The Penn HealthX Podcast

his episode was created for The Perelman School of Medicine’s online Health Systems curriculum for second-year clerkship students. In it, third-year medical student Casey Kim (who was previously featured on the Podcast for her work with POHPS and creating COVIDigests) and finished our interview with Dr. Kirstin Knox and Dr. Anna Morgan. In part 2 we discuss the COVIDWatch program which uses SMS to check in on and triage patients who are awaiting testing results, or who are COVID-positive and at risk of suffering from more serious symptoms while they are self-isolating at home. We go into some of the challenges of implementing the program, and how patients have been responding. We hope you enjoy the rest of our conversation with Dr. Knox and Dr. Morgan. Footnotes Dr. Kirstin Knox https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p8338155 Dr. Anna Morgan https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/anna-morgan COVIDWatch https://covidwatch.waytohealth.org/

This episode was created for The Perelman School of Medicine’s online Health Systems curriculum for second-year clerkship students. In it, third-year medical student Casey Kim (who was previously featured on the Podcast for her work with POHPS and creating COVIDigests) and I interviewed Dr. Kirstin Knox, Dr. Anna Morgan, Amber Kuestner who is an RN, and Catherine Stieglitz who is a social worker at Penn Med. In part 1 of this episode, all our guests discuss their roles, how they have changed due to the coronavirus, and then we discuss the STEP 19 program which is an offshoot of the STEP program designed to better assist patients who frequently present to the emergency department for care. We touch on how the program began, the challenges of coordinating care during the pandemic, and what the future holds. We hope you enjoy. Footnotes Dr. Kirstin Knox https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p8338155 Dr. Anna Morgan https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/anna-morgan Amber Kuestner’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/amber-kuestner-034b7640/ Catherine Stieglitz’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-stieglitz-lcsw-2baa9138/

This episode was created for The Perelman School of Medicine’s online Health Systems curriculum for second-year clerkship students. In it, third-year medical student Casey Kim (who was previously featured on the Podcast for her work with POHPS and creating COVIDigests) and I interviewed Caryn Douma and Cynthia Line. Caryn is Corporate Director of Patient Safety for Penn Medicine, and Cynthia is the Senior Improvement Advisor for Clinical Effectiveness Quality Improvement. In the episode, we discuss how the health system has responded to the COVID pandemic to ensure both patients and healthcare workers are as safe as they can be. Caryn and Cynthia share a few examples of how they have adapted to unique safety concerns due to COVID, and what lessons they’ve had to rapidly learn in the last few months. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Caryn Douma and Cynthia Line. Footnotes Caryn Douma’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/caryn-douma-0398a021/ Cynthia Line’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthialinephd/detail/photo/

This episode was created for The Perelman School of Medicine’s online Health Systems curriculum for second-year clerkship students. In it, third-year medical student Casey Kim (who was previously featured on the Podcast for her work with POHPS and creating COVIDigests) and I interview Dr. Julie Uspal, who is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Emergency Medicine, and is the Co-Director for Quality and Safety for the HUP EM department. In the episode, we discuss how the health system and emergency department have had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what she’s learned over the last few months. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Julie Uspal. Footnotes Dr. Julie Uspal https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/julie-uspal

This episode was created for The Perelman School of Medicine’s online Health Systems curriculum for second-year clerkship students. In it, third-year medical student Casey Kim (who was previously featured on the Podcast for her work with POHPS and creating COVIDigests) and I interview Dr. Anna Graseck and Dr. Kirstin Leitner, who are both Ob/Gyn physicians. They tell us more about the THEA program for blood pressure monitoring in prenatal patients, and the Healing at Home program which performs virtual postpartum follow-up appointments. We discuss how the programs have had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what they’ve learned in the last few months. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Anna Graseck and Dr. Kirstin Leitner. Footnotes Dr. Anna Graseck https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/anna-graseck Dr. Kirstin Leitner https://www.pennmedicine.org/providers/profile/kirstin-leitner Healing at Home https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/penn-physician-blog/2020/february/healing-at-home Heart Safe Motherhood https://www.pennmedicine.org/updates/blogs/penn-physician-blog/2020/february/heart-safe-motherhood

