Raise the Line

Telehealth has become ubiquitous, but Andy Flanagan thinks the word telehealth will soon disappear. “It’s just care,” said the CEO of the remote psychiatry service, Iris Telehealth. Flanagan anticipates that, just as concepts like “online banking” are now indistinguishable from what it simply means to use a bank, telehealth will soon be baked into the healthcare system. “The very best of it will b...

With new medical products constantly entering the market, it can be difficult for doctors to keep up. Interventional radiologist Dr. Aaron Fritts has experienced this first hand in his career, and often found himself calling friends and former colleagues with questions about how to use new devices he encountered. Realizing doctors everywhere are in the same boat he launched BackTable, a podcast pl...

“The role we play in healthcare is so much bigger than I could have imagined, and it's just exciting to be a part of it,” says Kevonne Holloway, Managing Director for Global Content Partners at Elsevier, when reflecting on the work of her large team. GCP is responsible for 2,500 publications and other content that health educators around the world rely on to provide the foundation for medical educ...

There is approximately $266 billion in administrative waste in the U.S. healthcare system each year, and much of it is tied to the complexity of insurance. Our guest today, Syam Palakurthy, co-founded SamaCare to help solve this seemingly intractable problem. SamaCare builds software to make the often-burdensome process of prior authorization as quick and easy as a credit card swipe, improving out...

“I think I've learned as much by watching and observing and being mentored by people as I have from any formal classes I could ever take,” says Dr. Dele Davies. Dr. Davies credits his incredible role models for teaching him that handling people well is key to a harmonious and successful work life. In this episode of Raise the Line , learn how Dr. Davies, who was born in Nigeria, became interested...

When a young Patrick McKeown had an important exam decades ago, he prepared as society had coached him: With big, deep breaths. He entered the testing room lightheaded and scatterbrained. “It was,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani, “the worst thing possible that I could have done. In fact, I should have done the opposite.” Long after his asthma and stress inflected youth, McKeown immersed himself in the...

“The biggest things I’ve learned about improving health equity are the importance of data and relationships,” says Dr. Aditi Mallick, who, in her role at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services counts that goal as a top priority. That knowledge was largely gained last year while she was director of North Carolina’s COVID-19 Response Command Center.  Data on testing and vaccination rates by...

On today's episode, we spotlight nursing education because trends in the profession and healthcare at large are making it more important than ever. "The job of nursing has become far more complex, and first-year nurses are being asked to make very complex decisions right away," says Brent Gordon, President of Nursing and Health Education at Elsevier. That underscores the urgency of developing clin...

We've been fortunate to speak to many medical educators in the United States over the past two years on Raise the Line about the state of medical education and how learning has been impacted by the COVID pandemic. On today’s episode, we happily broaden our scope on these topics to Central Asia with the help of two officials from Samarkand State Medical University in Uzbekistan. Mahzuna Nasretdinov...

“I want to be the home for the clinician in digital health,” says SteadyMD CEO and lover of complex business problems Guy Friedman. Taking care of clinicians by thinking about their needs and respecting their autonomy is key to the approach of Friedman's company, which he co-founded in 2016 as a way to improve primary care delivery. Tune in to this episode of Raise the Line with host Dr. Rishi Des...

Hurricane Sandy struck New York City when now-Dr. Jason Reminick was in town, interviewing for residency programs to which he’d applied. The whole process, which would shape the coming years of his life, was a huge mess. Interviews were canceled. Anxiety ran high. He remembers a fellow applicant whose car was lost in the storm. Desperate, the applicant took a cab to one interview, at a cost of $60...

“One of the pieces of advice I like to give young people is to collect knowledge, interests and a network of people you want to know. You don't know yet how you are going to use it all, but later it will become obvious which pieces fit with which,” says Youngsuk ‘YS’ Chi, Chairman of Elsevier. If you want a great example of how this approach works, you can look at Chi’s own remarkable career which...

“I'm in a part of my life where I like to have an impact that disrupts an industry,” says famed entrepreneur Mark Cuban, and his new online pharmacy CostPlus Drugs is already showing signs of creating a major disruption, indeed. Here’s just one example of what his no-frills operation is making possible: a 30-day supply of the cancer-fighting drug Gleevec is usually $2,500, but on CostPlusDrugs.com...

