Raise the Line

Inspired by her own challenges with fertility a few years ago, serial entrepreneur Halle Tecco saw a tremendous opportunity to rebuild the fertility and pregnancy experience for families from the ground up. She wanted to bring a human-centered approach to physical products that were largely designed and sold by male-owned incumbents in the space. She came home one day after interviewing a few pote...

Victoria Repa has known from her earliest days growing up in Ukraine how difficult it can be to lose weight. “In my family, everyone is overweight. It's our family problem and we can't overcome it.” Breaking that cycle provided Repa with the motivation to start her own journey toward better health, but she wanted to help others find their own motivation as well, and sustain it. Armed with business...

It was a decade after NY Giants great and Super Bowl champion Leonard Marshall retired when he first started to notice cognitive issues and a concerning change in attitude. Five years, many doctor visits and countless hours of research later, the two-time Pro Bowl defensive lineman received a diagnosis of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that’s common in forme...

“I knew I wasn't going to survive unless I found a drug that could save my life,” says Dr. David Fajgenbaum, who has almost died five times from the rare disorder idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease, which he developed while in medical school. Now a physician and assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Fajgenbaum has led research efforts into a cure for Castleman, discovering...

On this special episode of Raise the Line , we get an eyewitness account of how medical needs are being met in the midst of the war in Ukraine from Ukrainian-American anesthesiologist Dr. Oleg Turkot, who has been coordinating resources and treating patients since the war started. As he tells host Shiv Gaglani, one important focus for him has been working with the Butterfly Network to distribute h...

When Akiva Zablocki found out his infant son Idan had a one-in-a-million immune disorder, he and his wife Amanda were terribly worried, as all parents would be. But unlike most parents of children with rare diseases, Akiva could draw on the expertise in navigating the healthcare system he gathered when successfully overcoming his own rare and scary ordeal with a brain stem tumor. Thanks to that kn...

In this super insightful conversation with host Shiv Gaglani, Dr. Karim Lakhani breaks down the difference between “strong” and “weak” artificial intelligence, and how the healthcare world can not only adapt to it, but harness its full potential. But, he stresses, the system has some important groundwork to do before that can happen. “Process change is the biggest work that has to happen in health...

As a young girl, Dr. Maria Guevara was inspired by her parent’s volunteer medical missions in the Philippines where they helped repair cleft lips and palates. The deep impression that work created led her on a path to medicine and eventually to her role today as International Medical Secretary at Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders). In her eighteen years with the agency, Dr. Gue...

“From the beginning, my approach was that we need to challenge the system,” says Dr. Ronald Harden, General Secretary of the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE). In the 1970’s as a young medical professor in Scotland, this mindset led Harden to create the Objective Structured Clinical Examination, or OSCE, which dramatically improved the way medical students are evaluated. Many year...

“So much of healthcare actually does have parallels to the business world, insofar as much of our job is to help align people to the next steps that are in their best interest,” Dr. Robert Lord tells host Shiv Gaglani.  Dr. Lord, who recently completed his medical degree at Johns Hopkins, understands the parallels between the business world and the healthcare world better than most. As a Partner a...

“It's a strange odyssey being a rare disease parent. It sort of forces you to question everything about life,” says Philippe Pakter, whose daughter Lysiane was born with Pierre Robin Sequence, a condition that impedes normal breathing and feeding. In this compelling interview with Shiv Gaglani, he shares the wrenching details of his family’s daunting emotional, medical and legal journey. “It's tou...

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...