About PALNET.

Why PALNET exists

EEG devices are commercially available for pediatric operating rooms, yet adoption of EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia has been slow. Key barriers include limited structured training during residency, fellowship, and post-graduate education; uncertainty in EEG interpretation across pediatric anesthetic states and developmental stages; and a lack of local expertise to train faculty, trainees, and allied anesthesia professionals.

PALNET addresses these barriers through hands-on education, in-OR teaching, workshops, and mentorship designed to learn EEG interpretation based on anesthetic design and to build clinician confidence to use EEG, gain expertise, and develop sustainable practice.

Mission

To educate and train pediatric anesthesia clinicians on EEG-guided anesthesia — to improve safety, outcomes, experience, cost, and sustainability for patients and the earth.

Vision

EEG-guided anesthesia will become a standard for anesthetic dosing and neurological monitoring, and a core competency in pediatric anesthesia education and certification.

Values

PALNET's values are operational and integrity-focused:

• Vendor-agnostic education. PALNET supports EEG-guided anesthesia education across qualified pediatric EEG devices. A qualified device displays raw EEG, the density spectral array (DSA) or a similar spectrogram, and the spectral edge frequency (SEF), and must be approved by the PALNET member's country regulatory agency.
• Transparency and integrity. Members disclose conflicts of interest if they receive money directly from, or hold investments in, for-profit companies relevant to EEG technologies.
• Open collaboration. Members are free to collaborate with external organizations and to write and speak about EEG and EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia. Permission by PALNET is not required.
• Mission-aligned partnership. PALNET may invite partners to workshops and site visits when consistent with the educational mission.

What PALNET does

• Provides a curriculum for EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia — reading materials, lectures, smartphone-ready tables and figures, and an online knowledge assessment.
• Conducts on-site educational visits to children's hospitals and pediatric centers.
• Delivers experiential learning through case-based EEG interpretation and hands-on in-OR teaching during live cases. PALNET teachers may go to member sites, or members may go to a PALNET teacher's site.
• Builds local expertise through a train-the-trainer model — identifying, educating, and mentoring a cohort of local site clinicians who become experts and train their colleagues.
• Enables continuous learning through post-site-visit access to PALNET teachers and other PALNET experts.
• Runs workshops using a case-based EEG video library and simulator.

How PALNET works

PALNET education and training typically follows a repeatable implementation pathway:

1. Pre-learning. Curriculum review and baseline knowledge assessment (optional).
2. On-site visit. Case-based teaching and in-OR coaching during live cases.
3. Train-the-trainer. Targeted mentorship of a few local clinicians who will become experts in EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia and teach their colleagues.
4. Post-visit support. Coaching and continued access to PALNET experts to consolidate practice and expand within the department.
5. Workshops. Periodic refresher and advanced learning using video cases and simulation.

Structure

A Board of Directors oversees four functional domains, each led by an officer. An Advisory Board offers mission-critical information and perspective to the Board, while partners, collaborators, and research entities contribute to PALNET's mission from outside the organization.

Leadership

Current officers:

• C. Dean Kurth, MD — President & Founder (Philadelphia)
• Gregory Johnson, MD — Vice President & Secretary (Toronto)
• Robin Presson, MD — Treasurer (Indianapolis)
• Ian Yuan, MD (San Diego)
• Mihir Parikh, MD (Dallas)
• Julia Galvez Delgado, MD, MBI, FASA (Boston)
• Isabella Jaramillo, MD
• Michael Puglia, MD

See full leadership profiles →

Membership

PALNET includes 50 pediatric anesthesia department members and is growing rapidly across Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Membership can be departmental — in which all members of a department have access to PALNET educational resources — or individual pediatric anesthesia clinicians and allied professionals.

See current member institutions →

In the news

Writing about PALNET and EEG-guided pediatric anesthesia in the wider literature.