Short Coat Podcast

Recess Rehash: MD/MBA: Why Physicians Must Know More About Business

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Does a physician need to know everything about healthcare, even the *shudder* money stuff?

money photo
Photo by free pictures of money

[Dave was out of the office on recording day last week, so enjoy this rerun!]

Physicians go through years and years of school to be great at this calling, so why on earth would anyone want to tack on an MBA, too? Co-host Gabe Conley decided to do just that. He’s been thinking about this for a while, but hadn’t pulled the trigger on the idea. Then, as he was about to become a fourth-year medical student, SARS-COV-2 came along and gave him a nudge in the right direction. Gabe explains why he thinks it’s vital to understand business principles as a physician–and it’s not just to make more money.

And Dave prompts Gabe and his fellow co-hosts Aline Sandouk, Brandon Bacalzo, and Madi Wahlen to answer some conversation starters. As a result, some conversations were started and we all learned a thing or two.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

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BONUS: The challenges of Refugee Healthcare with Dr. Akihiro Seita

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The UN Relief and Works Agency has a tough job, especially in Palestine.

In this bonus episode (recorded prior to the US pa we talk with Dr. Akihiro Seita, the Director of Health and WHO Special Representative to The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.  He joins thanks to our Global Health Programs unit and its director Robin Paetzold as well as the University of Iowa Lecture Committee.  MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M2 Abby Fyfe, MD/PhD student Ossama Abu-Halawa, and our former intern Joel Horne, who has a strong interest of his own in global health, talk with Dr. Seita about the difficulties of providing refugees with healthcare when everything seems stacked against their health.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Short Coat Podcast

“Preference Signaling” –the Future of Applications?

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Preference Signaling Tokens may be a way to combat over-applying for residencies, but the schemes have a ways to go yet before they’re ready for prime time.

Dear Residency Program: I love you. Do you love me? Check YES or NO!!!

Dave noticed something he’d never heard of before: a company offering ‘tokens’ (for a fee) that could be used by residency program applicants to signal their love for particular programs.  The general idea is to combat the common applicant strategy of applying to as many residency programs as possible to be sure  the applicant gets a match.  While this strategy is quite reasonable from the individual applicant’s perspective, it causes problems for both programs and the general body of applicants because those extra applications flood programs with candidates that may not actually be interested. 

Then he found out that the Otolaryngology Program
Directors Organization will be doing something similar, and Aline Sandouk, Eric Boeshart, Emma Barr, and Nicole Lacina explore a analysis of who wins and who looses in such a scheme.  

Plus Dave creates an educational game to help students plan how they’ll react to common odd situations.  And by educational, he clearly meant “educational.”

We Want to Hear From You

Do you think Preference Signalling is a good idea? What if medical schools adopts the idea?  Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a kick to hear from you!

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does a DO Degree Ruin your Speciality plans?

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Listener Shivam wrote to theshortcoats@gmail.com to ask his question: does becoming a DO hinder one’s chances in competitive specialties? MD/PhD students Aline Sandouk and Sahaana Arumugam, M2 Nathan Spitz, and M4 Marisa Evers weigh in, while Dave uses his tiny brain to try and parse the National Residency Matching Program’s statistics to find an answer.

Photo by chaddavis.photography

The gang considers whether it would help their anxiety to adopt an alter ego to overcome their anxiety surrounding upcoming events. Then Nathan clues them in to the defacing of the famous George Floyd mural in Minneapolis by a medical student. All that and a smattering of Ellen Degeneris news–is she cancelled?

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Are we cancelled because we angered you? Or did we do okay in the discussion? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Then, call home. They miss you.

Short Coat Podcast, Uncategorized

A COVID Puzzle in a Rural Iowa Community

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Why was the Hispanic population in Clarion, Iowa seeing so many more infections?

Wright County Courthouse, Clarion, Iowa. Photo by Brandonrush (Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

Dr. Michael McLoughlin, internist at Clarion Clinic, was puzzled. Why were 95% of the patients who showed up with novel coronavirus infections Hispanic? And what interventions would best help his community?

Meanwhile, M2 Abby Walling was looking for a summer project centering on health disparities after her overseas global health experience was cancelled.

Global Health Programs Director Robin Paetzold knew them both (Dr. McLoughlin graduated from CCOM in 2013), and helped get them together to find answers and develop solutions. M4 Sophie Williams-Perez, M2 Ananya Munjal, and M4 Marisa Evers sat down to talk to Abby and Dr. McLoughlin to discuss what they found.

As a bonus, Dr. McLoughlin discusses his life as a rural medicine practitioner in his town of 3,000.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Short Coat Podcast

Putting on your #MedBikini

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A study is only as good as its methods, and the #medbikini study wasn’t pretty bad.

Maybe you heard:  some researchers tried to help vascular surgeons understand that their social media profiles might contain “unprofessional” content.  Things like wearing swimsuits and swearing and drinking  *shudder* alcohol. Especially by wymmin! Okay, maybe it was better intentioned than that, but join Aline Sandouk, Eric Boeshart, and Ananya Munjal as they explore the ideas and the execution behind this now-retracted ‘study.’

Listener Logan wrote in to theshortcoats@gmail.com to ask why he’s getting the impression from the questions on his secondary applications that there is a divide between specialties and service.  

