Explore The Space

“I’m walking into it with my eyes open, my dukes up. I’m looking around the corner, but I’m still walking forward into it” Dr. Kimberly Manning is a Professor of Medicine & Associate Vice-Chair of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at Emory University School of Medicine. She is also a busy clinical physician, teacher, coach, and mentor, as well as an extraordinary writer, thinker, and social media voice. For the second year in a row, we are fortunate to have Dr. Manning join us for our final episode of the year. 2020 has been a year like no other, we reflect and focus on readiness for whatever is to come next. Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our Position Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Sponsor: Vave Health believes that personal ultrasound is the future of medicine, with an aim to empower both clinicians and patients.  Check out their website for details on their free virtual ultrasound educational events and more, at www.vavehealth.com/live Key Learnings 1. Finding a new empathy amidst the chaos of 2020 2. What still feels Exceptional 3. Carrying sadness (with a cameo from “Rapper’s Delight”) 4. The impact of code-switching & how it eats up cognitive & emotional space 5. The exceptional nature of diversity 6. Owning privilege and sharing that exercise 7. What are you doing well, what’s something you want to work on? 8. Imposter Syndrome & doing stuff scared Links Twitter @gradydoctor #2021, #Covid19, #empathy, #privilege #exceptional, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“Healthcare & medicine have to be able to say & acknowledge “there are really bad things that have happened under our watch, but this is not one of them'” Dr, Jasmine Marcelin is an Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases at University of Nebraska Medical Center & Associate Program Director of UNMC Internal Medicine Residency Program. She comes back to Explore The Space Podcast for an essential discussion of the Covid19 vaccine on the day we both received our first injection. Dr. Marcelin describes how to both access and move through barriers people may have around it and critical insight into how to properly center and validate concerns held by BIPOC Americans related to the long history of systemic racism in medicine. Click here for Dr. Marcelin’s 1st appearance on Explore The Space Podcast Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. Discussing the experience of getting vaccinated just before we recorded 2. Dr. Marcelin discusses her needle-associated anxiety and how it can be a barrier for people 3. The importance of transparency around actually getting the vaccine and the post-vaccine experience 4. Acknowledging the roots of structural racism in American health care and how they resonate around getting the Covid19 vaccine while also seeing how the vaccine will reduce the impact of Covid19 in communities hardest hit 5. Avoiding use of the word “Targeting” and what we need to say 6. The importance of centering voices and connecting with community leaders 7. Learning to navigate conversations with people about the vaccine & avoiding assumptions 8. Dr. Marcelin’s conversation with parents 9. The need for time & skills to speak with every patient 10. Learning to customize each conversation based upon each person’s unique needs 11. Why it’s important to avoid use of “Mistrust” Links Twitter @DrJRMarcelin Dr. Marcelin’s Twitter thread about getting the Covid19 vaccine today #vaccine, #Covid19, #conversation, #infectiousdisease, #pandemic, #assumptions, #community, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“This is the most important phase. This is the phase that requires the most passionate leadership, the most informed & rational leadership.” Mark Hertling is a retired 3-Star General in the US Army who returns for his 4th visit to Explore The Space Podcast for more riveting leadership conversation. We focus on Inflection Point leadership as we deal with the surging Covid19 pandemic and the arrival of the vaccine. In addition, Mark’s insights on the importance of “running through the tape” and preparing for After-Action reviews are absolutely brilliant. Click here for the archive of Mark’s previous appearances on Explore The Space Podcast Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our Position Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. The importance of “Living room language” 2. Introducing the idea of running through the tape 3. Why the Covid19 vaccine represents an inflection point and what are the implications of that 4. The essential mindset for leaders to carry right now 5. What’s going well and what could be done better 6. The importance of applying lessons learned and not going back to business as usual 7. Reflecting on personal and organizational lessons in preparation for an After-Action Review Links Twitter @MarkHertling #Covid19, #vaccine, #inflectionpoint, #organization, #AAR, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“I want to effect change through the vehicle of empathy” Dr. Sayed Tabatabai is a Nephrologist in San Antonio and a simply brilliant writer. He shares most of his work as @TheRealDoctorT on Twitter where he continually amazes his large audience. He joins Explore The Space Podcast as we wrap up 2020 to discuss solitude, anger, and empathy in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic. This is a remarkable episode, enjoy. Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. The nature of Dr. Tabatabai’s writing & connecting to the past 2. Is looking forward an act of bravery 3. Where does medicine stand right now 4. The appetite for a grand reshaping of medicine 5. Why Sayed writes about connection and things we all recognize as human beings 6. The power of social media in building relationships, connections, and friendships & what comes next when we come out from behind the Zoom chats 7. How deeply we’ve all been immersed in solitude 8. What do we do with all of our stored-up anger 9. Leveraging empathy 10. How we can move through the dark part of the tunnel together Links Twitter @TheRealDoctorT #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician  

“The daily grind doesn’t worry me, doesn’t intimidate me, doesn’t bother me so much” Dr. Amy Oxentenko is a Professor of Medicine and Chair of the Dept of Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Arizona. She is a truly superb leader and brilliant teacher and she joins us to talk about The Grind of the day-to-day work and the importance of adaptive leadership, especially during a crisis. Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Sponsor: Vave Health believes that personal ultrasound is the future of medicine, with an aim to empower both clinicians and patients.  Check out their website for details on their free virtual ultrasound educational events and more, at www.vavehealth.com/live Key Learnings 1. What does the Grind look like 2. Does the Grind precipitate anxiety? 3. The importance of the book “Crucial Conversations” and how Dr. Oxentenko uses leadership books 4. Leadership books vs real-life experience 5. Reconciling tension between someone needing “more experience” and the value of on the job training 6. Term limits in medical leadership as a way to help elevate new leaders and prevent stagnation 7. Running as a restorative technique 8. Dealing with new challenges superimposed on the Grind and being able to pivot 9. Adaptive leadership during the pandemic and during a cross-country move 10. Speaking for voices that don’t feel comfortable doing so 11. The power of data to improve inclusivity and drive change 12. Dr. Oxentenko’s appetite for more Links Twitter @AmyOxentenkoMD #adaptiveleadership, #crucialconversations, #pandemic, #Covid19, #termlimits, #onthejobtraining, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“Sometimes the point of sharing is to get people to understand how human we are & what things are really like for us” Ashley Bartholomew is an ICU nurse in El Paso, Texas. She spent the past several weeks working in the Covid ICU at her El Paso hospital during a tremendous surge in hospitalized patients. After that she shared her experiences in a Twitter thread that has since gone viral. She joins us to discuss confronting misinformation at the point of care, redefining professionalism in how we show emotion, and why being told you’re a hero can feel dehumanizing Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. What is El Paso, Texas like? 2. The sense of common purpose amongst those at the front lines of the pandemic 3. Seeing the surge firsthand the day before her scheduled last day and stepping forward to work for an additional three weeks in the Covid ICU 4. Writing a Twitter thread that went viral 5. Where Ashley felt a sense of empowerment sharing such vivid and candid experiences 6. The problems with stoicism and the moment where Ashley broke that barrier with her patient 7. The need to redefine “professionalism” when it comes to showing emotion as a whole person 8. Do nurses feel like they shouldn’t be sharing work experience for fear of reprisal? 9. The disruptive effect of mixed messages 10. What the limelight feels like and dealing with the inevitable trolls 11. Why humanizing health care professionals is so important & calling them heroes can actually feel dehumanizing Links Twitter @theblondeRN Ashley’s viral Twitter thread #Covid19, #ICU, #nursing, #nursetwitter, #thankyou#podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“This cannot happen in our country right now. We cannot have a civilian-service divide.” Kevin Schmiegel is the CEO of Operation Gratitude, which is the largest non-profit in the country for hands-on volunteerism in support of the military, veterans and First Responders. Operation Gratitude has expanded their essential operations to support doctors, nurses and hospitals during the Covid19 pandemic. In this episode we discuss how service is critical to bridging divides in our society, why Operation Gratitude expanded its operations to support the medical community, and effective ways to respond to “Thank you for your service” Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. The current strategic picture for a conversation around giving, gratitude, and service 2. Reflecting on the word “Giving”, how it’s analogous to service which is a common feature across Americans 3. Overcoming inertia around service & the origin story of Operation Gratitude 4. Waning morale and widening gaps between doctors, nurses, HCWs and their communities during the pandemic and how to bridge that gap 5. The need for comfort, how Covid makes that more difficult, and the need for empathy in that space 6. Addressing “Thank you for your service” with a response that can start a conversation 7. How getting special treatment or recognition makes people serving feel even more distant 8. Building a sense of community at the local level that can be sustained whether times are hard or not Links Twitter @OpGratitude, Instagram @opgratitude Operation Gratitude Kevin’s essay in The Hill about how service can help unite communities Giving page to support California firefighters Virtual Volunteering “A grateful nation that serves together is united” #service, #gratitude, #MarineCorps, #veteran, #firstresponder, #soldier, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“That’s why I do the work that I do, to bring those voices into places where they need to be heard” Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith is the Kenan Distinguished Professor at University of North Carolina Center for Health Equity Research & is an internationally recognized expert on leadership & health equity. Dr. Utibe Essien is an Assistant Professor of Medicine & a health equity researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. They came together for an incredible discussion on Explore The Space wherein Dr. Essien interviews Dr. Corbie-Smith covering her career arc, insights into merging leadership and health equity, what brings her joy, and her superb podcast “A Different Kind of Leader.” This is a very special episode, it’s an honor to have these two incredible people on Explore The Space Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Sponsor: Vave Health believes that personal ultrasound is the future of medicine, with an aim to empower both clinicians and patients.  