Raise the Line

One of our favorite themes on Raise the Line is how technology can help people become better informed about their own health, allowing them to participate more actively in maintaining and improving it. Well, today, we're going to take a deeper look at that issue with the help of Carol Lucarelli, Executive Director of Marketing and E-Commerce at Omron Healthcare, the global leader in remote blood p...

How will the healthcare system navigate unprecedented workforce and financial challenges? What can be done about staff and leader burnout? How can healthcare systems increase diversity and equity? These are the types of big picture questions Deborah Bowen and her colleagues confront at the American College of Healthcare Executives, an international society of more than 48,000 executives in hospita...

Join us on this special episode as we start a series of conversations with the winners of the Osmosis from Elsevier 2022 Raise the Line Faculty Awards which recognize the inspirational educators who are responsible for training future generations of healthcare professionals. Winners were chosen fromover 1,000 nominations received from 377 institutions around the world.  The interviews feature test...

Regular listeners to Raise the Line know that research into rare diseases should matter to everybody because it has led to treatments for much more common conditions that have improved and saved millions of lives. Statins are usually the prime example of that. Well, on this episode we're going to get into much more detail on this point with someone who literally wrote the book on the subject: Dr....

Lucy Landman is one of only a few children known worldwide to have a genetic disorder called PGAP3, in which a single missing gene can cause seizures and severe physical and cognitive limitations. Luckily for Lucy, her parents Geri and Zach Landman are both physicians whose expertise has been a big help in obtaining a diagnosis and in advocating for her. The Landmans are bringing that know-how and...

Eighty percent of rare diseases are caused by genetic mutations, which is why many of our recent guests have highlighted the importance of pursuing gene therapies as potential treatments and cures. That’s why we’re particularly pleased to have Dr. Gaurav Shah on Raise the Line today. He’s the CEO of Rocket Pharma, a company that’s in hot pursuit of developing curative gene therapies for patients w...

“Burnout to me is about losing control, not overwork. It's about being unable to solve problems, and problems beginning to stack up with no end in sight.” Today’s Raise the Line guest Justin Welsh earned that insight the hard way after a demanding corporate job led to a panic attack so severe it prompted a 911 call. Five years later, after founding a one-man business called “The Saturday Soloprene...

“The qualities of a provider that were envisioned fifty years ago are completely different from what the world needs for tomorrow. It’s completely different,” insists Dr. Abebe Bekele, who is entrusted with educating this new breed of physician at the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda. As Bekele explains to host Shiv Gaglani in this special in-person interview on the campus of UGHE in B...

“Our rare disease community is looking to solve for many different types of policy barriers because we have a very diverse patient community,” says Annie Kennedy, who was drawn to the rare disease issue due to some personal experience early in her life.  After spending many years as a patient advocate -- including being with patients during provider visits -- she has developed a keen understanding...

“In about three weeks, I went from a completely normal thirty-year-old to somebody with a heart transplant. It was crazy,” says Dr. Alin Gragossian, who shares her remarkable experience on this edition of Raise the Line . What makes her tale even more interesting is that at the time of the life-threatening heart episode that necessitated the transplant, she was finishing up a residency in emergenc...

There are so many choices to make as an undergrad in med school: selecting which medical field to go into; whether to go down the academic path; and how to use your knowledge and skills to find success and create positive change in the world, to name a few. On today’s episode we’re going to hear from someone who helps students work through all of those questions and also assists faculty colleagues...

A singing guest!  A poetic chat bot! This special episode of Raise the Line features those unusual artistic highpoints along with the substantive and interesting conversation you always get with host Shiv Gaglani. Our guest, Dr. Mark Korson, is a metabolic geneticist and Director of Education and Physician Support Services at VMP Genetics who believes patients have a crucial role to play in the ed...