Today’s episode is a continuation of our COVIDCast series. In it, Jonathan Wakim and I interview Charlotte Tisch, who is a first-year medical student at Penn who was able to help secure PPE for hospital systems in the early days of the COVID pandemic by digging it out from the basements of various museums in New York and Philadelphia. We talk about her experience studying Egyptian Archeology, working in museums and aquariums, why she chose to pursue medicine, how she’s gotten involved in the COVID pandemic response, and what’s ahead. Hosts: Ryan O'Keefe and Jonathan Wakim Show Notes Charlotte’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-tisch-592317178/ Article’s Covering Charlotte’s Work https://www.menshealth.com/health/a31976751/medical-students-pohps-ppe-collection-covid-19/ https://www.menshealth.com/health/a31976751/medical-students-pohps-ppe-collection-covid-19/ https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covid19-penn-temple-jefferson-medical-students-20200329.html

In this episode, Jonathan Wakim and I spoke with Olivia Best, who is currently a post-bac student at Temple and is leading the wellness initiatives for the POHPS group. It is another short episode and is a continuation of our COVIDCast series highlighting the work of students, residents, and faculty to address the COVID pandemic. We discuss Olivia’s background, how she got involved with POHPS to organize events such as wellness happy hours, meditation sessions, Music on Call, and to share posts on a wellness blog. Check out the POHPS website to learn more. Hosts: Ryan O'Keefe and Jonathan Wakim Foot Notes Olivia’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivia-best-57a42572/ POHPS Wellness Page https://www.pohps.org/wellness Penn Internal Medicine Wellness Blog https://pennimwell.wordpress.com/blog-2/

Today’s episode is a quick one Jonathan Wakim and I recorded with Alexandra Myers and Elizabeth Volpicelli, who are both 3rd-year medical students at Temple Medical School. They tell us about their involvement with the POHPS organization helping to centralize all of the volunteer opportunities for students to help out during the COVID pandemic. We’ve included links to the spreadsheets the two have compiled in the show notes, but you call also find them on the POHPS website in the campaigns and initiatives tab at the top of the home page. Footnotes Alexandra’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-myers-9b180386/ Elizabeth LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-volpicelli-20090299/ Spreadsheet for Student Volunteer Opportunities in Philadelphia https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r20JYf9al09VlNdWYRaiYp7NGYoscplT5AvuJ0a7AgM/edit#gid=70815559

Today’s episode is a conversation I co-hosted with Maryam, one of the VP’s of Curriculum for Penn HealthX, and our guest, Dr. Danish Nagda. Dr. Nagda is the founder and CEO of Rezilient, an exciting telemedicine company. From their website: After speaking to countless physicians, they’ve heard the same rationale for the lack of adoption of current virtual care solutions for outpatient care: Doctors don’t see themselves consistently using telehealth because of the inability to perform their objective physical assessments through videoconferencing. We believe that this current gap between in-person and internet-based outpatient care can be addressed by incorporating recent advances in medical robotics and digital health into the clinical workflow. Through our web-based care command center, physicians can assume control of a mobile medical robot in our network, allowing them to deliver in-person care from a distance. Prior to founding Rezilient, Danish was formerly a founder at Schoology, the first social learning platform, which now has had over 20 million users in 130 countries. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his MD and Wharton MBA. Since the beginning of his ENT residency at Washington University in St Louis, he has served in advisory roles for Doximity, Inventr, and Enterprise Bank & Trust. In the episode, we discuss how he became interested in the intersection of business and medicine, why he chose ENT, why he founded the company Rezilient to improve telehealth capabilities, and what the last few months have been like due to increased demand for such services. We also discuss the future of telemedicine, it’s limitations, and how physicians need to drive continued innovation and policy now that we are at a crossroads. He also makes the case that medical students have the potential to be the greatest innovators in the medical field, especially as it relates to COVID in part because we are still learning, have more time, and we are allowed to make mistakes. Footnotes Danish’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nagda/ Rezilient Website: https://www.rezilient.io/