Check out their website for details on their free virtual ultrasound educational events and more, at www.vavehealth.com/live Key Learnings 1. How Dr. Essien felt meeting Dr. Corbie-Smith for the first time 2. Starting off with a Win 3. Dr. Corbie-Smith’s origins and early career arc 4. Studying health disparities, starting a career in research, and being a Robert Wood Johnson fellow 5. Being a child of immigrants & some wonderful advice from her father 6. The process of integrating leadership development with health equity and launching “A Different Kind of Leader” 7. Deriving motivation from conversation 8. What does the next dream job look like 9. Covid19 through the eyes of a health disparities expert & the critical need to demonstrate trustworthiness for minority communities 10. What brings joy to Dr. Corbie-Smith during these trying days? Links Twitter @GCSMD, @DKLeadership @UREssien A Different Kind of Leader Podcast Transcript Mark Shapiro (00:01): Welcome back to Explore The Space Podcast. I’m your host Mark Shapiro. Let’s start off with a quick, thank you to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode. Creighton University believes in equipping physicians for success in the exam room, the operating room and the boardroom. If you want to increase your business acumen, deepen your leadership knowledge and earn your seat at the table. Creighton’s health care executive education is for you. Specifically tailored to busy physicians our hybrid programs blend the richness of on-campus residencies with the flexibility of online learning. Earn a Creighton University executive MBA degree in 18 months or complete the non-degree executive fellowship in six months, visit www.creighton.edu/CHEE to learn more. Thank you also to Vave Health for sponsoring this episode. Vave believes that personal ultrasound is the future of medicine with an aim to empower both clinicians and patients. From an affordable wireless device to the industry’s first, all inclusive upgrade plan two built in support with Vave Assist. Mark Shapiro (01:07): Their mission is to move the needle on ultrasound use in every clinical setting. Find more information online at www.vavehealth.com. That’s V a V E health.com. This is a remarkable episode. I am delighted that it is actually airing when it is airing. This is one that has been in the works for months and through trial and error and wildfires and an election season. We are finally here. Dr. Utibe Essien and Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith take over Explore The Space and I’ll just say it’s just one of those conversations. It is unbelievable. The thing that I liked the most about it, and I certainly don’t want to step on any of this conversation. This is a Titan of medicine being interviewed by someone who is on that same road, but also looks up to them as a Titan of medicine and to just feel that dynamic and to be in that space with Mark Shapiro (02:03): Dr. Essien and Dr. Corbie-Smith, it’s really special. I’m beaming, as I say this, this is really wonderful. I am delighted that this episode is coming out. I do obviously want to acknowledge this is the first episode of explore the space that has aired after the election. For those of you who are fans of the show, you know, how much energy our whole Explore The Space universe put into the election season. It’s great that we’re now on the other side of it. I hope that this episode can help to restore a little bit of a sense of normalcy, but obviously to all of you who contributed so much sweat and energy and tears and your own personal treasure and all of those things that help drive towards a result. Thank you to all of those of you in medicine who got engaged and activated for the first time who registered to vote for the first time who maybe helped a colleague get to vote for the first time. Mark Shapiro (02:53): Thank you as always to, I would like to invite everyone. Please do take a look at the archive of Explore The Space podcast, www.explorethespaceshow.com. You can find me on social media, I’m on Twitter at @ETSshow, and please feel free to email me anytime, Mark@explorethespaceshow.com. And if you have the opportunity to subscribe to explore the space podcasts, wherever you’d like to download your shows, that really helps us out and definitely leave us a rating and a review. It’s great to be back. It’s great to have another episode up and I just couldn’t be happier with the conversation between two incredible physicians, two extraordinary scientists and two just wonderful people who are creating new roads and conversations like this. Just reframe things in a way that is exciting, refreshing, and challenging all at once. So without further ado, Dr. Utibe Essien and Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith Utibe Essien (03:49): Hey everyone. My name is Utibe Essien and I’m an assistant professor of medicine at the university of Pittsburgh. I have to thank Dr. Shapiro for lending us his platform on the Explore The Space podcast to have what is going to be an incredible discussion with one of my favorite people in the medicine, in medicine, probably in the world, Dr. Giselle Corbie-Smith. So Dr. Corbie-Smith, for those of you who, for some reason do not know is the Kenan distinguished professor in the UNC university of North Carolina department of social medicine. And she’s the director of their center of health equity research. She has so many accolades and awards, which was some of which we’ll talk through during our time together. But, um, I’ll start with a little story rather than when I first met her back in 2014, I was straight up like I’m meeting Beyonce or Michelle Obama. Utibe Essien (04:48): I remember asking my mentor for med school, Dr. Gonzalez like, Oh, can you introduce me? Like, is it okay if I go up there and say hello at this my first society of general internal medicine meeting? And you could see like the crowds lining around here just to talk to her, because again, she’s so incredible. And I feel so grateful that six years after that, here we are chatting it up on a podcast and just finished getting our first paper together accepted and, um, been a long journey for me being this awkward, shy guy who was trying to say hello to, to use. So thank you for taking the time to chat Dr. Corbie-Smith. I am so glad to be able to talk with you. I think one of the universal truth is that if you know that social awkwardness, and it’s just part of being a physician in medicine, it’s like, we all have a little of that and you just got to figure out how to, how to channel through that. I think that’s probably true. That’s very true. So before jumping into your story, cause I got to, I know a little bit about it, but I want the world to hear it as well. Um, I love starting every conversation with my teams and learning about wins, especially during crazy times when there is a lot of sadness in the world. Um, it’s always great to kind of start off with highlight of the week. Favorite moment, uh, inspiring tale, I guess, so to speak from the past week. Giselle Corbie-Smith (06:09): Yeah. That’s such a great question. I’m thinking I’m going to incorporate that going forward. So I would, I, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to go back a little bit more than a week to maybe the last two weeks. Um, we just were awarded UNC and Duke, the coordinating center for grants, which are the rapidly accelerating diagnosis for COVID-19 testing and underserved populations. And that feels like, um, a huge win primarily because my collaborators and myself as PIs really decided we, in this coordinating center, we were centering the community and in everything we do and that felt, it feels like it could be potentially really impactful. Um, and so I’m excited to be able to contribute in this way, in this time, in this crazy time to center the lives of individuals who have been historically marginalized in this country. So that feels like a huge win. So I’m excited for it. Utibe Essien (07:18): Awesome. That’s so great. Congratulations. And obviously you guys are killing it down in the research triangle, so, um, congrats on co-PIing that work and looking forward to learning more about it. So again, I just, I feel like I’ve heard and know some of this story. You shared a little bit about your journey during your SGM presidential plenary talk last year. Um, reminded me just how connected you and I are in our journeys. And again, would love to kind of have you share a little bit about what brought you to where you are? Giselle Corbie-Smith (07:50): Yeah. Um, well, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York and the old Brooklyn, not the new Brooklyn. I wasn’t a target on Atlantic Avenue then. And Bed-Stuy was, was the stuff of movies from spike Lee, right? Yeah. I grew up, I went to a high school that was rated the, had the highest crime rate in New York city of the year. I graduated had the highest reported crime rate because those of us had tilled and believe that others had higher rates, but we were better at reporting it, get skeptic, even men and, you know, went to, went to college and was woefully unprepared. Um, I had made it through, I was telling my kids last night that I made it through just by not being a bad kid, you know, not, not acting out in class and just doing enough work to stay under the radar medical school in the Bronx. Giselle Corbie-Smith (08:51): That really was just a pivotal moment for me in terms of seeing well sort of witnessing and living through the HIV, the birth of the HIV epidemic, um, and seeing the toll. It took not just on our patients, but on our colleagues. We had colleagues who became, who were visibly HIV positive, and it was, um, it was just heartbreaking. And I think that my time at Einstein and at Monte just really was, again, one of those inflection points where you make a commitment, even if it’s not completely conscious to the care of, of, of people that are, have been historically marginalized in this country. And, um, did my training at Yale. And I remember being on the wards and being allowed mouth about the care that I saw people getting that I felt wasn’t just, and just, I felt completely compelled to let everybody know this. And one of, one of the attendings pulled me aside and said, you know, you don’t necessarily want to be seen as an angry black woman, which I thought was hilarious because she was the angriest white woman I had ever met. Giselle Corbie-Smith (10:05): And I was like, really you’re telling me this. Cause she was, she was just as strident about the inequalities that, that we saw, but I wanted to try to do something more about it. I remember, um, I don’t think I was a chief resident yet. I remember as a resident, Nikki Lori came to give a, um, an invited lectureship and she talked about, um, vulnerability and brace and social class and some of her research that she was doing around Medicaid expansion, um, even back then. And, um, Medi-Cal, I think in California and I was blown away that people could actually study this and could make a career out of an actually could even name what it was, um, because it really wasn’t even a name for health disparities work at that time. Um, and I thought, wow, okay. So this is a possibility. Um, and as a chief resident, I tried to do a little project to uncover what I saw as the bias around amongst my colleagues. Giselle Corbie-Smith (11:06): It didn’t go very well, but it definitely pointed me in a direction to that. This is something that could happen. This is something that I could do. I joined the faculty at Emory, um, at Grady, which was just an amazing place. Anybody that works at Grady could be anywhere else, but it’s the commitment to that population that draw people there. Um, and that sort of comradery was really a beautiful incubator for, for some of this work. And I really wanted to, to learn and to study more about the doctor patient relationship and what was happening in that relationship and how that manifested in health inequalities. And I was dissuaded by my colleagues who had more research. I had no research experience at that point who had more research experience and said, you can’t really understand happening. You can’t study it. There’s no way to really get into the clinical encounter to study it. Giselle Corbie-Smith (11:58): And I believe them. Um, but at that time, people were, that was right around the time of the NIH revitalization act. And people were really remarkably callous and to a point of being vitriolic in the scientific press and the scientific publications about having to include black and Brown people in their studies. And I was like, well, if they’re going to publish this as must be zero to study, right? I mean, they’re just saying it right out here, it’s all published about, you know, what I saw as sort of looking in hindsight, sort of a racist approach, racism and medicine, really. Um, and so I followed that line. I was able to get grants. I went back to my chair of medicine. Ralph Horowitz up at Yale who told me I needed to get some research training before I left Yale and I didn’t believe him. And then I saw him at a meeting. I think it wasn’t at SGI M meeting. And I said, Ralph, you were so right. Can you help me? Giselle Corbie-Smith (13:02): And he’s like, you know, I have, they have these new diversity supplements out. Why don’t we have an ROI? One, why don’t you write one of these and get a diversity supplement? And I, so I got one of those. It took a while because I had no idea what I was doing. And Ralph Ralph and his team was busy, but that was sort of the lifeline, one of the lifelines that were thrown to me to help me on this path. Yeah. And then, so I got the diversity supplement. Then I got a K I had heard about these cases that were new on the scene. And I said, well, this sounds like a goal. Let me get a K out. I knew nothing. I had no idea what it was or what it would entail, but I was like, okay, I’m going to give myself five years to get a K if I don’t get the K, then I’m out. Giselle Corbie-Smith (13:47): I obviously I’m not cut out for this. It was. So this was the bargain I made with the universe. Um, and I got it actually on the first try, um, asked her after two years. Yeah. I got the Amos award. Um, after two tries, the first time I shouldn’t have gotten it. I was so glad that they made that decision. The second time I was barely ready, but I had just gotten a K and they said, you know, well, we’d like to fund winners, so yeah, we’ll take you. And thank God they did that family. Um, extended family of Robert Wood Johnson foundation