Raise the Line

When Tracy Dixon-Salazar was a young mother of two she described herself as a mediocre high school student with no real academic or career ambitions. Today, she has a PhD in Neurobiology and Neurosciences, is credited with uncovering the genetic driver of a rare form of childhood-onset epilepsy, and she also identified the first precision therapy for it. Unfortunately, the spark for this remarkable change of course was her daughter Savannah’s battle with Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome (LGS) which caused hundreds of seizures a day, stopped her cognitive development and nearly killed her several times.  It all started thirty years ago at a time when the condition was poorly understood. “Nobody really knew what to do with this kid so I realized I had to fight, I had to become her advocate. You'll do anything for your babies and so I had to become educated,” she explains to host Michael Carrese. Dixon-Salazar moved on from her academic life several years ago to become a full-time advocate as executive director of the LGS Foundation where she works with over 200 gene-specific advocacy groups for rare diseases. “It gives me so much hope. The ability for patients to have a voice in the whole process has changed. Now patients have a platform.” Don’t miss this incredible story of a mother’s persistence that changed the prevailing dogma about epilepsy and LGS and ushered in new approaches to treatment that have affected many children beyond Savannah. Mentioned in this episode: https://www.lgsfoundation.org/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

“There's never been a better time to do what we do in our fields and the future of life sciences is so incredibly bright,” says Dr. Lloyd Minor. From his perch as dean of Stanford University School of Medicine, Minor sees the convergence of biomedicine, information science and technology dramatically increasing the pace of discovery-driven science and translational science. As a result of observing and contributing to the culture of discovery at Stanford, and based on his own groundbreaking work as a physician-scientist in otolaryngology, Minor has distilled the necessary elements of innovation into what he calls the “Four Cs of Innovation” -- combination, collaboration, chance, and culture.  “A culture of inquiry and collaboration is so important to making scientific advances that benefit patients and there is a level of collaboration and cohesiveness here that I think is very, very conducive to interdisciplinary scholarship,” he tells Raise the Line host Shiv Gaglani. But Minor acknowledges that this time of unprecedented change and new technology in healthcare has been stressful for providers, which informs his approach to leadership. “There's never been a more important time for empathy in leadership and for leaders to be engaged listeners.” Tune in for a fascinating look at how academic medicine is both driving change and adapting to it, how Stanford is applying precision medicine for preventive health and the importance of balancing the opportunities and risks of AI in healthcare. Mentioned in this episode: https://med.stanford.edu/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Educating someone to be a nurse, physician or allied health professional is obviously a complex process for learners, faculty and administrators. Today, our new Raise the Line co-host (and Osmosis COO) Derek Apanovitch takes a look at tools that help all of those stakeholders visualize the overall curriculum, where a student is on their learning path, and how they are performing. Our guide is Andrew Dos-Santos a veteran of healthcare and higher education IT who has launched the edtech company Fenix Alma Solutions to apply the insights he’s gained in his long career. “Over the last twenty years working so closely with faculty and staff it became clear that disconnected, disparate systems weren't the answer, and this is the landscape most institutions are still working within.” Fenix Alma, and its curriculum management platform VidaNovaVLE, provides the ability to see both the big picture and a granular view to ensure that educators and learners can target where performance improvements should be made. As a unified platform, it also gives administrators the ability to connect the data needed to answer critical questions about what is being taught at what level, what is being assessed, and how are learners doing. “We are trying to breathe new life into this health sciences education technology space.” Tune in to learn about customizing content for students, integrating with external content providers such as Osmosis, and how AI might benefit health sciences education. Mentioned in this episode: https://fenixalma.com/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

The failure of patients to take their medications as prescribed costs the U.S. healthcare system more than $500 billion a year, not to mention the adverse health outcomes it causes. Today’s Raise the Line guest, Sebastian Seiguer, co-founded and leads a company called Scene Health that is tackling this problem with a system that combines video technology, clinical coaching and validated interventions to improve medication adherence rates. Based on evidence gathered in multiple clinical trials, the Centers for Disease Control recently concluded that using asynchronous video is equivalent to an in-person Directly Observed Therapy - the current gold standard for adherence. “It’s an incredible thing. It's the first time in healthcare that an asynchronous video appointment is being treated the same as an in-person appointment,” Seiguer tells host Shiv Gaglani. Scene Health is currently supporting patients across multiple chronic and infectious conditions, including diabetes, asthma, opioid use disorder, tuberculosis and hypertension. Check out this enlightening conversation to learn why adherence is so low in the first place, how Scene Health is educating patients on how and why their medications work, and other applications for this approach.Mentioned in this episode: https://www.scene.health/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

To the uninitiated, interoperability may sound like a surgical term, but it actually refers to how IT systems and other technologies communicate with each other. The goal, of course, is seamless communication to improve efficiency and quality of care, but that's obviously a big challenge. Today on Raise the Line, we dive into this important issue with two people who come at it from different professional perspectives, but who share that goal. Oh, and they also happen to be brothers!  Jake Engle is a Senior Director at Oracle Cerner, a supplier of health information technology used at thousands of facilities worldwide. His brother, Dr. Sam Engle, is a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Wisconsin. On the patient care side, Dr. Engle talks about the value of having a complete patient history in hand prior to appointments to maximize the efficiency of the time spent, but also to avoid doing duplicate tests. “Especially with kids, you never want to have to repeat labs if you don't need to. I feel very strongly about that.” From the tech side, Jake Engle addresses the challenge of trying to synthesize data from multiple sources such as EHRs, insurance records, public health databases or commercial products focused on one niche of healthcare. “I think the healthcare systems are a bit late to the game and it's much a more complicated game.” You’ll also learn about efforts to make it easier for patients to access their health data, the need for data standards in the industry and how their personal relationship contributes to this work.   If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Dr. David Yaden’s interest in studying spiritual experiences started with one of his own. As he describes it, it was a totally spontaneous experience involving an intensely altered state of consciousness that left him with an enhanced, positive perspective on life. “This became an obsession, really, to understand this. I learned that these experiences have been studied throughout history by scholars and increasingly by scientists,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani. “As I learned more, it became more and more clear that this is what I wanted to study, and that's what I still do.” He happens to be in a perfect spot to do it as the Roland R. Griffiths Professor in Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-Being at Johns Hopkins, named for a leading figure in the modern renaissance in psychedelic research. The basic scope of the project he’s managing is non-clinical. Topics of study include better quantifying the risk-benefit ratio of psychedelics as a positive intervention; looking into how psychedelic experiences that have a spiritual character relate to similar experiences not triggered by psychedelics; and collecting data from non-Western population centers across the world to provide a more complete picture of how much cultural expectations play a role in influencing these experiences, as well as how similar they are across cultures. There is much to learn in this probing look at a fascinating dimension of psychedelic research.Mentioned in this episode: https://griffithsfund.org/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

