Today’s guest is a trailblazing surgeon who performed the first successful nerve allograft, among other important achievements, but that’s actually not what host Shiv Gaglani wanted to focus on in this interview with Dr. Susan Mackinnon. After seeing her speak recently at a Johns Hopkins Grand Rounds presentation, Shiv immediately asked her to be a guest on Raise the Line because of her passion to change the culture and climate in the medical profession, partly by reconnecting it with its...

There are more than 2,600 colleges and universities with nursing degree programs in the United States, offering a mix of options from associate-level degrees to doctorates. Ensuring that those programs deliver high-quality education is the focus of today's guest, Kathy Chappell, PhD, RN, the CEO of the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, also known as ACEN. “We have this regulatory compliance function as an accreditor, but at the end of the day, it's about high-quality...

When Raise the Line host and third year medical student Shiv Gaglani witnessed the creation of a “heart song” at the bedside of a terminal patient during his recent neurology clerkship, he immediately wanted to know more about the clinical applications of music therapy and realized the Osmosis audience would want to as well. That’s why we’re happy to bring you this fascinating episode featuring Shiv’s interview with Kerry Devlin, MMT, a senior music therapist at the Johns Hopkins Center for...

We've had the pleasure of speaking to nursing leaders at a variety of health systems and at nursing schools on past episodes of Raise the Line, but today we're going to zoom out for a big picture perspective on the profession and its current and future challenges and opportunities with Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, PhD, RN, MBA, president of the American Nurses Association, which advocates for the nation's 5.5 million RNs. In a frank assessment, Mensik Kennedy says nursing is actually not in need...

After working alongside healthcare providers in under-resourced countries, today’s Raise the Line guest Dr. Rebecca Weintraub came to see that the desire to serve patients and the curiosity to learn how to be the best clinician possible are universal, but the best tools to do so are not. That’s what led her to launch the Better Evidence program at Ariadne Labs which designs, tests and scales data-driven digital tools that help manage diagnostic and therapeutic uncertainty. Currently, Better...

As we’ve learned on previous episodes of Raise the Line, people dealing with rare diseases usually wait 4-7 years before receiving a diagnosis, during which time their condition can deteriorate significantly. Shortening this “diagnostic odyssey” is the mission of today’s guest, Lukas Lange, and in an interesting twist, he’s doing it by involving the patients themselves. The company he co-founded, Probably Genetic, has developed a system that starts with rare disease patients, or the parents...

We've devoted quite a bit of time on Raise the Line to learning about persistent workforce shortages in human healthcare and what is being done about them, but as yet have not turned our attention to the fact that veterinary medicine is facing the same headwinds. To find out more about how that challenge is being addressed and to learn about other current issues in veterinary medicine we turn today to Dr. Kathryn Meurs, Dean at North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine....

The question of how generative AI and other recent advances in technology will change medical education is one we're continually seeking answers to on Raise the Line, and today we're turning to a really well-placed expert to weigh in on this issue. He's Dr. Warren Wiechmann, senior associate dean of Clinical Science Education and Educational Technologies at University of California Irvine, a school known for its embrace of technology. Dr. Wiechmann is considered the architect of the school's...

Most people associate being a physician with achieving financial security, but according to a recent report issued by Medscape, only about half of physicians in the United States report having a net worth over $1 million. That's where today's guest comes in. Brett Riggins founded Physician Wealth Systems in 2022 to help doctors achieve financial security through real estate investments that generate passive income. “Real estate could be that ‘means to an end’ kind of thing. It could produce...

On today’s Raise the Line, we continue our Next Gen Journeys series featuring conversations with learners in medical professions around the globe. Our special guest is Omer Rott, a longtime participant in our Osmosis Medical Education Fellowship and Osmosis Health Leadership Initiative programs. Omer will soon be earning his medical degree from Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. In addition to pursuing a career as a pediatrician, he’s an aspiring diversity and inclusion medical...

The importance of understanding the connections between animal and human health reached new heights due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this has long been a rich area of study and it’s also the foundation of the long and impressive career of today’s Raise the Line guest, Dr. Sue VandeWoude, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. Before assuming that role, Dr. VandeWoude was Director of CSU’s One Health Institute, an interdisciplinary...