For this episode, Jonathan Wakim and my fellow Co-President Logan Brock joined me to welcome back our very first guest on this podcast all the way back in 2017, Dr. David Fajgenbaum. In the episode we hear about some of the major milestones and highlights of the last 3 years since we last spoke with Dr. Fajgenbaum. These include memories of successfully treating other Castleman patients with the drug sirolimus, the birth of his daughter Amelia at Pennsylvania Hospital, and publishing the book, Chasing My Cure. We also discuss the decision to transition some of Dr. Fajgenbaum’s lab’s resources to studying COVID, and what specifically we can learn from the CDCN’s previous research on cytokine storms and on repurposing off-label drugs to treat rare diseases. We talk more in detail about their tireless work diving into all of the published literature (which was more than 2500 papers and counting) to find which drugs have been tried against COVID-19 to get a better sense of what has been done, what may be working, and where we can go from here. We wrap up with a quick discussion of some precautions Dr. Fajgenbaum is taking, as someone who is on an immunosuppressive drug, his love for Borat (yes, you heard that right), and what Dr. Fajgenbaum is most looking forward to in the coming years. - Ryan O'Keefe Footnotes Dr. Fajgenbaum’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfajgenbaum/ Dr. Fajgenbaum’s Twitter https://twitter.com/davidfajgenbaum?lang=en Chasing my Cure https://www.amazon.com/dp/1524799610 The CDCN Website https://cdcn.org/ Drug Repurposing https://cdcn.org/repurpose/ The Database the CDCN Created on All COVID Drugs Used https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jH0MRE9S8CDOfL-lP9GM4eMIx6aKOAEa_uLgwJBHRL4/edit#gid=0 WHYY Article/Podcast https://whyy.org/segments/penn-doctor-uses-his-near-death-experiences-to-research-why-covid-19-patients-crash/ Dr. Fajgenbaum's Full Bio David Fajgenbaum, MD, MBA, MSc is a groundbreaking physician-scientist, disease hunter, and bestselling author of the acclaimed memoir, Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action. Fajgenbaum went from being a beast-like college Quarterback to receiving his last rites while in medical school and nearly dying four more times battling Castleman disease. To try to save his own life, he spearheaded an innovative approach to research and discovered a possible treatment that has put him into an extended remission. Now, he is spreading this approach to advance cures for other diseases and sharing lessons he learned about living from nearly dying through Chasing My Cure. One of the youngest individuals ever appointed to the faculty at Penn Medicine and the top 1 percent youngest grant awardees of a leading NIH grant, Dr. Fajgenbaum is co-founder and executive director of the Castleman Disease Collaborative Network (CDCN) and Associate Director, Patient Impact, for the Penn Orphan Disease Center. He has been recognized on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, as a top healthcare leader by Becker's Hospital Review, the Global Genes RARE Champion of Hope: Science awardee, and one of three recipients--including Vice President Joe Biden--of a 2016 Atlas Award from the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia. Before co-founding the CDCN, Dr. Fajgenbaum co-founded and led the Actively Moving Forward Support Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting grieving college students. Dr. Fajgenbaum has been profiled in a cover story by The New York Times as well as by Good Morning America, CNN, and the Today Show, among others. Dr. Fajgenbaum earned a BS from Georgetown University magna cum laude with honors and distinction, MSc from the University of Oxford, MD from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and MBA from The Wharton School. He is a former Division I college quarterback, state-champion weight lifter, and co-founder of a national grief support network.

This episode is a continuation of our series of COVID-related content. Jonathan Wakim and I speak with the SaniPack team, consisting of Omar Abdoun, Khaled Abdoun, Lina Ibrahim, Ahmed Aly, Zonia Moore, and Doreen Lam. Each of the team members is a student at the Perelman School of Medicine, and Doreen Lam is currently one of the VPs of Curriculum for Penn HealthX. Together, their group developed the Sanipack, a pouch that can rapidly decontaminate an N95 mask and enhance its usability and shelf life to help protect healthcare workers. HealthX actually provided some tiered, non-dilutive grant funding so that the team could rapidly prototype the device to begin testing them and piloting them in the clinics. In the episode, we chat about how the team formed, the problem they were looking to solve, how they came up with the solution, how they worked as a team to put together a pitch for the Johns Hopkins COVID competition in under a week, and what the next steps are to get the device created and ready for use. It was a lot of fun to have everyone on one zoom call, and I’m glad we have such thoughtful and innovative students at Penn who are heeding the call to help in the COVID crisis. - Ryan O'Keefe