has been just, uh, the connections connection to such a callous word. The, the family that you become a part of in that program is really enduring and some of my best colleagues even to today, 20 years later. So, um, yeah, so that’s how I started, ended up at UNC when I realized that, um, while Emory and Grady worked fabulous for the work that I was doing at the time that I needed an, a bit more infrastructure to support the work ended up in UNC. Giselle Corbie-Smith (14:49): And I’ve been here 20 years, which crazy to me, this is longer than it lived in my parents’ house. Kind of nuts for me to take. I’ve been in one place 20 years, but yeah, it’s been a really fantastic place for my work, the department that I’m in, um, I’m in social medicine and also in internal medicine and it’s been just an incredible place, interprofessional interdisciplinary place to situate this work. And it allowed me to go in a variety of directions and really pushed me to think beyond participation in clinical research and to like, what are you going to do about it? Like, yeah, that’s fine. You’re describing this, but like, what’s, what’s, what’s the game plan. And that’s how I ended up in community engaged research. Community-based participatory research, which is mostly what I do, which has been some of the most rewarding and incredible collaborations that I, um, I’ve, I’ve, I feel like I’ve learned, I feel somewhat selfish. I feel like I’ve learned so much more than, than I ever gave in those collaborations. Utibe Essien (15:53): Well, that, that journey is I feel like the stuff of what many of us hope our careers will be, that we, you know, hit it on the first, try our K awards and get the AMLs award grant end. But still what I heard you say throughout that it was, you know, my first project didn’t go as well as I have added hope. I probably shouldn’t have gotten my email’s award on the second try. And so, yes, I, uh, hear the amazing success that we all can see and visualize what I also hear this persistence and kind of resilience through, through the work I suspect I can appreciate where that probably came from, but can you share a little bit about what, what keeps, what kept you going in those times when it was like, you know what, this project is terrible. And my chief year, I’m not going down this route, I’m going to retire those patients. Giselle Corbie-Smith (16:43): Well, that chief year, I hadn’t, I probably some would say was a very productive year cause I had my first child, but in terms of scholarly productivity, it really sucked. So, you know, I am a child of immigrants and there’s this, my parents are from the Caribbean and there’s, I saw them work. I mean, and my dad had gave each of us a little saying, as we, as we went through our sort of elementary and high school years, and his quote for me was the race is not for the swift, but for the sure. And it was disappointments in high school because I kind of pulled up. It was easy for me. High school was easy because as I said, you know, I just had to stay out of trouble, show up, do some work. And, you know, I was on the path to be valedictorian. And then I kind of just stopped doing work in height in my senior year. And so I missed valedictorian by like a 10th of a point and was really disappointed. And, um, my dad was like the race is not for the swift, but for the sure. So just stay on your path, keep working hard persevere and you’ll be fine. Um, and in fact, he, right. Okay. Utibe Essien (18:00): Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I love it Giselle Corbie-Smith (18:03): Parents, right? I mean, everybody sees all the, all of these achievements, but it’s the it’s realizing that you have to do it for a purpose. The, for me, the grants and papers were never enough to do the work, the hard work that’s required in academics. So I had to, I literally remember thinking, so like, what’s the deal what’s driving you to do this. And for me, it’s what I realized is that papers and grants are the currency of academia. Um, and it’s the path by which the voices of, um, folks that are underserved or don’t have a voice can be brought into the Academy. Um, and that’s why I do the work that I do is to bring those voices and find a way to bring those voices into places where they need to be heard and can shape organizations. Yeah, Utibe Essien (18:54): That’s awesome. Well, one of the other ways that I see you doing it, this work is through your fellowship, through the  Robert Wood Johnson. Can you share a little bit about that experience and what kept you again? It sounds like within that family of scholars. Giselle Corbie-Smith (19:10): So, um, I actually, for the first iteration of the clinical scholars program, I was on, I was a faculty member. Well, they had a program at Yale that I kind of knew about, but didn’t really participate in. And then they had, they had a program at UNC and I got to be on the faculty there. Um, and then got, was invited to be on the national advisory committee for the first iteration. And then now are sort of leading the latest iteration of the clinical scholars program, which is more about leadership development, which is a fascinating and exciting space to be in because we’re integrating leadership development in our program with health equity in a very intentional way, um, to build teams of interprofessional leaders who are tackling some of the most challenging problems in our country facing health equity. And so it’s exciting to see these folks coming through the program, um, and even more exciting to see how they’ve already been so impactful. Um, since the beginning of the program, Utibe Essien (20:22): Maybe that’s a good segue to chat a little bit about your podcast. Obviously we’re recording on a upon right now. Um, and last year you created this new podcast, A Different Kind of Leader, uh, which I feel like is perfectly embodies your career and what you’ve been to me, at least when I left for you to take us through how does a researcher, physicians, academician full professor mother, um, find the time to a director of a research center, find a time to then create a podcast. And, uh, what was the inspiration for that? And what does leadership kind of more broadly mean to you? Giselle Corbie-Smith (20:56): Yeah, thank you for that. So the podcast I’ve been thinking about for about two years before, um, and it became clear to me that my colleagues, particularly people who had faced some adversity in their past, either because of what they look like or who they loved had almost been burnished by those that adversity within the Academy and their luster was just, so it was just remarkable, the talent that I saw around me and this really started in the Amos program, but what I have seen, and this is not to take away from anyone else, but the depth of insight and thoughtfulness for leaders that are black indigenous people of color, um, sexual or gender minorities, um, and is their leadership style and substance is, is there’s a, well there, that’s so deep. And that often time appreciates that diversity in thought diversity in their leadership and the teams that they pulled together in their approach to the complexity, their strategies, and the way that they move in the world. Giselle Corbie-Smith (22:11): And I wanted to elevate that. Um, I hadn’t seen that I waited two years because I didn’t know how to start a podcast. Um, and you know, as you said, I had a couple of things that I was working on at the time. Um, and then somebody who had heard me talking about actually one of the, one of the folks in our leadership development programs, like, you know, I’ve been hearing you talk about this for like two years, when are you going to start it? Like, okay, I got called on that. So why don’t I go ahead and get this started? And I’ve been lucky to have an incredible team that I’m working with Sable and Rachel, and also to there hasn’t been a single person that I’ve asked that have said no. And in fact, we had, we kind of got ahead of ourselves and our first season and kind of ran out a slot. Giselle Corbie-Smith (22:58): We asked a whole bunch of people thinking that, you know, maybe 50% would say yes, and then it was like, okay. And then COVID happened. And we were like, wait a minute, time out, we all need a break. We had to pump the brakes then. So season two, starting now, we’re super excited to launch. Uh, my hope is folks will listen and be inspired as I am each time I talk with those, with those individuals, you know, at the end of the day, it’s hard sometimes to think about adding that one more thing, but I’m always refreshed and energized and inspired just to talk with folks who are on this leadership journey. The other reason that I did it as a fairly selfish, um, you get to a point, um, within academia, as you sort of ascend that you don’t have these colleagues around you, um, as a racial or ethnic minority there it’s far and between. Giselle Corbie-Smith (23:46): And I felt like other people probably were experiencing the same thing. And just being able to hear the stories and to have their experiences validated would be helpful. And then the third reason is because I’ve sat in that chair and looked with awe at folks that seemed to have accomplished so much. And it’s so important when you’re starting out as a leader, um, you’re a barking on your leadership journey to know that it’s possible. Um, and to know that folks have experienced those same bumps and that you can do it. There’s nothing you can do it. Utibe Essien (24:22): That’s awesome. And that’s my journey towards medicine was literally one first-year medical student at Einstein as well, who told me, you know, if I can do it and you can too. And I was struggling through my MCATs and freaking out about my, my science GPA and she totally completely motivated me in a way that no one else had before. And I think that sounds like that’s what these conversations aren’t for you as well. Giselle Corbie-Smith (24:45): Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s my hope is it certainly works for me. I mean, at the end of these conversations, I’m like, okay. Yeah, that just validated another experience that I’ve had. And my hope is that it also serves to inspire people that might feel that that might need, that may need that in, um, in their lives at that moment in time. Utibe Essien (25:05): Yeah. That’s great. So what, what, um, what is the future look like for, for someone who is a full professor? One of the very few black women who have, can claim that in medicine, who is a director, again, like I mentioned as someone recently elected to the national Academy of medicine, like seemingly checking off all the boxes that young, early career, um, academicians have, what does, what does the next dream job look like or dream opportunity look like for you? Giselle Corbie-Smith (25:36): Well, that’s a great question. So right now I have the privilege of serving as associate provost for rural initiatives. And, um, it’s, uh, I think an opportunity to, to, I think you’d get to this place where you’re no longer satisfied with the impact that you’re having. And you feel particularly if you’re motivated by the people that you’re, so that you’re hoping this work will serve, that you want to be able to have a bigger impact. And so I’m, I’m excited in this role to be able to sort of support people who are really trying to build partnerships with, at least in North Carolina, some of the most underserved areas in our country. I mean, our, that the place where the geography, where my community collaborators live and work is the buckle of the stroke belt in the Southeast and in a rural, rural part of our state. Giselle Corbie-Smith (26:31): And so, um, I feel really privileged to be able to support partnerships around the state and to create an infrastructure, to, to advance their work and to create new partnerships. So that’s, that’s what I’m working on now. You know, leadership development is another way to have that impact supporting leaders so that they can really have a systems view of the work that they’re doing and the opportunities to create systems that are equitable. And so that is another thing that gets me excited is to find ways to support leaders, either through a coach or being a coach or through a program. So, yeah, so those are the things that, that are floating my boat now. And of course the research is always there and my patient, I still see patients on Friday afternoon, you know, for, for me, that’s my first love medicine. Utibe Essien (27:17): That’s awesome. That’ll put the full package as some might say. And I guess that, that kind of reminds us that as you mentioned, the research into patients, that we would obviously be remiss to not mention the current moment coordinate quote that people refer to as, as the, um, racial injustice that is occurring around our world. And I think that’s really connected you and I together over the last few months, along with the pandemic of COVID-19, and as I was writing references for a recent paper, I came across your paper from 2003, talking about distrust, race and research in JAMA, and really talking about these issues that are really now coming to the forefront. And so I wonder how you’re thinking about this moment, what it means for health disparities research as a field for early again, early career researchers, and again, for the patients and communities that are being were hard hit back when you’re a training where, when you were writing