The Emergency Mind Podcast

Dr. Derek Donegan, an orthopedic trauma surgeon and Penn associate professor who builds surgical tech and champions clinician well-being. He explains what makes trauma care uniquely unpredictable. Short takes cover differences between planned joint work and emergency cases. He breaks down what teams can control, why consistent staffing matters, and how tacit intuition shapes surgical decisions.

Victor Bilgin, founder of Bridge Layer Analytics who maps informal organizational networks to improve performance. He explains how hidden influence, brokers, and bottlenecks shape how work actually gets done. Short scenes explore network data sources, signatures like silos and overload, and practical leverage points to spot who really connects teams.

Sarah Gebauer, a physician who founded Validara Health and leads AI evaluations at MDCalc, discusses clinical AI evaluation and governance. She talks about how hospitals matured AI oversight, translating engineering QA into clinical trust. They explore system-level risks when AI replaces redundancy, AI failure patterns versus human ones, and how interface and role design shape safe use.

Mena Ramos, a family physician and co-CEO of Global Ultrasound Institute, and Elvina Hewitt, an ER nurse turned health-tech and aging-care innovator, join to talk systems that meet clinical reality. They explore why people are drawn to chaos, tensions between creativity and reliable processes, working around constraints in emergency care, and building tech that actually fits frontline workflows.

Diane Malaspina, psychologist, performance coach, and yoga teacher focused on stress, burnout recovery, sleep, and nervous system regulation. She discusses a strengths-based shift away from deficit models. She outlines foundational pillars like sleep, transitions, nutrition, and regulation. She debunks the idea that suffering at work is necessary and shares practical tools for tuning performance.

Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a RAND social scientist and former wildland firefighter, brings a practitioner-informed lens to disaster risk. He discusses bridging individual, team, and system perspectives. Topics include socio-technical thinking, full-spectrum risk management, cascading crises, and designing expertise for emerging technologies. The conversation pushes interdisciplinary thinking and spotting professional blind spots.

Joshua Feblowitz, a board-certified emergency physician and medical educator with Harvard and MIT training, explores experiential learning and simulation in clinical training. He discusses teaching metacognition through interactive cases. Conversations cover operating under uncertainty, speed versus accuracy tradeoffs, realistic decision thresholds, and practical limits of traditional assessments.

Patrick Pollock, veterinary surgeon and One Health academic who builds remote and rural veterinary programs, discusses the collision of people, animals, and complex systems. He talks about why animals complicate rescues, horse senses and hidden risks, training trade-offs between calling experts and cross-training, and practical system fixes for safer, coordinated responses.

Christine Stead, CEO of ELSO and leader in global ECMO coordination, shares how networks of people, data, and organizations drive innovation. She recounts rapid data-sharing during COVID, the shift from centralized labs to collaborative systems, challenges of crisis decision-making, and bold ideas for expanding ECMO access through coordinated EMS, transport, and engineering advances.

Adam Milano, a practitioner-scholar blending social work, crisis response, theater, and higher ed, shares how teamwork under pressure mirrors ensemble art. He discusses using storytelling and improv to rehearse emotions, building nonverbal cues, and simple rituals like breath checks and pre-briefs. Expect practical scenes about loyalty, making teammates shine, and syncing fast in high-stakes moments.