We’ve talked a lot on Raise the Line about the upsides of the telehealth boom, but our guest today, Dr. Mike Hoaglin, brings a new silver lining to light: it’s one way to help with the physician burnout crisis. “I've certainly been in the trenches of burnout in the past, and having the flexibility to be able to see patients when I'm at my best and when I'm able to be at home with my family is just...

On today’s Raise the Line  episode, you’ll have a unique opportunity to hear the collective voice of healthcare providers all over the world who shared their needs, hopes and concerns with Elsevier in its first-ever Clinician of the Future Global Report .  Elsevier and its partner, Ipsos, engaged nearly 3,000 clinicians from 111 countries to reveal current pain points, predictions for the future,...

What should oral healthcare look like in 2022? Dr. Jeremy Krell and Dr. Ro Parikh are working to figure this out and bring a new, consumer-centric dental industry into being. Through oral healthcare venture capital firms like Revere Partners, and consumer-facing companies like Quip and dntl bar, these dentists hope to forge an industry that better reflects the culture and consumer habits of the po...

“I think you should listen to your heart as quickly as possible,” says today's guest, Dr. Luke Murray, when asked for advice for students and early career professionals. He calls this skill ‘listening to your heart faster’ and it’s a principle that’s guided him on a zigzagging career path, from an interest in neurosurgery, to working in global health, to starting a tech incubator.  As COVID was ge...

You might not think flossing one tooth a day would be worthy of celebration, but today’s Raise the Line guest says that’s actually the best way to become someone who regularly flosses all of their teeth, and he has decades of research to back it up. Dr. BJ Fogg, a Stanford University researcher perhaps best known for his bestselling book Tiny Habits, says his approach is based in part on the recog...

When people hear about James Nestor’s bestselling book on breathing, he says the first question they ask is “Why the heck would I need to relearn how to breathe? I'm breathing all day long.” But as the award-winning science journalist details in Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, proper breathing is quite uncommon, which causes major health problems given its essential value to the body. Nesto...

“We don't need physicians physically in the middle of every step that we take,” argues today's guest, former Buddhist monk and Harvard professor Dr. Michael Mina. “One of my goals has been to break down this massive wall that often exists, where physicians are the gatekeepers of people knowing about themselves in terms of their biology.” In this fascinating discussion with host Shiv Gaglani, hear...

Scott Carney trained as an anthropologist, thinking the academic life would facilitate new adventures. He soon found journalism to be a better fit, moved to India, and discovered an organ tracking scandal in a village right next door. His reporting on that helped launch a career fueled by frantic curiosity that frequently centers around habit formation and how the human body integrates with the di...

The critical and analytical thinking required by research become habits of mind that change your approach to life, explains Dr. Bill Cullinan, dean of the College of Health Sciences at Marquette University. They force you to challenge your own biases, and ask for evidence rather than taking things for granted. That’s one reason Cullinan is pleased to offer students meaningful roles at Marquette's...

A new generation of medical technology has produced endless new rivers of biometric data, and attuned regular people to their own health in new and complicated ways. On today’s episode of Raise the Line, we turn to a pioneer in connected medical devices, Dr. David Albert, to understand more about these influential trends. He founded AliveCor, whose smartphone-enabled heart monitors anticipated the...

“In life, I feel like you always know what the right thing to do is, it's just hard,” says Dr. Omar Lateef, who runs Rush University Medical Center in the Near West Side of Chicago. Lateef has embraced the challenging path necessitated by Rush’s community-based mission which involves providing services like tutoring, food subsidies and jobs programs in addition to acute care. In this episode of Ra...

Despite being a self-described “data geek” Josh Schoeller is well aware of the challenges in making sense of the ever-expanding amount of healthcare-related data. As he puts it, “More data doesn't necessarily mean more knowledge.” As president of Global Clinical Solutions at Elsevier and CEO of Healthcare for LexisNexis Risk Solutions, Schoeller is in a unique position to see how all of this data...