Raise the Line

Wouldn't it be great if you could instantly learn from your mistakes? While that might be difficult for humans to do, it's the foundation of DreamBox Learning's adaptive learning software which analyzes student errors in real time and instantly offers up opportunities to learn and succeed. But CEO Jessie Woolley-Wilson is quick to point out the system is intended to be a complement to live instruc...

Going from a "9-5" company to "24/7" in just a few months has been challenging for Fulgent Genetics, but employees are happy to be contributing to the much needed supply of COVID-19 tests. Fulgent's at-home test kit was recently authorized by the FDA, and antibody testing is also now being offered. What role will testing play going forward, especially as companies try to figure out how to get empl...

Witnessing the "ceaseless wave of humanity that crashes upon the safety net hospitals" spurred Dr. Brad Spellberg, who is chief medical officer at the largest public hospital in America's largest county, to write a book describing the depth of the problem and offering solutions. The COVID-19 crisis has, unfortunately, highlighted the system's weaknesses and made his new book "Broken, Bankrupt and...

The COVID economy is prompting millions of unemployed Americans to learn new skills to help their chances of getting a job. That's obviously good news for companies like Penn Foster, which has been offering distance learning since 1890. To meet the strong demand for healthcare workers, make training more doable, and speed the transition back to work, Penn Foster has launched short form courses tha...

Dr. Vu Tran thinks doctors make the best salespeople, and he's in a good position to judge as both a general practitioner and growth leader at a booming workplace learning start-up. In fact, Tran believes the skills you develop as a physician to communicate complex information effectively and build trust with patients are valuable in almost any profession. As he explains to host Shiv Gaglani, grab...

It's understandable for people to have second thoughts about becoming a healthcare provider at any time, let alone in the middle of a pandemic. But despite the many challenges that come with nursing and other clinical roles, Dan Weberg thinks better training, new technology and opportunities for leadership make it a good time to take the leap. As a nurse with a Masters and PhD in healthcare innova...

This is a dicey moment for colleges and universities. The sudden and massive shift to online learning made necessary by the COVID-19 pandemic is threatening the traditional on-campus model. There is further danger for institutions that merely put lectures on the web and don't offer a compelling online learning experience. That's where 2U comes in. For the past 12 years it's helped some of the worl...

As 3-D technology started taking off in the early part of this century, Frank Sculli saw the potential it had to help people learn human anatomy, something that had been taught the same way for the previous five. His company, BioDigital, was the first to develop what's been called "the Google Map of the human body" -- interactive visualization software now used by millions of people worldwide. And...

Providers who have treated hundreds of patients with the same problem can develop a "gut sense" of how to proceed. But a new disease like COVID-19 does not allow for such hunches. Dr. Joe Habboushe knows that first hand, having worked on the frontlines in New York City ERs during the worst of the crisis. That's where "decision-support" tools like MDCalc come into play, providing all of the credibl...

The stethoscope has been around since 1816 and its basic design hasn't changed substantially in decades. But this tried and true tool has been launched into the world of machine learning and artificial intelligence in recent years largely thanks to the work of Jason Bellet and his co-founders at Eko. Today, over 50,000 clinicians in thousands of health systems across the globe are using Eko’s digi...

It's well known that COVID-19 has negative effects on the heart, but it was unknown until recently that one of those impacts, strain in the lower right chamber, seems to be the best predictor of death in patients with severe infections. Dr. Bijoy Khandheria, director of the Echocardiography Laboratory at Aurora Saint Luke Medical Center in Wisconsin, is one of the doctors who zeroed in on this phe...

Here's another casualty of the coronavirus: strategic planning. But even though anticipating what medical education and health careers will look like going forward might be unusually difficult at the moment, Dr. Ted Wendel, Senior VP for University Planning and Strategic Initiatives at A.T. Still University, is starting to see where career opportunities might emerge in COVID's wake. Check out this...