that paper and continue to be hard hit today. Giselle Corbie-Smith (28:16): Yeah, yeah. 2003 seems like a minute ago now. Huh? Yeah. So we’re in, they sent syndemics right. So the COVID 19 pandemic and this racism that’s been in our country is actually the fabric of our country. Um, the syndemics that are coming together and actually creating a sum that’s worse than each of its parts. I think for many people of color, this has been just an incredibly trying time. Um, and it’s exacerbated by the misinformation and the sort of the destruction of trustworthiness within our scientific community, but, but we’re seeing, um, and sort of the politicization of this pandemic, I think has, is going to have far reaching consequences for research beyond, beyond the, the unnecessary deaths and ill and lives that have been lost, um, in, in this country. My worry is that as a scientific community, we’re not yet clear on how and on how to, and how important it is to demonstrate our trustworthiness. Giselle Corbie-Smith (29:31): We typically, and one of the things that I would go back now, I guess, 17 years ago, and rewrite that paper is to reorient the work to trustworthiness. And this is, I mean, that paper is a, is a product of growing up in a majority culture in, in, in science. And so it’s oriented towards people of color being distrustful, as opposed to the fact that as a scientific community and some would say, even a medical community that we have not demonstrated our trustworthiness in the way that we need to. It’s completely, I remember a quote from the first set of focus groups that I did at Grady around the Tuskegee syphilis study and participation in research. And this, this brother said, given the way brothers are treated in, in, um, why do what I think that participating in research would lead to anything good for me. And I’m like, it’s completely legitimate for people to not put their trust in an institution that consistently and persistently it’s failing them. And right now the misinformation that we, that it’s being, you know, the misinformation contradictory information that we see in our press is really, isn’t going to be a major challenge. And I think is going to have an enduring impact. Unfortunately. Utibe Essien (31:00): Yeah, that’s actually something I’ve never, ever really heard that it’s not just the current moment, which is so powerful. Obviously the, the millions and infected the deaths, but thinking about its impact on research down the line, and this trust is not just affecting us right now and studies today, but in four or five years, when we’re trying to recruit again, like what do those similar conversations look like? And that’s such a critical point to bring up? Well, I always want to end on, on a note of hope. Again, I have been inspired by you over the last six, seven years that I’ve got to know you and follow your career. I’m so fortunate to have you as a mentor, a colleague and friend, I’d love to know what, what is giving you hope in, in these days as again, the pandemics, the syndemics, however, we refer to them as can really, um, start to get to us and affect us. What, what brings that joy? What brings that hope as you go along on the day to day, Giselle Corbie-Smith (31:55): Really this is going to sound fairly trite, but it’s my kids. And when I say my kids, I’m lucky enough in this pandemic to have my two nieces with me, as well as two of my son. And they are so savvy, they are remarkable. Um, my oldest son, my middle son is 22, my oldest son’s 25, but he’s, he’s in law school now at an, at Howard. Um, but my 22 year old is here. My 14 year old son is here and my 15 and 17 year old nieces. And when I sit down and hear them talk about politics, about race and racism, they are, I mean, it took me a year. It took me probably 10 years on them to be able to have such confident, sophisticated kinds of conversations. I remember last summer I had them for a little while and, um, I came back from a racial equity training and was talking with them about it. Giselle Corbie-Smith (32:51): And I said, you know, they have these for teenagers sometimes too. And they were like, please mom. We want to go, we want to go. I was like, wow. Okay, cool. That’s dope, man. So that gives me hope to know that, that they’re not starting from the place that I started. They’re already leagues ahead of me in terms of the, really the sophisticated way that they think about race and racism, anti-racism politics and policy and the current events. It’s really remarkable. And so that, that gives me hope. Every time we sit down to dinner together, that’s really great. And again, I think parents are saying, well, yes, the younger ones, it’s a little rough with that virtual school life, but to have some of the older ones at home when they would typically be on campus or at anywhere else, uh, has been a blessing. So that’s so wonderful to hear that. And I hope they tune in to this pod to hear their mom. Really thank you again so much Dr. Corbie-Smith for taking the time to connect with us. Thank you, Dr. Shapiro for lending this platform of Explore The Space and I’m really looking forward to connecting again soon. Yeah, this was fun. Thank you. Thank you again for a long day after a long day, feel a lot better now. Giselle Corbie-Smith (34:13): Yes. Before I go, how can the rest of folks connect with you? I am episodically active on Twitter, not narrowly as active as you are @GCSMD. Um, I’m also on LinkedIn and much less active there, but that’s a goal. Certainly can listen to A Different Kind of Leadership podcast or follow the podcast on, on Twitter as well. Season two is dropping soon. Um, and, um, we’re really excited about the diversity of disciplines that we are having on the show. Um, branching out beyond medicine, which was sort of heavy in the season one, but really almost all of our colleagues that we’re talking with are centering race and their leadership in this moment in time. So I think is going to be pretty exciting for folks to listen to. Very cool. Thanks again. And we’ll chat again soon. Alrighty. Thank you. Mark Shapiro (35:12): My thanks once again to Dr. Essien and Dr. Corbie-Smith for this extraordinary conversation and my deep thanks to both of you for sharing my platform and your incredible expertise, your stories and your insights on explore the space podcast. This is very special and I really hope we get to do it again. Thanks also to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode, learn more about Creighton’s executive MBA and executive fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. And thanks also to Vave Health for sponsoring this episode, that’s Vave with a V. don’t forget to check out their site for details on their free virtual ultrasound educational events, otherwise known as #VaveEduCasts. The next one is coming up this Thursday, November 12th at 3:00 PM, Pacific 6:00 PM Eastern standard. Go to vavehealth.com/live for more details or find a link in the show notes. Thanks to all of you for listening. Thank you so much. Look forward to bringing you more great content. If you enjoyed this episode, please do let me know. Please do find us on Twitter and share your insights there as well. You can email me anytime. Your time listening is o appreciated. Thank you so much. Remember to wear your masks, maintain physical distancing, wash your hands, get your flu shots, take care of yourselves, and we will see you soon. Thanks so much. Bye-bye. #racism, #antiracism, #scholarship, #disparities, #immigrant, #healthdisparities, #Covid19#podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“The goal is to help patients who are unexpectedly hospitalized on Election Day vote from their hospital bed” Dr. Kelly Wong is an Emergency Medicine doctor in her 4th year of residency at Brown University and she is the Founder of Patient Voting. Her incredible, nonpartisan project is helping us all better understand how to help hospitalized patients cast their vote, which is more important than ever as Covid surges across the country. Click here to find information on patient voting for your state! Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. What is Patient Voting? 2. Where Dr. Wong first learned of the concept of patient voting from the hospital 3. How Covid19 has driven increased interest in Patient Voting 4. The ways it is not too late to engage prior to the 2020 elections 5. Common questions about patient voting from healthcare providers and patients 6.  Where has there been resistance to Patient Voting? 7. How the new generations in medicine are driving this work 8. The future of Patient Voting Links Twitter @kellywongmd, @patientvoting Patient Voting website State guidelines for patient voting Transcript Mark Shapiro (00:00): Welcome back to Explore The Space Podcast. I’m your host Mark Shapiro. Let’s start off with a quick, thank you to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode. Creighton University believes in equipping physicians for success in the exam room, the operating room and the boardroom. If you want to increase your business acumen, deepen your leadership knowledge and earn your seat at the table. Creighton’s health care executive education is for you. Specifically tailored to busy physicians our hybrid programs blend the richness of on-campus residencies with the flexibility of online learning. Earn a Creighton University executive MBA degree in 18 months or complete the non-degree executive fellowship in six months, visit www.creighton.edu/CHEE to learn more. My guest in this episode of Explore The Space Podcast is Dr. Kelly Wong. Dr. Wong is an emergency medicine physician she’s in her fourth year of her residency at Brown University, and she is the founder of Patient Voting. Mark Shapiro (00:59): This is part of our run-up to the 2020 general election. And this project that Dr. Wong has created is really remarkable. It is designed to facilitate people who are hospitalized on election day being able to vote. Every state has guidelines for this. Every state has rules for this and a process by which it can happen. This is something I never knew about. I’ve been a practicing physician for awhile. I have never heard of this. And I’m delighted that Dr. Wong has, first of all, created this program, which you can find at www.patientvoting.com. We’ve got all the links in the show notes, and that she’s mobilized this incredible team of pre-meds and medical students and residents and people who are doing all sorts of other education and training to be part of this project. It is really exciting. It’s really remarkable that I’m delighted that she came on. Mark Shapiro (01:54): It’s more important than ever as we watch. COVID 19 surge across the United States in the run up to election day as well. Before we get to this really wonderful conversation with Dr. Wong, please do check out the archive of Explore The Space pPodcast at www.explorethespaceshow.com. Email me anytime you want Mark@explorethespaceshow.com and you can find me on Twitter @ETS show. Wherever you’d like to download your podcast, please subscribe to Explore The Space and please leave us a rating and a review. So really appreciate that if you have a chance to do it, that really means a lot. And it definitely helps us out. There are all sorts of remarkable innovations and activations that are happening in the run up to the 2020 election and this patient voting project that Dr. Wong and her whole team have created is really something special. Mark Shapiro (02:40): You’re going to really enjoy listening to this. Please check out the website, please think about how you might be able to utilize it. If you are in medicine and you work in a hospital. And if you know somebody who is hospitalized as well, this is something you can ask about. So without further ado, Dr. Kelly Wong Kelly, welcome to Explore The Space Podcast. I am so happy that you’re here. This is cool, Mark. Thanks for having me on. We were joking before we started. And I said, you know what? I don’t script the show. I don’t know what I’m going to ask you. And then I actually asked you, I think a really good question. I’ve been looking at this website, patient voting. I’ve been getting a better understanding of it just in these last few weeks in the run-up to the 2020 election. Who are you? What, what is going on? This is unbelievable. Kelly Wong (03:26): I think a lot of people, when they see patient voting and they see that I like founded Patient Voting, they assume that I had a political background. Like I think they assume I was the kid that went and did like a summer in DC and, you know, been involved in like campaigns before, but I was a very casual voter prior to this. And I actually just fell into this because there was a knowledge gap that I saw Mark Shapiro (03:48): That is absolutely fascinating. So I didn’t think that I thought that you were like lightning bolted down from above to fill that need. I was like, I’ve never heard of something like this taking shape with this size and scope. And before we get into like the, how did this happen when I kind of get hyperbolic about size and scope, it’s important that people understand this full transparency. I just learned about patient voting the actual website, this platform that you’ve created just like two weeks ago. And I reached out and said, let’s get, let’s get you on the show. Give us a sense of what is this? What is this entity? What have you created here? Kelly Wong (04:26): So, you know, it