Raise the Line has been honored to be part of Osmosis from Elsevier’s Year of the Zebra campaign and we’re happy to share that this successful effort will continue throughout 2024. To mark that commitment and to celebrate Rare Disease Day, we have a very special episode of the podcast for our listeners in which, for the first time, we interview a child faced with the challenge of living with a rare condition. She is Maddie McNeer, a seven-year-old from Kansas who developed a rare eye...

“I feel like I'm living a dream in many ways. It's really gratifying to be working in this area,” says Dr. Peter Hendricks, a clinical psychologist at University of Alabama Birmingham who is pursuing a long-held interest in the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. In addition to being chair of Psychiatry there, he is also a professor in the Center for Addiction and Pain Prevention and Intervention which explains why he is researching the use of psilocybin in patients with fibromyalgia, a...

After many months of emotionally wrenching, exhausting work on the frontlines of COVID, and the unexpected death of his mother, Dr. Michael Foti found himself in an emergency room dealing with what he suspected was a heart attack, but it was actually a panic attack caused by untreated anxiety and depression. “As healthcare providers, we're afraid to speak up about our mental health because it's seen as a weakness,” he explains. He’s trying to change that culture in his role as a clinical...

Our guests today have set a big goal to tackle a big problem. Jack Needham and James Naylor co-founded Sanctuary Health to build the largest video library for patient education motivated by the fact that patients forget approximately half of what doctors tell them in appointments. The young British entrepreneurs are aiming to move the healthcare system beyond the practice of handing every patient with a new diagnosis the same generic pamphlet as they leave an appointment. Based on research,...

Due to rising awareness of the importance of nutrition to good health and patient demand for alternatives to so-called Western medicine, the number of medical schools offering naturopathic programs has grown in the past two decades in the United States. Today on Raise the Line, we're going to learn more about this approach to medicine, the education and training involved, and where the field is heading with Dr. Kristina Conner, Dean of the School of Naturopathic Medicine at Bastyr University....

Today we continue our series Next-Gen Journeys, featuring conversations with students, residents, and early career medical professionals around the globe to get their fresh perspectives on education, medicine, and the future of healthcare. We’re delighted to do that today with Dr. Josh Bliss, a third-year internal medicine resident at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine, who will continue his training there next year as a hematology-oncology fellow. Josh was actually one of the...

About one-third of Californians live in areas where there's a shortage of primary care providers, and this gap is especially apparent in what's known as the Inland Empire -- a rural region in the southern part of the state. As we’ll learn on today’s episode, the barriers to access this creates might only get worse because population is expected to grow sharply in that area. Our guest, Dr. Timothy Collins, has the challenge and opportunity of developing solutions to these thorny problems as...

How do we solve for nursing shortages in a thoughtful way in which we're reinventing the way we deliver care? That question is asked and answered on today’s episode of Raise the Line by Mandy Richards, Chief Nursing Executive for Intermountain Health which operates thirty-three hospitals in seven states. The veteran nurse leader believes the go-to strategies of doing a better job at recruitment and retention, while important, will not be enough, so it will be necessary to reskill the current...

Physician Assistant remains one of the fastest growing professions in the US, and the expansion of their role in healthcare delivery seems to be growing just as quickly. One of the biggest changes in that regard, according to Jonathan Bowser of the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine, is that states are opening up opportunities for PAs to practice with more autonomy to fill needs in the healthcare system. “That requires PA education programs to think about who are we putting out...

We're marking a couple of firsts on today's episode of Raise the Line. In the hundreds of podcasts we’ve done, we've never interviewed a goddess before, nor had a guest who has won an astounding seventy-five teaching awards, but that is the happy situation we face today in welcoming Dr. Linda Costanzo to the show. She’s been on the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine for forty-three years, earning the nickname “Physiology Goddess” for her trio of books -- including...

It’s not often that you have the chance to benefit from the sweeping perspective of someone who has been in the same profession for 50 years, but that is the fortunate circumstance we find ourselves in on this episode of Raise the Line. Our guest, Dr. Jim Gordon, describes the remarkable evolution of physical therapists from being limited to hospital-based, post-op rehabilitation to becoming community-based providers of choice in a wide and growing list of specialties from orthopedics to...

"Our faculty are really dedicated to trying to bridge that gap between academics and clinical practice," says Dr. Lisa Beals, the Nursing Department Chair at Missouri Southern State University and today’s Raise the Line guest. A key factor in that effort is recording students while they perform clinical simulations and providing the students themselves, their peers and faculty an opportunity to watch the playback and weigh in on what happened, an area of expertise for Beals based on her...