As the longest serving Secretary of Health and Human Services in American history, U.S. Representative Donna Shalala of Miami is well aware of the serious deficiencies in our healthcare system. That's why it might surprise you to know she thinks we could be heading for "the golden age of healthcare." Check out this interview with Dr. Rishi Desai to learn why, and for her take on the George Floyd p...

It isn't what you'd call a great start to a career. Dan Rosensweig, who went on to be a key leader at Yahoo and Guitar Hero, was laid off on the first day of his first job out of college. It set the pattern for a career full of unexpected setbacks and opportunities that led to driving a remarkable turnaround at the popular digital learning platform Chegg.com. In this engaging conversation with Shi...

It's now possible to do your own test for COVID-19 at home. It involves doing a simple nasal swab and mailing it to a pre-approved lab. Results are available in just a few days. These FDA authorized tests have the potential to make a big impact on detection and tracking of the disease, and Julia Cheek of Everlywell, one of just a few companies providing them, tells Shiv Gaglani the COVID crisis ha...

In the race to find an effective treatment for COVID-19, Artificial Intelligence may end up playing a big role because of its ability to quickly test drug combinations -- as in testing up to a trillion different combinations in a matter of weeks. Dr. Dean Ho, Director of the Institute for Digital Medicine at National University of Singapore, explains the fascinating capabilities of AI to to test a...

Maybe you can't pick-up your prescriptions because you can't afford to fix your car. Or maybe getting outside to exercise is a worry because your neighborhood isn't safe. Dhiren Patel and his colleagues at Pack Health, a digital health coaching company, realize there are many barriers to better health that go beyond what doctors have traditionally addressed, and that insight is built into their ef...

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If the U.S. healthcare system was a patient right now, you'd probably put it in the ICU. In the view of Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and host of the "Public Health On Call" podcast, the COVID crisis has exposed weaknesses in the way we finance healthcare and it could either derail existing efforts to reform the system, or it might spur cha...

We ask all of our guests what they think the COVID-19 crisis has revealed about the U.S. healthcare system. Dr. Lois Nora is the first to assert that "we do not have a healthcare system." As you'll hear in her conversation with Shiv Gaglani, Dr. Nora's background as a clinician, lawyer, and longtime academic leader grounds her unique perspective on what needs to be done to strengthen healthcare de...

“Science is the only thing that can get us out of it.” That’s the conclusion of Dr. Mark Rosenberg, who says finding a way to balance the needs of public health and economic recovery in the wake of COVID-19 must be guided by facts. After a long, admirable career tackling public health issues in the U.S. and abroad, including knotty problems like gun safety, Rosenberg says solving complex issues re...

Turns out there's nothing new about having a shortage of primary care physicians. In the late 1960's, the need to fill that gap led to the creation of physician assistants who have since expanded into nearly every medical speciality. As Mary Jo Bondy explains to host Shiv Gaglani, the broad-based training PAs receive makes them valuable players in meeting changing patient and workforce needs, as w...

It's not just K-12 and college students moving to online education these days. edX and other learning platforms have seen huge increases in enrollment over the past two months as millions of adults seek to learn new skills in a battered economy. As edX CEO Anant Agarwal explains to host Shiv Gaglani, part of edX's role now is teaching people how to learn, and teachers how to teach, using a format...

Arianna Huffington learned about burnout the hard way. Two years after starting the Huffington Post, she collapsed from overwork. She turned that moment of personal crisis into a movement to help people learn how to develop a healthier work-life balance and effectively manage stress. In this episode of Raise the Line, host Shiv Gaglani explores with Arianna how her company, Thrive Global, works wi...

After seeing Italy confront the grim reality of ventilator rationing, emergency medicine specialist Dr. Sarah Farris wanted to spare physicians and patients in the U.S. the same agonizing choices. Creating a splitting device that would allow one ventilator to serve two patients seemed like a good solution, and in a remarkable sequence of events, thousands of those devices were manufactured and rea...