did start small and it’s definitely grown. So Patient Voting is a nonpartisan volunteer based organization that I founded in 2018, just prior to the midterms two years ago. And so the goal is basically to help patients who are unexpectedly hospitalized around election day, vote from their hospital, but using an emergency absentee ballot. And, you know, most people are familiar with a regular absentee ballot. It’s, you know, what college students use in the military uses when they know they’re going to not be present on election day to go to the polls, but for somebody like you or me who maybe thought we might go to the polling place on election day, and then something happens where we end up in the hospital. This is what an emergency absentee ballot is for it’s for that period of time, after that regular absentee voting deadline to election day. Mark Shapiro (05:17): And here’s something that I will share. And I share this with equal parts, excitement, and equal parts sadness. I finished residency in Oh six, 2006. I’ve been an attending ever since my sadness comes from the fact that I am just hearing about this. Now, all those years have gone by all those doctors that I’ve worked with all around the country, the smartest, kindest, most engaged, most interested in their patients that you would ever hope to want to work with. It’s never come up. I’ve not heard of this before. So that’s the sadness. The flip side is, Oh my gosh, look at what you’re helping us to better understand. This is really cool. Now for the rest of our careers, we’ve got this. Kelly Wong (05:58): And, you know, nobody told me this during my medical education. And it was pretty much a patient that pointed this out to me during the last presidential election. I was still in med school. And as you know, in the emergency department, when we say, you know, I’m very sorry, but you’re probably going to have to be, be admitted to the hospital. You’re going to have to stay for a couple of days, is my guests, you know, sometimes you hear people say, Oh, I can’t be admitted to the hospital. I need to go home to, you know, do X, Y or Z take care of my grandmother, let my dogs out. And I understand those things, but I, until the presidential election in 2016, never heard somebody say, I can’t be admitted for an NSTEMI. I need to go home and vote and like leave AMA. Mark Shapiro (06:42): Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t either, you know, for the, the, the, the, how many election cycles have I been a physician for? I’d actually, I have not heard that yet. Kelly Wong (06:50): And, you know, I looked at that patient and I was so taken aback basically. Cause I’m the person that cries when like Tom Hanks talks about the constitution in what’s that spy movie that he did, but any kind of patriotic, patriotic part in a movie, I just know. And, but, you know, it’s, it didn’t seem fair to me that there wasn’t a process for patients to go in the hospital. And once I started researching, I realized most States do have a process. We just don’t know about it. And then our patients don’t know about it if we don’t tell them. Mark Shapiro (07:22): So from there, especially with this election, have you found if you, you started this in 2018? I would imagine. And I hate to guess, but I want to, because it’ll just kind of spark. I want to see what you think about this. I would imagine that there has been a surge of interest over the last few months around the Patient Voting project. Kelly Wong (07:40): Yes. And I, you know, I think part of that is people are more interested in general in general elections than they are, you know, midterms. But I think this year, if any, with COVID has, you know, elections have been in the news more like different ways that you can vote, vote safely vote early. And so I think people are a little bit more familiar that there might be other ways for them to vote other than the classic, like go to the polling place on election day. But we’re definitely getting a lot more inquiries earlier than we did during the midterms. So yes, we’ve seen a huge surge. Mark Shapiro (08:17): And then that brings us to where we are now, right? By the time this episode goes up, we’re going to be close to, you know, we’re going to be less than two weeks away from election day. And we’ll obviously have links to the website and the various tools that exist there. But every state, my understanding is every state has its own regulations about how to obtain the emergency absentee ballot, where we are now, are we still in a place where physicians and nurses and healthcare administrators can reach out to individual patients can do organization within their hospitals and medical groups to actually still utilize this tool? Kelly Wong (08:52): It’s definitely not too late. You know, I think I’ve, we’ve set up the website so that you, if you have a single patient, you could download all the materials you need on a case by case basis. But there’s definitely still time to organize on kind of a, a larger institutional level, if you wanted to. Mark Shapiro (09:08): And what are the most common questions you’re getting from people who find this website, you know, through social media, through any number of different ways, word of mouth, you know, hopefully this podcast, what are the common questions you’re getting? So we can sort of lay out, maybe some of those answers. Now, Kelly Wong (09:24): I think from medical providers, it’s a lot of questions about, you know, I don’t, I see what you have on your website on patient voting.com, but I don’t see that on the state elections website, can you kind of like talk me through that? And I think that’s been one of the biggest problems and kind of why we started this website in the first place. It’s, it’s really, really hard to find these processes on the state election websites, even in states where, you know, it exists and you can look up the state election code and you can look up the state laws and you see that there’s a process. You know, I spent hours on my laptop with 20 tabs open on like, you know, whatever state election search, trying to look up like hospitalized patient medical emergency vote from the hospital, but from, you know, home safely and you just can’t find it on there. Kelly Wong (10:16): So that’s been kind of the question from medical providers is the kind of mismatch between what they’re seeing on our website versus what they’re seeing on the election website. And then mostly from patients, I think they are hoping that somebody can help them locally. And so that’s really where, you know, building a network has been kind of one of our goals in the future to have people in different States that are more familiar with that state’s process, or can coordinate with somebody at a local hospital to actually like be in person to help that patient or the patient family. Mark Shapiro (10:49): And as you’re watching the news, and we’re all seeing the same data points, and we’re all seeing the same curves and graphs around COVID-19 and hospital admissions and all of these sorts of things, are you expecting more demand as we get closer to election day simply because of that variable? Kelly Wong (11:10): Definitely. I think, you know, this year is highlighted that anybody could be hospitalized. When I first imagined this program. I kind of thought of it more, as you know, I’m worried about the patients that have repeat visits for, you know, has CHF exacerbation. And they’re more likely to be hospitalized around the election because they’re, they’re hospitalized frequently or something like that. But you know, this year it could be anybody. And, you know, at the time that we are recording this, you or I, or anybody still has time to be exposed, having an incubation period and get sick and end up in the hospital. So I think, you know, I want everybody to hear about this until all their friends and families cause who knows. Mark Shapiro (11:52): And what resistance points have you met as you got this started? It’s been a little over two years. It sounds like that you’ve been working on this project and growing the project. Where have you met resistance? Where have you found friction? Kelly Wong (12:05): So I think from a grassroots level, people are very, very excited to bring this to their, their institution. And I’ve been so lucky that I basically experienced no friction at my own institution. So I was pretty taken aback when, you know, other people who wanted to start it at their own hospital were met with opposition, basically from the C-suite. And I think, you know, you, you talk about this is an election and we’re going to try and help people vote. And a lot of hospitals feel like that is too political for them to take a stance on and, and help patients. And for me, I think you can be, I think you can be political, but nonpartisan. And that’s really what we are. We want people to be more civically engaged, but I think it’s really important that we’re encouraging all patients equally that we see and giving the equal opportunities to everyone. But that’s been the number one barrier has been having hospitals approve it. Mark Shapiro (13:00): It’s going to be really interesting to see if that changes. I can imagine that that is indeed the case. I think if you were to have asked me the same question, Hey Mark, what do you think is the most common friction point? I would’ve probably said the same thing. I think there’s just, we have an opportunity to really level up in our sophistication and our understanding of what it means to be political within the practice of medicine. There’s a lot more nuance to it, right? Like you said, we’re political, but it is a non-partisan brand. And that, that exists. That’s very real as you, I think, have done a wonderful job of, of crystallizing. And there’s just that level up. It’s just another level of sophistication. And I think we’ll look at 2020 as a real pivot point where we realized that we need to make that next level of sophistication, as opposed to using the blunt instrument that has been there for generations, don’t get political conversation over. Kelly Wong (13:47): Right. You know, I remember looking four years ago when I started looking into whether or not patients could vote and there really wasn’t a lot. And I remember, you know, you where you you’ve been on Twitter for a while, I assume. Mark Shapiro (14:00): Yeah. I’ve been on Twitter for, you know, enough enough. I don’t know. Self-Conscious there all of a sudden Kelly Wong (14:07): I’ve been on since I think 2015, but I remember it used to be very voodoo, you know, put your political comments out there along with your quote unquote professional Twitter account. That used to be a huge no-no. And I think this year, you know, people have, you know, decided to take a stance. What am I go back to it? Something else about the COVID questions. Yes, please do. So with all of the hospitalizations for COVID, I’ve actually gotten a lot of questions from, you know, social work, people working at a hospital saying we have the patient, we have their ballot, but if we bring the ballot into the patient, we can’t bring it out. Now one interesting. So just yesterday I was on, I made a couple calls to Washington’s board of elections offices to try and work with them about a specific patient who we want, he really wanted to vote. And so we were able to actually find a way, which is awesome. Wow. Mark Shapiro (15:11): Wow. So again, we need to get to a place where it doesn’t rely on a phone call to Dr. Wong and then Dr. Wong calling the election board of a state that’s on the other side of the continental United States to lobby for one patient. We have, we have many levels of sophistication that we need to grow to do this, right? Kelly Wong (15:31): Yeah. I think there’s a lot of room for kind of identifying barriers in the future. I think that’s like our goal for the next four. Mark Shapiro (15:39): Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that’s really striking to me about patient voting as well, the project as well is, you know, I was talking with Alice Chen from Doctors for Biden and one of the things that she and I were reflecting on because she and I went through medical school and training at relatively similar times. I think I maybe was two years ahead of her or something like that, that as medical students and residents, this was not something any of us did. But when I go to the patient voting website and I look at the who we are page and, or the, you know, the, the, the, our team link, it’s all medical students, it’s all residents. It’s amazing. Kelly Wong (16:17): It really is. And I think Mark Shapiro (16:19): It’s premeds too. I mean, it’s, it’s, you know, people who were in PA school, I’m scrolling through it right now. It’s, it’s phenomenal. Kelly Wong (16:27): Ed techs are having social work directors of patient experience Mark Shapiro (16:33): Tapping into something that’s really exciting for the generation of doctors and doctors to be behind mine. It’s, it’s really remarkable. Kelly Wong (16:42): Yeah. Future medicine is bright and it’s younger than me. Mark Shapiro (16:46): W w why, what is the, what is, what is the offer that, or what is what’s drawing them, do you think? Kelly Wong (16:51): I don’t, I mean, maybe, you know, just timing wise is, you know, since 2000 you know, there’s been a lot discord about mismatch between the electoral college and popular boat, and maybe they’ve just grown up with, we either need