“There's a real diversity of jobs available that folks don’t always think about initially when they think about going into healthcare,” says Marc Cummings, the President and CEO of Life Science Washington, a nonprofit trade association serving the life sciences industry in the state of Washington. Dr. Tina Albertson, the Chief Medical Officer at nearby Lyell Immunopharma, agrees. For instance at h...

“With psychedelics right now, there's a lot of hype around the compound, which is somewhat important, but Sunstone Therapies is really founded on the belief that the delivery is more important than the drug,” says Dr. Manish Agrawal, the company’s co-founder and CEO. As interest in the use of psychedelics for mental health treatment grows and various compounds continue to move down the path of FDA...

Our guest on this episode of Raise the Line, Dr. Githinji Gitahi, ended up in the medical field because he’s always had a nagging need for social justice. “That was a place that I found where social justice is needed and is probably the foundation for healthy populations,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani. Dr. Gitahi is the Group CEO of Amref Health Africa, the leading Africa-based health development in...

Why is it that Hispanics make up 20% of the U.S. population, but only 6% of the physician workforce? Well, Dr. Pilar Ortega, founding president of the National Association of Medical Spanish and co-founder of the Medical Organization for Latino Advancement, is working towards closing that gap. As an immigrant herself, she and her family have experienced trying to navigate a medical system that was...

“Patients don’t understand how little we actually know in medicine. I'm not sure if doctors understand this, either,” says Dr. Lisa Sanders, an associate professor at Yale School of Medicine who is perhaps best known as the author of the “Diagnosis” column for the New York Times Magazine . You’re in for more of that refreshing frankness from Sanders whose fascinating career path includes network T...

“In medical school, you don't learn about leadership. You don't learn about what skills are required to make large-scale strategic decisions that can impact your patients,” says Nita Gombakomba, who will complete her medical degree later this year at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  As national president of the Student National Medical Association -- which has been fighting for equi...

“I know it's hard for people to think about holding on if they're in despair, but there's the possibility of healing coming ahead. Don’t give up hope,” says Dr. Rick Doblin, who has devoted his career to getting MDMA and other psychedelics approved by the FDA.  As you’ll hear in this episode of Raise the Line , he could be on the verge of seeing his decades-long dream come true.  On the day host S...

The growth in skepticism about science that was fueled by disinformation during the pandemic has been a frequent topic on Raise the Line, with many insightful guests from medicine and academia offering analysis of the problem and possible solutions. On today’s episode, we’ll hear from someone who is very well-placed to actually make progress on this front. Max Bronstein, the Assistant Director for...

“It's still early days in the application of all this technology relative to its long-term potential, but even so, it's already producing some big wins for patients,” says Dr. Matthew Might, whose impactful career in computer science and medicine has been shaped by the rare disease odyssey of one of his children. His son, Bertrand, was the first person in the world diagnosed with a particular form...

We welcome one of the nation's most respected health and health policy thought leaders to Raise the Line  on this episode .  Susan Dentzer’s remarkable career includes many years of reporting on healthcare for major national news outlets, being a senior policy adviser to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and serving as a board leader in medical education and health system delivery, just to name a...

“There's a reservoir of hope, energy and optimism many of us have that we may not know about until we're really tested,” says attorney and author Scott Reich. The heavy test he and his wife Ilissa have endured for the past three years started when their infant son Eli was diagnosed with a rare brain disorder called FOXG1 Syndrome which causes severe seizures and impedes normal movement, speech and...

“I’m currently sitting 100 feet away from a giant lab full of robots where we can do up to 2.2 million experiments a week,” says Dr. Chris Gibson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion, a company whose mission is to create a more efficient path to drug discovery. You are going to hear a lot of mind-boggling numbers from Chris in today’s Raise the Line episode, but they all boil down to this: advance...

You might think improving healthcare quality is largely in the hands of the clinicians providing the care, but much of this challenging work is actually done behind the scenes by professionals who lead quality reviews, institute new protocols for safer care and focus on performance improvement, among many other efforts. “We are on a journey to really change the perception of what quality is. We wa...