Raise the Line

“In less than a month we went from zero COVID patients to 285, and we’re only a 300-bed hospital,” says Dr. Brian Radbill, recalling the early weeks in March and April when coronavirus stormed New York City. As chief medical officer, Radbill oversaw the Manhattan hospital’s transformation into a COVID care facility, which required a lot of on-the-fly innovation. “It was a real team effort. I have...

“Often, the real answer is at the bedside,” says Dr. Thomas Rebbecchi, who has worked as an ER doctor at Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey for 23 years. “If you ask the right questions to people, they're going to tell you directly or indirectly what's going on with them.” Dr. Rebbecchi's educational mission is to teach students to focus less exclusively on technology and take the extra time fo...

COVID-19 has had a tremendous impact on dentistry, says Eve Cuny, who has worked in the area of dental infection prevention and patient safety for the past 30 years. Many dental procedures create fine mists and sprays, including respiratory secretions, that can travel long distances, so dental professionals have had to go to great lengths to adapt. Throughout the pandemic, Cuny has been a guiding...

If you’re one of the millions of Americans who just received a smart speaker as a holiday gift, you’re joining an enormous group. Earlier this year it was estimated that 90 million people in the U.S. own one, and that number is growing fast. They offer an easy way to get news, weather, listen to music and control functions in your home, but there are many other uses for these devices and health ca...

Sara Miller’s advice for those in training to be healthcare professionals is fairly simple. “This is your opportunity to learn to be nimble and develop a spirit of innovation.” Miller believes taking this approach early leads to embracing lifelong learning, the benefits of which can be implemented in a provider’s job everyday. As Senior Director of the Quality Improvement Institute at Med-IQ, a le...

Although the dental industry is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when you think of tech entrepreneurs, this is precisely where Alex Frommeyer has found himself. Frommeyer is the CEO and co-founder of Beam Dental, one of the country’s fastest-growing dental benefit providers offering employers a unique approach to coverage by incorporating dental hygiene behavior into policy pricing....

Battling stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a teenager exposed Dr. Omar Dawood to many flaws in the healthcare system and sparked a desire to find ways to improve them. Although his early experience in medicine was in the public health realm, he eventually saw how he could blend his clinical expertise and strategic mindset to make an impact in the business world, thereby expanding the positive differen...

Dr. Benjamin Young knows what it’s like to confront a pandemic early in one’s medical career but in his case, we’re talking about AIDS, not COVID-19. Trained as an enzymologist, Young was studying drug resistance in cancer cells, but he quickly pivoted to become an HIV specialist when AIDS surfaced in the U.S. “You would have to have a heart made of a lump of coal not to understand the human spect...

Have you wondered what it was like for the doctors who treated the very first COVID-19 patients when so little was known about the disease? Well, you can find out directly from the source in this episode of Raise the Line. The initial cases were in Seattle where Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips works as the chief clinical officer at Providence Health, one of the nation’s largest health systems. In that ro...

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

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

If you’re curious about the impact “big box” retailers are going to have on healthcare delivery in the U.S., this episode of Raise the Line has some answers. Host Shiv Gaglani welcomes Marcus Osborne, a senior leader at Walmart Health, who is helping to build a new approach that could shake-up the whole industry. “If we can create a model that is actually compelling for consumers, and consumers ar...

Two out of three doctors did not vote over the past decade, laments Dr. Atul Nakhasi, a Los-Angeles-based physician and policy advisor who the Wall Street Journal once dubbed “Campus Kingmaker” for his role as head of the Iowa College Democrats. This represents a lower voter turnout rate than that of the general population, and in Dr. Nakhasi's estimation, it's got to change. Dr. Nakhasi believes...

One of the most dramatic changes to the field of telemedicine since COVID began is the shift from it being a facility-based to a primarily home-based service, and that’s been good for patients, says Samir Malik. It’s unknown if the emergency repeal of longstanding federal rules that previously limited the use of telemedicine will stay in effect in a post-COVID world, but Malik is hoping so because...

While serving in the army decades ago, Dr. Larry Benz noticed the importance of bedside manner and other nonclinical factors in determining clinical success. Keeping that top of mind has served him well over his 30 years as a physical therapist. In fact, he argues that these so-called “soft skills” can be even more important in affecting outcomes than clinical skills. Benz is the author of the new...

As a pediatrician, Dr. Ryan Padrez was frustrated by the challenges of navigating education and health systems to get his patients the services they needed – whether it was speech therapy, mental health counseling or other important care. That’s why he’s gratified to be involved in building a model for early education, developed by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, that integrates learning with heal...

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. Chuck Cairns enjoyed practicing emergency medicine early in his career, but he soon realized he could have a bigger impact by focusing on how clinical care, education and medical research is organized, and how advancements in all three can be applied to benefit patients, especially those from underserved populations. That started him on a leadership path that wound its way around the country a...

As a young professional in Chicago in the early 1990’s, Tim Barry happened upon a poster in a store one day that simply stated, “You just can’t fake love, man”— and it was at that moment he realized he would focus only on things he was passionate about moving forward. After trying his hand as a tech entrepreneur, a friend convinced him to take a job in healthcare insurance, and he got hooked on th...

Dr. Jerry Balentine thinks a lot about the qualities successful medical students and physicians need. “I think all medical schools wish there was a way of testing who's going to be a great physician, but there's just no such test, so we use markers such as the MCATs to make sure that they're successful academically.” But he knows those markers don’t capture aspects of a person’s competence, charac...

“Science transcends politics,” says Dr. George Daley. “My hope is that physicians and scientists will, in fact, be a force for global harmony, and that will be a silver lining to come out of the pandemic.” In this important conversation with Shiv Gaglani, Dr. Daley, who is an internationally recognized leader in stem cell science and cancer biology, describes his collaboration with recent Nobel la...

Kids without regular access to healthcare are obviously at higher risk for developing health issues, but it also makes them more likely to face long-term consequences such as dropping out of school, having trouble finding work and ending up in jail. What’s the connection? Poor health access can lead to chronic school absenteeism, which can start a downward spiral. That’s where Hazel Health fits in...

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“I think it's an enormous gift to pursue medicine and particularly academic medicine,” says former philosophy major Dr. Steven Scheinman, a distinguished researcher in the genetics of inherited kidney disease and dean of the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. The school in its current form is only a few years old, having not had a clinical system partner prior to 2017 when it aligned with...

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