to be active and change things, or just kind of accept the election results. And maybe they’re just a little bit more used to this political activism at work. Mark Shapiro (17:21): Also, do you guys, as a group ever reflect on this, do you ever sort of look around and say, gosh, we’re, we are in a younger demographic, not knowing everyone’s age, but just saying, look, we’re all early career. At least what’s up. Why are, why is it us? Kelly Wong (17:35): I don’t know. I didn’t really notice until you pointed it out, but Mark Shapiro (17:37): I was blown away by it. I was like waiting to see, you know, the faculty mentor or something like you guys don’t get a faculty mentor. You guys are crushing it, faculty mentors at this they’re coming to me with research projects. They Kelly Wong (17:50): Want to do they want to know more about this than anybody? Yeah. They they’re the experts on this. They’re the ones that I’ve talked to all the boards of elections, like their funnel. Mark Shapiro (17:59): That is so cool. So what do you foresee for the next two weeks as we come up to election day as we come up to November 3rd? What’s your wishlist with patient voting? Kelly Wong (18:08): I mean, I always say that my ultimate goal with patient voting is for it to be obsolete. And maybe that’s not, that’s definitely not this year, but, you know, I would love to go talk to patients this year because we’re just kind of starting on that emergency absentee voting timeline here in the state. I’d love to go talk to patients and have them say, Oh, don’t worry about it. I already voted. Like, I think that’s ideal. I already believed in a safe, early manner, right. Rate my job is done. My job didn’t even start. That’s perfect. Yeah. I do anticipate hearing a little bit more of that actually this year, but I think in the next two weeks, it’s going to ramp up and we’re going to have a lot more of those kinds of COVID isolation case by case basis, because previously it was, Oh, follow the standard protocol of the state. And now it’s, every situation is different. Whether or not it’s, you know, family members that have to serve as an authorized representative to pick up the ballot, can’t get into the hospital because of visitor policies. Cause of COVID. Yeah. There’s a lot more barriers to this than there had been in the, in the past. Mark Shapiro (19:12): There’s a lot more barriers. I agree with you in what I would say for my wishlist, it would be acknowledging that I’m just learning about it now is for what time we have left, it would basically just be as many people engaging with it as possible. But for the next go around, you know, the 20, 22 midterms, the next general election, I would like to see are big organizations providing patients with the information up front. So as soon as the deadlines are, as soon as the windows are open for, for emergency ballots in any state that just like, you know, when you get admitted to the hospital, you’ve got some paperwork to complete, or your family has some that this is part of it. And they say, here’s one of your options. If you would like, if you, you know, you can apply for this, that sort of thing. I think that getting that level of sophistication is going to be really, really important. We’re just become standard work. Kelly Wong (19:57): Right. And you know, maybe my local hospital can set like a guideline on this. This is what we’re doing. We, every admitted patient is receiving a flyer. Wow. And I think that’s awesome. Mark Shapiro (20:09): That is totally awesome. It’s so inspiring. It’s really remarkable. I think that after this election, I, man, you’re going to have such an incredible career and you’re going to have so many cool things you get to do, right? The stuff, you know, blog about it, podcast about it, get on the news. Like you’ve really tapped into something very important here. And the experiences that you’ve learned are going to make it easier for other people to replicate it. And most importantly, for patients who are admitted and don’t obviously want to be in the hospital, they can still vote. Kelly Wong (20:39): Exactly. And you know, Mark, just like you said earlier, I think when you thought that hospitals kind of administration and improving like political program was the biggest barrier. All of these hospitals are wondering what other hospitals are doing. They all want to hear what the other big systems they need other people to have done it first. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s, it’s a trickle and then hopefully it’ll open up in the future. Like you said, Mark Shapiro (21:05): How on the website? It says who’s doing it. You’ve listed some really big organizations that are on the patientvoting.com website that have adopted this. Yeah. And look, it’s, that’s how it starts. These are big, big organizations that anyone can have it to go there, www.patientvoting.com and you can see them for yourself. And you’re going to see names that you recognize Kelly Wong (21:22): Adding more every day. That’s Mark Shapiro (21:24): So cool. So how do people find this individual physicians, nurses, family members of somebody who may be admitted to the hospital, how do they find patient voting? How do they find out more information? Not just about this project, but about specifically the state that they’re in. Kelly Wong (21:37): Yeah. So if you go to patientvoting.com, if you go to patientvoting.com/states, or there’s also a way to get to it from like how to vote, basically it’s really important because every state is so, so different. The deadlines are different the way in which you have to get your application to the election. Officials is different. So what we’ve done is create a state page that has the deadlines that has the process has a principal, state flyer PDF with the step-by-step instructions. And then where possible, where there has been a, you know, application posted to the state election website, we’ve put that on our website and in Google folder. So hopefully we’ve put most of those important materials all together. So that healthcare workers, whoever’s social work, friends or family, aren’t going to 10 different websites that all download things. Mark Shapiro (22:27): And we’ll have links to all of that in the show notes for this episode as well. Kelly, this is remarkable. The fact that you have kind of just put this project on your shoulders and built this incredible team of, you know, the next generation and the current generation of young physicians and physicians to be in PAs to be in text. And it’s really exciting. I am feeling so inspired. It’s sort of that shot in the arm in these last two weeks before the election. This is awesome work. Thank you for doing it. And thank you so much for coming on. Kelly Wong (22:57): Thanks Mark. Thanks for having me. Mark Shapiro (23:00): My thanks once again to Dr. Wong for joining us on Explore The Space Podcast to talk about the Patient Voting project. Definitely take a look at the links in the show notes, learn about this. If there’s time before this election, and there is still time, please make use of it and definitely start to integrate it into your regular workflows because it’s going to be around these rules and laws around people who need an emergency ballot have always been there. We’re just learning about it now. Thanks also to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode, learn more about Creighton’s executive MBA and executive fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. We’ve done a ton of content around the election. Please take a look at the archive. We’re getting closer and closer to election day. Please make sure you make a plan. Please help your friends and teammates and colleagues and family make a safe voting plan. Mark Shapiro (23:50): If you can vote early, take advantage of that opportunity. We’re coming down to the wire. So this is the time to make sure all of those pieces are in place so that you can cast your ballot and that your voice can be heard as you’re doing all of this great work. Make sure you wear a mask. Make sure you wash your hands, maintain physical distancing. Make sure you get your flu shot. Take good care of yourselves. Take care of the people around you. We will see you again soon. Thanks so much for listening. Bye bye. #patientvoting, #ElectionDay, #Vote, #Covid19, #Election, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician

“We are affirming to a complete stranger that their voice matters” Dr. Alice Chen is an Internal Medicine physician, the former executive director of Doctors For America, and one of the leaders of Doctors For Biden. She joins us in the stretch run of the 2020 election to discuss the shift in mindset among American doctors around politics. We also discuss the critical impact and sense of satisfaction to be had with phonebanking to help drive change. Please subscribe to and rate Explore The Space on Apple Podcasts or wherever you download podcasts. Email feedback or ideas to mark@explorethespaceshow.com Check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast as well as our White Papers and much more! Follow on Twitter @ETSshow, Instagram @explorethespaceshow Sponsor: Elevate your expertise with Creighton University’s Healthcare Executive Educational programming. Learn more about Creighton’s Executive MBA and Executive Fellowship programs at www.creighton.edu/CHEE. Key Learnings 1. How Dr. Chen became politically engaged as a physician 2. Signing a letter 3. Differences between physician engagement with politics between 2008 and 2020 4. What is phonebanking? 5. The impact a doctor can have when they share their profession when making calls 6. Orienting and getting started 7. The current state of voter activation and the rise of medical students and early career physicians in this work Links @DoctorsForBiden on Twitter and IG Phonebanking with Doctors For Biden Transcript Mark Shapiro (00:01): Welcome back to Explore The Space Podcast. I’m your host Mark Shapiro. Before we get to today’s episode, a thank you to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode, Creighton University believes in equipping physicians for success in the exam room, the operating room and the boardroom. If you want to increase your business acumen, deepen your leadership knowledge and earn your seat at the table. Creighton’s healthcare executive education is for you. Specifically tailored to busy physicians our hybrid programs blend the richness of on-campus residencies with the flexibility of online learning. Earn a Creighton university executive MBA degree in 18 months, or complete the non-degree executive fellowship in six months, visit www.creighton.edu/CHEE to learn more. My guest in this episode is Dr. Alice Chen. Dr. Chen is an internal medicine physician. Mark Shapiro (00:53): She is former executive director of Doctors for America, and she is now one of the leaders of Doctors for Biden. She joins us in the stretch run of the 2020 election to discuss a really important shift that’s occurring in the mindset of American medical students, doctors, healthcare professionals, all around the country, around this idea of engaging in the political process. And we also discussed the critical impact and the sense of satisfaction to be had with a whole variety of tangible things that you can do to drive towards change the biggest one at this point in the election being phone banking, which is a really interesting topic. It’s a really interesting subject, and she really helps step through some of the barriers that people can come up with to not participate in phone banking, as well as all the great reasons to jump in. If you have some free time leading up to the presidential election, definitely take the opportunity to check out the events page on the Doctors for Biden website. Mark Shapiro (01:47): There are phone banking opportunities every single day. So definitely take advantage of that before we get to our conversation. We’ll want to just invite everyone to please subscribe to and rate and review, explore the space podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you’d like to download your shows. That really helps us out. You can email me any time mark@explorethespaceshow.com. Definitely check out the archive of Explore The Space Podcast at www.explorethespaceshow.com and you can follow me on Twitter at @ETSshow. As I said before, we are coming down the stretch, there are lots of things people can do to engage around activating voters and driving towards change in America. As we come up to election day, it’s just a few weeks away now, Dr. Chen gives us some really tangible, actionable things we can be doing. This was a fantastic conversation. You’re going to really enjoy it. So without further ado, Dr. Alice Chen Alice, welcome to Explore The Space. I’m excited that you’re here Alice Chen (02:47): So excited to be here, Mark. Mark Shapiro (02:50): We are 15 days away and by the time this episode goes up, it’ll be a little closer. We’re 15 days away. It’s funny. I can say that and you can hear, and all of the listeners will hear it and they will know exactly what I’m referring to. Speaker 3 (03:05): Nobody’s here. Mark Shapiro (03:06): Nobody’s got, so obviously we’re, we’re referring to election day and we’re, you know, there there’s a whole host of things I’m in California and there’s a wide variety of, of interesting propositions and ballot measures and such things. And there’s Senate races and down ticket races and all that good