“I think we're doing something really special here to change the way healthcare is delivered in South Florida, so keep an eye on us,” says Dr. Julie Pilitsis, dean of the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine and Vice President of Medical Affairs at Florida Atlantic University. For one thing, class sizes in the medical and nursing programs are both increasing to tackle less than ideal access to health services. “If you get diagnosed with a lump on your breast in Florida, it takes you thirty days on average to see a doctor, while the national average is three to five days,” she notes. And just as FAU’s educational and clinical programs are supporting the communities they serve, Pilitsis tells host Shiv Gaglani that they need support in return.  “I think academic medicine and academic hospitals are essential. Everybody wants good healthcare, but I think sometimes they don't understand the economic impact that good healthcare brings to the area.” Shiv and Dr. Pilitsis also explore advancements in functional neurosurgery, the role of artificial intelligence in reducing burnout and her landmark career as the first female neurosurgeon to become a dean in this enlightening episode.Mentioned in this episode: https://www.fau.edu/medicine/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Shortly after starting his job as Dean of the USF Health Morsani College of Medicine in 2014, Dr. Charles Lockwood was presented with the exciting opportunity to help design a new medical education building. In contemplating requirements for the new space, he raised the challenge to colleagues that when the facility was completed in 2020, medical knowledge would be doubling every seventy-three days. “That fundamentally altered the way we thought about the building, and we accelerated the process of curricular reform that we had started,” he explains to Raise the Line host Shiv Gaglani. That reform included dramatically reducing the amount and length of lectures, substantially increasing active and problem-based learning, introducing more assessments and requiring students to learn how to be good researchers to help them discern what’s credible within the ever-growing amount of information available. But Dr. Lockwood also sensed a need to address the way students manage the rigors of a medical education and clinical practice. “What we've tried to do is to stress the need for grit and for embracing the classic stoic teaching about taking on obstacles and challenges as wonderful opportunities to grow and become more resilient.” Lockwood credits this perspective for the institution performing well through the worst of the pandemic. “I think the most surprising thing was the relative lack of burnout at the end of it. We're moving on to new challenges, but it didn't leave us hollowed out.” Tune in for a fascinating conversation about adopting an “anti-fragile” mindset, the dangers of overreliance on heuristics in making clinical decisions, and the implications of generative AI for medical education and patient care. Mentioned in this episode: https://health.usf.edu/medicine/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

After battling chronic illness as a child, Dr. Janelle Sokolowich swore she’d never step foot in a hospital again and started pursuing a different path in college. But life had a way of bringing her back to the world of medicine. “I started thinking back to all the nurses that made such an impact on me as a child and helped me to grow up to be a functioning adult,” she explains to host Michel Carrese. Now as academic vice president and dean of the Leavitt School of Health at Western Governors University, Dr. Sokolowich is in a position to help many others like herself pay it forward by becoming healthcare providers. The school serves 20,000 to 30,000 students per month and seventeen percent of all BSN holders in the country are graduates, but Sokolowich is keenly aware this can be an unattainable dream when cost and other factors come into play. That’s why Leavitt strives to keep tuition low and her performance as Dean is evaluated based on how much debt students have when they graduate, and if they are earning a livable wage two years post-graduation. “We want to be the most inclusive university in the country and we see ourselves as personally responsible for advancing health equity through education.” Check out this thoughtful conversation about competency-based education, strategies for meeting health needs in rural America and the importance of mentoring. “I want to build that next set of nurse leaders and I take it personally, because I have been gifted and blessed with many that have done it for me.”Mentioned in this episode: https://www.wgu.edu/online-nursing-health-degrees.html If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Major depression, smoking, anorexia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease...is it possible for psychedelics to play a positive role in all of these conditions? There are indications the answer may be yes, which is why Dr. Al Garcia-Romeu and his colleagues at The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research are so busy. “We're learning more, but as we learn more, the rabbit hole gets deeper and so it's a really fascinating time to be involved in this work and to see the expansion in all these different areas.” As he explains to Raise the Line host Shiv Gaglani, this is not about research for the sake of research. “A big part of the end goal here is to get this in a place where anybody who wants to quit smoking in the country can go to a clinic and get this type of treatment because we’ve shown that it seems to work.” Garcia-Romeu recognizes there are many steps to be taken before that’s a reality --including, of course, FDA approvals if clinical trials are successful -- but there is also a need to train a national corps of providers to guide psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, a better system for recruiting diverse populations for studies, and insight into how current and future providers perceive psychedelics and their potential utility, a topic the Center is also researching. Don’t miss this in-depth look at the challenges and opportunities in a fascinating area of medical research.Mentioned in this episode: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast