Dave Melvin is a Valley High School alumnus from the class of 1973 and has sure kept busy since graduation! He became a Certified Respiratory Therapist at Methodist Hospital in Omaha where he worked in critical care as well as held supervision roles in the Respiratory Care Department until 1990. He then went to work at Children’s Hospital where he held roles in the PICU/NICU and the Pediatric Interventional Cardiac Catheterization Lab (whew, that’s a mouthful!). In 2000 he left Omaha and went to work in the Interventional Cardiac Catheterization Lab at Arnold Palmer Children’s Hospital in Orlando, FL followed by the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, OH where he was named the Manager of TeleMedicine and Information Services for the Heart Center.
Dave’s work and experiences can be found in several scientific papers and presentations he authored or co-authored regarding Cardiac Catheterization Labs and pediatric cardiology. In addition to practicing, he also received the opportunity to assist in designing and supervising the construction of several pediatric heart care-centric conference centers with an emphasis in audio/visual/TeleMedicine components in Omaha, Orlando, Columbus and Doha, Qatar. He then managed Pediatric Cardiology TeleMedicine networks in Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas and Ohio. For a time, he was a member of Ohio Congressman Zac Space’s State Wide Internet Working Group aimed at bringing internet to every resident of Ohio and he participated in a research group to determine how to best transmit battlefield echocardiograms via satellite from the Middle East.
Dave retired from Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus in May of 2013 and moved back to Nebraska in 2014. He is now retired and is loving being back home! We thank Dave for providing these photos of some of his experiences!
We’d love to hear and share what you have been up to since graduation! Please visit our Alumni Spotlight Submission page and fill out the form, you could be spotlighted next! If you are up to sharing some photos, you can email those to dcwestschoolsfoundation@gmail.com.