stuff. I know it’s the same for you on the East coast, but we’re, we’re here to focus more on the presidential election. Does that sound about right? Absolutely. All right. So you are one of those rare doctors, I would say, and I hope that you don’t stay rare. And I don’t think that you will remain rare, but you are a physician who is as well-trained, as anybody who went through all of the same principles and practices of how we train physicians in America. And at the same time, you are an activated physician. You are engaged from a social aspect and you are engaged from a political aspect. I D I still think that it’s rare, but when I characterize it as rare for an American physician to be as engaged as you are, am I right? Speaker 3 (04:11): You are right. Although it is changing. And I have seen a shifting over the past decade or so. Mark Shapiro (04:17): So then we come to where we are now, and you are doing close work with an organization that I’ve been really fortunate to participate in a number of activities with Doctors for Biden. And I’m really curious to get a sense for you of how you came to the place where you do all the same training that we’ve done. You’ve heard all of the same implicit and explicit messages about doctors and politics. And now you are doing work on behalf of a candidate on behalf of a vice president Biden. What does that progression feel like? Speaker 3 (04:49): You know, it’s funny, I certainly didn’t set out to be a, like a quote unquote political doctor, and it wasn’t anywhere in my training. I was just like any other doctor working in this system and, and just encountering patient after patient, after patient who, you know, I had all of this, like top notch, world-class medical knowledge and equipment and cons consults and everything at my fingertips. And yet I’d have this patient who came in for heart failure again, because his only grocery store is the, is the, is the the gas station down the street and he’s eating canned food. And that’s why he’s back in the hospital with heart failure. They’re just, it was just so frustrating to me that there were so many patients that I couldn’t help either because of the social situation or because they couldn’t get health insurance, or they had had health insurance that didn’t cover the things that they needed. Speaker 3 (05:39): And, you know, I didn’t, I knew that there were forces at play in far away places like Washington, DC that were making it harder for me, for me to take care of my patients, but I really felt like I don’t have any power over those people. I don’t have like muddied interest. I’m not like a billionaire, I’m just a doc trying to put my head down and, and, and do what I can for my patients. But then in 2008, I had just become an attending. And I, and I had more free time than I had it as a resident. And it was a presidential election that I was very inspired by. And I found myself there calling voters and knocking on doors. And the next thing I knew, I ran into this organization that was then called Doctors for Obama. And I discovered there were thousands of doctors and medical students just like me. Speaker 3 (06:23): And they were just like me. They’re also like deans and people who are very accomplished in the field who were suddenly standing up and saying, Hey, we need a better healthcare system. And we’re going to put our names on a letter and say, so, and, and get involved in an election. I thought, wow, that is crazy. But I joined up and that was my first my first taste of, wow, wait as a doctor, we do, we do that. We have the power of doing something and, and, and, and in powerful places that, that I don’t understand. And then from there, it just kind of progressed. I ended up, we ended up creating an organization called doctors for America. And I, you know, went from a sort of a, a low level volunteer to running the whole organization for many years. And then when this year came around and, you know, the presidential election is happening, COVID is happening. It feels like the entire world is resting on this election. It was kind of obvious that we needed to rally doctors, whether they were politically engaged or otherwise doctors who are just mad about what’s going on in the world and channel that energy toward the election. Mark Shapiro (07:27): I remember hearing about Doctors for Obama. I remember hearing about Doctors for America, my whole life I’ve been engaged in the political process. I’ve found it fascinating. I’ve loved to learn from it. I’ve always voted all of those sorts of things. And I’ve always had that barrier that I gathered as a medical student, as a resident that Mark you don’t join things like that as, as, as politically engaged and attached as you are. That’s not where you go. You get in trouble. If you do that, don’t, don’t, don’t I regret it. I’ll be totally honest with you. I wish that I had done things differently, but I know, I know what I know now. And we know we, we just couldn’t, we just kind of commit to trying to get better, but it was just really interesting to hear you name those organizations and that you were able to participate in them. Right. I became an attending in Oh six. So my, my kind of process of evolution as an attending, it’s very similar to yours. And for me, it was, Nope, you don’t do that. You’ll get in trouble that dah, dah, dah. And it’s, it’s just really interesting to reflect back on that as I hear the road that you’ve walked, Speaker 3 (08:26): You know, I was lucky in that I just signed a letter online, right. Like a little bit Mark Shapiro (08:32): For sure. Yeah. Speaker 3 (08:35): But the next thing I knew, I was, I met all these other people who are also like, just feeling like, Ooh, is this something we do? And there were a few people who were like, yeah, I’m putting on my white coat and I’m standing on a street corner. And I was like, what you’re doing? What? But being in that community of people who were all like, okay, we’re going to jump together and suffer the consequences together. That was part of what gave me the, and the permission to do it. Mark Shapiro (08:57): It’s so cool. And I love that you said that there’s that sort of permission to do it because I had to kind of do that, that same mental gymnastics over the last like year, just kind of asking myself permission, which is so strange, right? I’m a, I’m a mid career attending now. Like I finished residency, you know, six, and I’m still having that cognitive dissonance of like, I’m gonna get in trouble, get in trouble, but that’s the problem. Right. And so having that community to sort of land with and, and move through that. And that’s one of the things that I really like and appreciate about doctors for Biden is it’s a very open landscape. And, you know, when, when Joe saccharin, who also helped really build it, he came on the show a few a week or so ago. And we talked about this, even though the names has doctors for Biden, it is really designed to be an open landscape for anyone that just feels like they have something to say or want that sense of community that you described. Speaker 3 (09:44): Exactly. Exactly. Mark Shapiro (09:46): So then in terms of that activation, and in terms of bringing people in, and as we started the conversation with this idea of doctors becoming more activated, are you seeing a change comparing it to Oh eight? What are the, just off the top of your head, the biggest changes that you’ve seen, the biggest differences that you’ve seen? Speaker 3 (10:05): So a few things one is that I think there are many more doctors who are a bit more bold because they’ve seen other people doing this, or they have done political things themselves for, for, for a few years, or maybe it’s a year, maybe it’s a month. But they, they, there’s a little bit more of a community and a track record. And so I’m seeing people who are feeling more emboldened to go out there and write their letters to the editor and their op-eds. I’m seeing that there are there, there’s more savviness of understanding, okay, this is how we move the system. These are the ways that we move the dial. You know, the other pieces is, is, is a product of the, of the year that we’re in is that I am seeing a lot of, for lack of a better word, a sense of desperation. Honestly, Mark Shapiro (10:49): That’s a fair term. I’m perfectly comfortable hearing you use that term. Yeah. Speaker 3 (10:53): That people are. And especially, I mean, you hear from like, you know, the doctor in Wisconsin a week or two ago, who said, we’re out of dialysis, you know, of, of dialysis spots, our ICUs are full. We are shipping people off to another hospital because we don’t have any more space for all of these COVID patients. I mean, there’s, there’s a level of anxiety and like, I will do absolutely anything I need to do to, to make sure the right person wins this election. That feels very different from any prior year that I’ve been involved with. Mark Shapiro (11:23): I remember seeing that, that tweet as well. I thought that’s where I saw it. At least it was on Twitter. And so it’s interesting that that’s been sort of what you are experiencing that draws people in, but then is there a tension where I acknowledging that physicians for the most part, carry a mantle of leadership? Is there a challenge in just sort of getting people to step in and grind and be told, just go here, click there, do this for the next hour, as opposed to being the one to the other people to go and do it. Speaker 3 (11:55): It’s funny because there are some people who want to just like, sort of be, be on top of, for the most part, doctors are really busy, right? Like I have half an hour, like give me something like that’s like going to be effective to do. So there’s an element of that as well. And because of that, like level of desperation, people are like, I will do anything. Like I will, I will like sweep the floors. I like just, just give me something that will be useful to do. And it just put me in. Mark Shapiro (12:23): So then we get to this part, right of somebody has a half an hour. Somebody has a half day, somebody has a chunk of time and they want to do something out, whether it’s out of sense of purpose, sense of desperation, whatever that’s going to feel meaningful. One of the things that you and I spoke about a little bit before we started recording, and then the reason I emailed you in the first place, one of the things that doctors for Biden has done has created a very easy and user friendly space for people to take a small amount of time and do some phone banking. Can you explain first, just so that we make sure everyone has shared understanding what is phone banking? Speaker 3 (12:59): Sure. So phone banking is basically calling up voters and it’s mainly voters in swing States and, and, and helping to get them to vote for your candidate or your issue of choice. It it, it seems, it sounds a little scary. And certainly I was terrified of it went back in, back in Oh eight. I remember I had signed up for for, for the Obama listserv and, and they just kept sending out all these calls, like come hang, phone bank with us, come call voters, come call voters. And I was like, no way, there’s no, give me something else to do anything else. I know one day, one day they were like, I was in LA at the time and they said, okay, you guys we need people to drive to Nevada and knock on doors there. And I was like, sign me up, sign me up. I will not. So I ended up going to Nevada and I drove these like random people in a carpool with me. And they were like, wait, you don’t phone bank, but you’re driving to Nevada to knock on strange people’s doors. And I was like, okay. They’re like, you need to go to a phone bank, come with us. We will phone back when we get back to California. And I was like, okay. And, and it kinda stuck. I got kind of hooked on the, on on, on talking to voters. So Mark Shapiro (14:12): Hooked you about it. So for someone who’s hearing this as well, understanding themselves, no way, not a chance as not for me. What is that hook? What, what brings you in Speaker 3 (14:23): Well, so, so when you phone bank, so, so, so the way, I mean, especially right now, like the, the technology has advanced to a point where they have these like bots that will dial phone numbers for you dial, dial, dial until you had a real person that goes Bing. And then somebody says, hello, and you say, hello, you have conversation. I put on my like, super cheery, like, hi, I’m Alice, I’m a doctor. And I’m volunteering with this campaign. I really want to talk to you. That’s awesome. Mark Shapiro (14:52): So you, but you share with them off the top that you’re a doctor. I do. Yeah. Speaker 3 (14:58): It could be. Cause I don’t want them to hang up on me. And I think that like, there might be like a small chance that they’re less likely to hang up if I say it Mark Shapiro (15:05): You’re right. I think people would be delighted to get a phone call from a doctor. Speaker 3 (15:11): Indeed. Indeed. Well, I hope so. Mark Shapiro (15:14): And then what happens from there is it, do you have a certain amount of time? Do you take all the time? You want it cause right. It’s, it’s sort of an interesting parallel to what you and I do as hospitalists. Right? We, we make rounds, we chat with people. Sometimes we have plenty of time. Sometimes we don’t have very much, sometimes they may not want to see us. Sometimes they’re busy and we have to come back. How does that sort of rhythm work, Speaker 3 (15:35): Funniest, settle. And most of the calls that you get, you get patched through to like, somebody will hang up even before you say hello or they, you know, you say, hi, I’m with them. They’re like, Oh, no more phone calls by. And then you get that like one call or if someone’s like, Oh, hi, sure. I want to talk to you. And then you like talk somebody into becoming a volunteer or you walk them through like how they submit their ballot and that you get this like high and you’re like, I need to get another one of those. Interesting. So, so, so, so it’s like, it’s a little bit, I mean, speaking of, of, of going in Nevada in Vegas, it’s a little bit like slot machine. Like Mark Shapiro (16:09): You get that dopamine hit and you just want more. Speaker 3 (16:11): Exactly. And what’s fun is and you mentioned doctors for bide and having these phone banks, the phone bank is basically we getting together, you know, we used to be like in person. And now we’re doing it over zoom and basically you’re with a whole bunch of other people, so we can pool our experiences. So we’re all on zoom, we’re all doing our calls. And then you see like, you’re like, Oh, I’ve gotten another hangup. And then you still see somebody chat that, like, I just convinced somebody to over buy it. And you’re like, I’m doing more calls. Mark Shapiro (16:40): That’s amazing. That is really, really cool. And then when someone wants to participate in something like this, is there a minimum time they need to be able to commit. Speaker 3 (16:52): I mean, I’d say like, you know, probably the bare bare minimum is like 15 minutes. You put in a chunk of time so that you feel like, kind of got, gotta got a good call and okay. Mark Shapiro (17:03): Foothold, because you guys have an orientation session first and that’s like 15, 20 minutes, but that’s a one off. Speaker 3 (17:09): Yes, yes. There’s a one off session just to orient you to, how do you, how do you, how does the dialer work had you marked the survey to show that somebody is a, you know, what, what, how they’re voting how do you get to the next call? How do you, you know, the, the, the basics of like, be polite, be nice, be respectful. There was a little bit of that training, but once you’ve been trained, you can call during a phone bank, you can call on your own time, as long as it’s within the hours, when people are are awake and the phone banks are open, you can kind of, you can, you can do it, you can do it on your own if you want. Mark Shapiro (17:42): Okay. Gotcha. The question that I’ve been asked the most about this is people just have this sense of if they’re phone banking, their own number that they’re calling from, you know, their computer ID or their cell phone number will be accessible to the person that they’re calling. But it definitely feels like, as you said, the technology is way better than it used to be. That that is no longer the same level of concern. Speaker 3 (18:06): Exactly, exactly. I mean, I still remember back in 08, like just like reams of paper and these like lists of like phone numbers and dialing one number at a time I’m trying to remember does do star 67. Yeah. But now the system, basically you use your phone just for the audio, but it hooks into their system. It’s the campaign’s phone number is the callback number. So, I mean, you don’t even have to use your real name if, you know, for some reason you, you, you, you don’t, you know, you do, you’d rather use a pseudonym to, to, to make your call. And yeah. So nobody can get ahold of you off of your phone number. They don’t know where you are. And yeah, you’re just, you’re just calling people. Mark Shapiro (18:45): This might sound like naive or like overly romanticizing the concept, but it just, it does still feel to me that there’s this sort of unique Americanness to that, that you’re just reaching out to connect with another sort of fellow American to see where they are and to see if you can have a few minutes of their time and maybe guide some decisions together. Speaker 3 (19:04): It is. And it is, it feels like a, you know, for all the money and politics and all of us that are like left of policy. Mark Shapiro (19:14): Perfect. Yes, totally. Speaker 3 (19:18): Is that like sound like person to person, like just another person in this country who wants like better. Yeah. Just want better. And, and it’s interesting because, you know, unlike, I think some, like, I mean, I, sometimes people like, Oh, I’m like bothering people and like, you know, truth be told, some people in these swing States are getting called like all day long. So there’s a little bit annoying, but like, you know, we’re, we are affirming to a complete stranger that their voice matters that, you know, Victor’s voice in like, you know, Miami matters to me that, you know, Shannon’s voice in, like in Virginia matters to me. And there, you know, I’ve gotten a lot of people who have said, like, I’m just like, thank you so much for calling. And, and, you know, even if it’s somebody who is already a supporter and they’re already going to vote, like I know that that phone call will nudge them to remind one more person to vote or will make them like, like more likely to like put in that ballot like one day earlier. And like every little, like every little inch that we can move makes a difference because all of us added together. That’s how you win the election. Mark Shapiro (20:25): No, absolutely. And now as we’re approaching, right, everyone keeps saying, we’re coming down the stretch, we’re coming down the stretch. It does sort of feel like we’re getting there. I mean, we’re, we’re going to be, you know, inside of two weeks away from the election, what is your take on the energy level and enthusiasm for people who are doing this sort of work, making phone calls, sending postcards, doing voter activation. Speaker 3 (20:45): It is so high. So Mark Shapiro (20:48): High, Holy smokes. Speaker 3 (20:50): Oh, high, like through the roof high. I mean, I saw, I saw another person on Twitter who, who had like 4,000 postcards. And she said, if I don’t get a promotion this year, this is why I don’t get my research grants. Like, this is why that’s awesome. Mark Shapiro (21:04): That should be on a tee shirt. Huh? Speaker 3 (21:06): I think she tweeted it from her lab’s Twitter account too. Mark Shapiro (21:10): So great. It’s interesting though, too, because I think that there’s this, all of this stuff, right. Which you just described and what I’m seeing, it’s going to leave a legacy regardless of how this election comes out. And I mean, I’ve openly endorsed vice president Biden. I’ve already cast my ballot. And obviously I’m part of doctors for Biden and we’re talking about this. So it’s pretty clear which way we’re leaning in this election. But I do think though in 2022, in the midterm election, 2024 and going forward, I think that things will be different. And I say that for a number of reasons, but the biggest one is the place where I see unbelievable energy is in the students, the undergrads and the medical students, and then the residents. It didn’t exist when I was a medical student or a resident. I mean, it was a few people doing a little bit. This is a whole different sport now. Speaker 3 (21:57): Totally. I mean, I don’t remember a single person doing anything in Oh four when I was in medicine. I certainly did nothing. I voted that’s it? Yep. This is, this is, I mean, I, I just heard that yesterday, there are 60 med students in Michigan, Horace signed up to be poll workers. Amazing, amazing, Mark Shapiro (22:14): Amazing. That just, that would never have happened where I went to medical school. It was just not on and not again, it’s implicit and explicit messaging. It just wasn’t, it just wasn’t an option. It just wasn’t there. It was there. It just wasn’t transparent where it was, you know, or accessible in a way that was felt to be okay. Speaker 3 (22:33): Right. It wasn’t, it’s not what you do. Like back when we were med students like that, wasn’t what you do. But now it’s being, I mean, advocacy is part of the curriculum is part of the Ironman for some residency programs. We’re definitely seeing a pretty significant change. And I think it’s because, I mean, so many of us have realized, you know, whether it’s young doctors or our senior senior doctors have realized that like this system is not going to change with us or sitting on the outside being like, this is terrible. Yeah. To be involved. Yeah. Mark Shapiro (23:03): No, I think that that’s very well said. And I think that that fundamental message certainly resonates. So as we move forward, these last few weeks, people hear this, they get fired up, they get over the, whatever, whatever the barrier may be around phone banking or writing letters or any component of voter activation, how do they access these resources through doctors for Biden? Speaker 3 (23:23): Sure. So I definitely encourage every single person who’s listening to this to sign up for a phone bank. You just try it once. You don’t want to get to know November 3rd, fourth, whatever day we find out what the results are and think, gosh, I didn’t, I didn’t do everything I could have. So please, please, please try it once. And you know, for us to join one of the doctors for, for Biden or one of our affiliated phone banks, it’s, it’s easy. You go to our website, it’s www.docsforbiden.com/events. And we have phone banks basically every day that you can be a part of. We have phone banks for medical students. We have phone banks with a bunch of health policy, people with other healthcare workers. It’s just the, the doctors for Biden, join, join a phone bank. You don’t, they’re usually two hours or an hour and a half. You don’t have to stay for the whole time. Just join for some of the comradery. You will meet other people who are exactly like we’re there. They’re very few people who are like, I love phone banking. Speaker 3 (24:28): I must do this because like, this is what one has to do to win an election. And like, here I am, I’m kind of scared. I don’t like, I almost didn’t show up on this call, but here I am. And then like an hour later you’ve made, you know, a bajillion calls together. So just try it. It is, it is so great. And it will make you feel so much better. Like I sleep so much better on the days when I phone banked or I’ve text banked, I’ve done like some voter outreach. I, I definitely go to bed earlier and check my check all the polling sites one last time, because I feel like, okay, I’ve done my work. Mark Shapiro (25:02): You’re so locked in. I just love it. It’s so inspiring. And then if people we’ve talked to you about a little bit about Twitter, where do they access the stuff? If they like Twitter, if they enjoy social media, which so that’s everybody, or at least they’re on social media, whether they enjoy it or not. It’s a different question. How do they access doctors for Biden? Speaker 3 (25:18): So we are on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, our handle on all three is @DoctorsForBiden. And we’re also using the hashtag #votehealth. So those are ways to see it is, it is really fun to just watch that hashtag and it has been blowing out the number of doctors and other healthcare professionals who are using the hashtag. And just saying like, I am here, I’m standing up. It’s it is, it is, it is one of the things that gets me going every day thinking like, okay, I’m going to do one more thing. Cause look at all these other people, they’re all, they’re all doing the things I’m going to do it too. Mark Shapiro (25:52): It’s really tremendous. I’m appreciative that you have been one of those people for me to help get me going into kind of bring, explore the space podcast into all of this work. It’s, it’s exciting. And it’s invigorating. This is important. These are, these are momentous times. We’re all gonna reminisce about what we were doing during these extraordinary months. So for all that you’re doing and for helping get us down the stretch. Alice, thank you so much. Speaker 3 (26:16): Thank you so much for having me. Mark Shapiro (26:19): My thanks once again to Dr. Chen for coming on this episode of Explore The Space and thank you again to Laurie Baedke and Creighton University for sponsoring this episode, learn more about Creighton’s executive MBA and executive fellowship programs@www.creighton.edu/CHEE. And thanks to you for listening to this episode. These are critical times. These are extraordinary days and we will discuss them and reminisce about what we did in this amazing period in the year 2020 don’t waste a moment take advantage of the opportunities that are in front of you to drive towards change. Whether it’s phone banking, writing postcards, talking with friends, neighbors, and colleagues, to make sure that they have a voting plan. And of course, making sure that you vote. It’s all important. It’s all valuable. Thank you so much for being so engaged and for helping to do this work with us, make sure you wear your masks. Make sure you wash your hands, maintain physical distancing, take care of yourselves, get your flu shots. We will see you soon with more great content on Explore The Space Podcast until then, bye bye. #votehealth, #phonebanking, #election #Biden, #podcast, #podcasting, #healthcare, #digitalhealth, #health, #leadership, #mentorship, #coaching, #FOAmed, #doctor, #nurse, #meded, #education, #hospital, #hospitalist, #innovation, #innovate, #medicalstudent, #medicalschool, #resident, #physician