And Ananya talks about her recently launched arts journal for medical learners, The Appendix. It’s not just for CCOM students, either! Any health science student can join the fun!

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Short Coat Podcast

When Doctors Do Harm ft. Danielle Ofri, MD

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Hippocrates set a high bar.

A portrait of Dr. Danielle Ofri, Author of When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error

Dr. Danielle Ofri–NYU professor of medicine, Bellevue Hospital internist, and author of great renown–joined us this time to talk about her new book, When We Do Harm: A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.  Examining medical errors is a something all good physicians do–sometimes on a stage in front of their colleagues but often surreptitiously. However, “mistakes were made” simply isn’t acceptable to most patients and lawyers. Meanwhile, the shame felt by practitioners who make mistakes is not only unhelpful but hinders their development and can contribute to burnout and depression.   Because of the consequences of shame are so dire, Dr. Ofri argues in her book that confronting mistakes in a humane, understanding, and open fashion is vital. 

Not many years ago, a headline grabbed her attention:  medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the United States.  How can that be? she wondered.  If people were dying at that rate, wouldn’t physicians have noticed this earlier?  Of course, it turns out that the story of medical error is much more complicated than that headline would lead one to believe, and set Dr. Ofri on the path to this latest book.  Join MD/PhD student Aline Sandouk, M4 Marisa Evers, M2 Jessica De Haan, and M4 Anne Nora for this discussion on the sources of error, the causes, and the ways to understand and learn from the inevitable.

We also discuss her and her colleagues’ experiences fighting COVID-19 in New York City and learning about the disease in real time.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

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Recess Rehash: Is Academic Medicine Right For You?

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Photo by simpleinsomnia

[SCP has been given a week off–thanks, pandemic/economic collapse!  We’ll be back next week, but here’s a pre-pandemic rerun to enjoy.]

Academic medicine–in which a physician works at a university and may have research and/or teaching duties in addition to patient care–is but one of the fulfilling options available to medical students.  What’s that lifestyle like?  That’s the question an anonymous listener (who we’ll call Dr. Piledhigh Erandeeper) wanted our help answering. Fortunately we have Miranda Schene and Sahaana Arumugam (both in our Medical Scientist Training Program, so they know a thing or two about academic medicine) on hand to tell us–including co-hosts M1 Brandon Bacalzo and M2 Mason LaMarche–what they know about this career option.

Plus Dave puts his co-hosts through a game of Doctor Forehead, featuring some of the more interesting oddball medical stories he ran across prepping for this week’s show (see the next section for those links).

This Week in Medical News

The President’s new budget could be another nail in the coffin for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.  Mayo applicants get acceptance letters that the institution later had to rescind, causing one of the disgruntled victims to create a crowdfunding campaign.  And if you’re in the market for “global elite” DNA, then…well, you’ve already missed your chance.  And from our game:

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Is there a MD career niche you want to know more about? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.

Continue reading Recess Rehash: Is Academic Medicine Right For You? →

Short Coat Podcast

MD/MBA: Why Physicians Must Know More About Business

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08:45 — 94.5MB)

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Does a physician need to know everything about healthcare, even the *shudder* money stuff?

money photo
Photo by free pictures of money

Physicians go through years and years of school to be great at this calling, so why on earth would anyone want to tack on an MBA, too? Co-host Gabe Conley decided to do just that. He’s been thinking about this for a while, but hadn’t pulled the trigger on the idea. Then, as he was about to become a fourth-year medical student, SARS-COV-2 came along and gave him a nudge in the right direction. Gabe explains why he thinks it’s vital to understand business principles as a physician–and it’s not just to make more money.

And Dave prompts Gabe and his fellow co-hosts Aline Sandouk, Brandon Bacalzo, and Madi Wahlen to answer some conversation starters. As a result, some conversations were started and we all learned a thing or two.

We Want to Hear From You

How’d we do on this week’s show? Did we miss anything in our conversation? Did we anger you? Did we make you smile? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime  or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  It’s always a pleasure to hear from you!

Short Coat Podcast

How A Young FAmily Should Think About The Risks Of Med School

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No doubt about it, this road to becoming a physician has financial risks

risky photo
Photo by anathea

It feels risky to go to medical school, and for someone with a young family, like our listener who sent us their question to theshortcoats@gmail.com, those risks can feel existential. After all, if things don’t go as planned, the financial payoff of this calling might not be realized and the debt would be crippling. And Dave, as an inveterate catastrophizer, has sympathy for that worry. But is it the right way to be thinking about this endeavor? Brandon Bacalzo, Mariam Mansour, Levi Endelman and co-host newb Elias Kovoor are here to tell you why it can be better to go for it without fear. (We have done other episodes that focus on the concerns of parenting in medical school from a mom’s perspective and from a dad’s).

Another listener question (Dave forgot to make up names for these anonymous submissions) asks, how the heck are you supposed to “do the research” when looking for a medical school? We have some good suggestions for that, too.

And Dave, aware the his med student friends are always looking to save money at the grocery store, puts together a taste test–can the co-hosts distinguish between store vs. national brands, and which do they think is better?

We Want to Hear From You

Any responses to the stuff we talked about? Call us at 347-SHORTCT anytime, or email theshortcoats@gmail.com.  Do all three!

An honest guide to the amazing and intense world of medical school.