Raise the Line

Ryan McQuaid was facing chronic back and joint pain so intense he could barely stand up in the morning.  Without a primary care doctor to reach out to about his symptoms -- and little experience navigating the healthcare system -- he turned to a friend, James Wantuck, who happened to be a Stanford-trained physician.  Through this relationship, which was largely conducted via text messages and Face...

With its mission to bring the benefits of modern medicine to places that have been impacted by poverty and injustice, Partners In Health has been at the forefront of the battle for global health equity since it began in 1987.  Founded by a group of like-minded physicians and philanthropists, including the late Dr. Paul Farmer, it has focused on strengthening health systems in the communities that...

Like many academics, Dr. Peter Decherney wears many hats, but in his case you can also add a virtual reality headset.  That’s because in addition to being a professor of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he’s also a filmmaker working in both the traditional “flatty” format and virtual reality, with subjects ranging from artists in Puerto Rico to a Jewish community in Ethiop...

“Curriculum is at the heart of everything a university does, so it only makes sense to architect the solution we provide based on the core offering of the universities,” says Greg Vanclief, President & CEO of Elentra.  The tech industry veteran and his team are on a mission to transform the delivery of higher education and nurture life-long learners through an end-to-end platform featuring a wide...

In the last decade, a projected physician shortage drove the establishment of new medical schools across the country. Among these was the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, where Dean Dr. Paula Termuhlen is working to forge an identity for the young institution. She says they’ve settled on “health equity” -- a vision that emphasizes teaching and practicing among the...

In medical school, when taught about differential diagnoses, students are often taught, "if you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras” says Rebecca Aune, the Director of Education Programs at National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD).NORD, she says, represents twenty-five million American zebras living with rare diseases every day, many of whom undergo a deeply frustrating and isolating o...

The Student National Medical Association has been fighting for equity and diversity in the medical field for almost 60 years. Unfortunately, it’s a need as pressing today as it was when the association began, with Black doctors making up only 5% of the physician workforce in the nation.  And beyond making sure Black Americans are aware of the path to, and through, medical school, SNMA Executive Di...

One of the things that convinced Dr. Steve Riley to remain in Wales after leaving his native England as a youth to attend Cardiff University is what he calls its sense of citizenship and social accountability. It was a good fit with his own values, and when given the opportunity to help shape the curriculum at the University’s School of Medicine, he wanted it to reflect those sensibilities. “For m...

The current interest in using psychedelics for mental health treatment is a ‘back to the future’ moment for Dr. Jim Fadiman, a pioneer in psychedelic research known as the father of microdosing. “The method that's been developed for administering high doses in a supervised environment is replicating exactly what we developed in the 1960s,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani.  At that time, the federal gov...

As a child, Dr. David Perlmutter developed an uncommon familiarity with the human brain. Exploring the surgical ward -- and eventually, the operating room -- with his neurosurgeon dad, he observed the possibilities of modern brain medicine, but also its limits. After becoming a neurologist himself, he grew dissatisfied with the medical status quo which he says tended to react to brain diseases lik...

For decades, science fairs have kindled young peoples’ imaginations as they face down the conundrums of their time. Countless such fairs have been put on by the Society for Science, a century-old organization known for its science research competitions, its award-winning publication, Science News, and its outreach and equity programs that seek to help the young would-be-Einsteins living in “scienc...

“Our goal is to make things much more human,” says Dr. Vishal Punwani when speaking about the mission of SoWork, the company he co-founded to create virtual office environments that enhance the remote working experience. Recognizing that members of distributed teams experience a loss of self, SoWork allows people to customize their avatar and workspace in its virtual office environments. “When you...

Responding to the crisis of medical burnout, Punit Singh Soni, a former product manager at Google, launched the company Suki with a specific goal: leverage the burgeoning field of voice technology to lessen the growing administrative burden on clinicians. Soni says enterprise contexts, and healthcare in particular, are well-suited for the next generation of assistive voice-activated software. “Wha...

