
Ryan has been instrumental the development of several programs at Advent Health Redmond over the last decade. These include the Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS) program which redefined the paradigms and protocols utilized to care for patients in the perioperative period to shorten hospital length of stay, improve patient satisfaction and decrease complication rates. He also helped found Northwest Georgia’s first Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) program which gave patients suffering from aortic valve disease that were not adequate surgical candidates the opportunity to have a much less invasive procedure which still markedly improved quality of life. More recently, he has been a key figure in the establishing the region’s first and only Mitra-clip program – which, similar to TAVR, offers patient’s suffering from certain types of mitral valve disease, who may not be surgical candidates, the opportunity for improved quality of life with a less invasive procedure than traditional surgical mitral valve replacement.
Ryan is an associate professor with the Medical College of Georgia and has received several awards during his career for excellence in teaching, including the outstanding medical student teaching award in 2015. He has pioneered several educational programs at Advent Health Redmond including a partnership with Cardiothoracic surgeons, intensive care nurses and respiratory therapists that immediately led to a significant reduction in ventilator times for post-operative heart patients. He also regularly engages the transitional year and internal medicine residents at Advent Health Redmond in “life skills” education such as financial planning and dealing with debt in lecture format or one-on-one teaching.
Education
- B.S. Applied Biology, Georgia Institute of Technology
- M.Ed. Clinical Exercise Physiology, University of Georgia
- M.D., Medical College of Georgia
- Department of Anesthesiology Residency, University of North Carolina
- Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology Fellowship, Emory University Department of Anesthesiology
Professional Associations
- American Society of Anesthesiologists
- Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society
- Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists
- PA Education Association