Today’s episode is a conversation I had with David Lindsay, who is an MD/PhD student at Penn. He is also the Co-Founder and CEO of Oncora Medical, which is a Philadelphia based company developing of a digital health platform intended to improve the way oncologists access, organize and learn from past radiation treatment data. The company's platform uses predictive analytics to unify data on radiation oncology, enabling oncologists to analyze the side effects, success and failure of past treatments and offer better treatment to cancer patients. In the episode we talk about how he became interested in medicine, computer science, and entrepreneurship, and how he leveraged the Penn community to help found Oncora Medical. We talk more about what Oncora does, why he wanted to innovate in the cancer space, what it is like balancing being a student and a CEO, and some of the lessons David has learned as a leader. We also talk about important mentors of his, the challenges of electronic health records and interoperability, and a number of key decisions he and his team had to make as the company has grown. We wrap up with a discussion of some recent partnerships that Oncora has entered into, and what the future holds. - Ryan O'Keefe Footnotes David’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/wdlindsay/ Oncora Medical's Website https://oncoramedical.com/ Stephen Hahn (one of David’s early Mentors) https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-organization/stephen-hahn Oncora and Varian Partnership https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/varian-and-oncora-partner-to-accelerate-precision-medicine-in-radiation-oncology-300917662.html

Today’s episode is a quick one we recorded with Nicole Jochym to highlight the work she has done as the co-creator of Sew Face Masks Philadelphia (SFMP). Nicole is currently a 3rd-year medical student at Cooper Medical School just across the river from us in Camden, New Jersey. She holds a Masters of Bioethics from UPenn. Be on the lookout for a lot more COVID content to be released soon, highlighting other work students, residents and faculty have been leading here in Philly and beyond. Footnotes Nicole’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolejochym/ SFMP Website https://www.sewfacemasksphilly.com/

For this episode, we are continuing our series featuring healthcare students and workers who are helping in the response to COVID-19. I spoke with Casey Kim, who is a 3rd-year medical student. She is on the leadership board for POHPS, the Philadelphia Organization of Health Professions Students and has taken the lead on creating guidelines for both medical professionals and the public regarding COVID-19. She has also created CoviDigest which is a daily summary of news, announcements, and other takeaways regarding the coronavirus. Be on the lookout for future COVID episodes where we speak with more of the POHPS leadership, teams of students designing solutions to address PPE and ventilator shortages, those developing the eICU elective, and more. Foot Notes Casey’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-kim-b235a8149/ COVIDigests https://www.pohps.org/covidigests?fbclid=IwAR0JFk3dxWvSHbAIuhvtDU_IrrIQAkzd2Da42Dy3Yi2hSS7MFxk2a4eZot4

POHPS Website www.pohps.org Today, we are finally getting some COVID-related material. Over the next few weeks, we are going to continue highlighting some of the amazing work healthcare students and staff are doing in the Philadelphia area to help address the coronavirus pandemic. First, we are sharing a conversation Wakim, a 1st year Penn Medical student and VP of Strategy for HealthX, and I had with Ramie Fathy. Ramie is a 3rd-year medical student at Penn. He is the founder of POHPS, which stands for the Philadelphia Organization of Health Professions Students (POHPS). POHPS is an independent student-driven coalition born out of the COVID pandemic. The group includes students in the Philadelphia area who collaborate to meet community and health care worker needs, provide volunteer opportunities to fellow students, and promote holistic professional and personal wellness. In the conversation, we talk about his background, research interests and hobbies, how he and others came together to form POHPS, and what you can do to get involved. Check out the website, www.POHPS.org and join the Facebook group. In our ongoing COVID series of episodes, we will be sharing interviews with other members of the POHPS leadership, including those who are creating medical guidelines, compiling and organizing all volunteer opportunities, gathering PPE, sewing facemasks, and leading wellness initiatives, among many other projects. We will also highlight some of the groups of students who are innovating in the med device and med-tech space to address PPE and ventilator shortages, students who are working on developing an eICU elective, students who are working on developing a ChatBot for the Penn website, and those who are getting involved with new clinical trials happening at Penn. We will even speak with a few residents and faculty to hear what it is like in the hospitals and emergency departments now, and how they are preparing for an influx of patients. We’re excited to share these amazing stories with you all. - Ryan O'Keefe Footnotes Ramie’s website https://www.ramiefathy.com/aboutramie Ramie’s LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramiefathy/ POHPS https://www.facebook.com/groups/POHPS/ POHPS Website www.pohps.org