More than twenty-five million people in the U.S. experience bladder leakage every day and while the problem is more common in women, millions of men also confront this challenge. Unfortunately, says Vanita Gaglani, support for men dealing with this issue is lacking, especially after prostate surgery. “Men have been ignored and they have an equal problem. They don't know who to go to. There is no s...

After more than a decade studying resuscitation science in the ICU, Dr. Stephen Trzeciak felt himself burning out. He was skeptical of “escapist” options, like more vacations. “I thought something had to fundamentally change at the point of care,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani. Inspired by empirical studies linking human connections with increased resilience, he decided to lean into relationships wit...

David Blake -- rattled in the wake of a tough standardized exam – was doing some independent research in his high school library when it dawned on him that while he was a top-notch student, he was a terrible learner. From then on, he committed to changing a system that had encouraged him to merely “jump through hoops.” Through his companies Degreed, and more recently, BookClub, Blake has sought to...

On this episode of Raise the Line , we're going to learn about a company that sits at the intersection of three huge trends in U.S. healthcare: the unending growth in the number of people with chronic conditions, the advent of new virtual healthcare technologies, and moving more care into the home. And that’s just where the founder and CEO of Cadence, Chris Altchek, wants to be. “I’m very interest...

One night, Suzanne Peek was awoken by her son who thought he was having a heart attack. That began a drawn-out ordeal of misdiagnoses and ER visits until he was properly diagnosed with Median Arcuate Ligament Syndrome, a rare disorder which results from a constriction of blood flow to organs in the upper abdomen. Fortunately, Peeks had an easier time than most navigating our complicated medical sy...

One of the most urgent issues Dr. Sanjay Desai sees in medical education is how to bring historically minoritized people into the physician workforce. “We need to have a physician workforce that resembles the patients that we care for,” he urges. In Dr. Desai's former role as program director of the prestigious Osler Medical Residency at Johns Hopkins University, he and his team more than doubled...

The good news is researchers have established a tremendous amount about how human memory is acquired, organized, and deployed. The bad news, according to Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, is this information has pretty much stayed in technical journals and textbooks and not been applied in classrooms. Adding to the problem is that popular misconceptions about learning abound, so most of us are not learning nea...

“It's impossible to be a physician and not be able to speak the language of medicine, which really is anatomy,” says Dr. Marios Loukas, who, in addition to his current role as a medical school dean, has written several books on anatomy and is former president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists. In this episode with host Dr. Rishi Desai, find out how Dr. Loukas became interested in...

Listening to veteran healthcare entrepreneur and investor Carly Stockdale, the Co-Founder and CEO of BestLife Holdings, you get the feeling she is living her best professional life.  With BestLife -- a platform of age management organizations, including the Foundation for Healthy Aging and Cenegenics -- Stockdale has created a perch from which she can blend her interests in healthy aging, women’s...

“You don't have to change yourself culturally to be brilliant,” asserts Dr. Russell Ledet, a Black U.S. Navy veteran who has earned an MD-MBA as well as a PhD in Molecular Oncology and Tumor Immunologyand now works to remove barriers for those who want to follow in his footsteps. In this fascinating interview with host Dr. Rishi Desai, learn how Dr. Ledet went from being a security guard in a hosp...

Dr. Tom O’Callaghan thinks he’s already seen the future of medicine in this tech-heavy age, and it looks a lot like the personal, trusted healthcare he saw his father providing in the small community in Ireland in which he was raised. As he tells host Rishi Desai, if you have a good family doctor “you're far more likely to have a better healthcare outcome to every illness you have in your life.” I...

How can digital health benefit an ordinary patient? Today's guest, Tobias Silberzahn, enjoys taking a citizen perspective in his work in digital health—a field that, as he emphasizes, is far from a monolith, comprising over 25 categories from digital therapeutics to patient remote monitoring, to disease management. Tune in to this episode of Raise the Line with host Dr. Rishi Desai to learn how Si...