Before The White Coat

Growing up in Annapolis, MD, Dr. Eric Howell was fascinated by solving puzzles and finding out how things worked. He often took things apart so he could try to put them back together – from hair dryers to the transmission in his father's car.

SHM CEO Dr. Larry Wellikson talks with Dr. Howell about the various career choices he considered – from commercial pilot to electrical engineer – and ultimately what led him to becoming the Chief of the Division of Hospital Medicine at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, MD.

Hired as the fourth hospitalist at Johns Hopkins Bayview, he has helped the program to grow to 190 hospitalists across three hospitals. An active member and past president of SHM, Dr. Howell is the Senior Physician Advisor to SHM's Center for Hospital Innovation and Improvement. 

After witnessing firsthand the impact of a severe medical error on a family member, Dr. Jeffrey Glasheen learned that these situations were not caused solely by knowledge deficiencies, but rather by faults in systems and processes. This realization led him to a career as a hospitalist, rooted in quality improvement and patient safety.

From his role as president of his fraternity during his college days to his current role as Chief Quality Officer at the University of Colorado Hospital Authority, hear about the story of Dr. Glasheen's path to a career in hospital medicine.

From playing the lead in his high school class play to becoming the Chief Quality Officer at the University of California Davis, Dr. Gregory Maynard explains his storied journey to a career in academic hospital medicine.

In the latest episode of Before the White Coat, he discusses with Dr. Larry Wellikson how he evolved from a small-town boy in Illinois to a leader at one of the world’s leading cross-disciplinary research and teaching institutions.

“How do I create a career combining medicine and business?"

That was the question a young Patrick Cawley asked himself while still in pre-med courses at the University of Scranton.

Today, his combined interests in medicine, business and leadership have propelled him to become chief executive officer of Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Medical Center and Vice President for Clinical Operations of the Medical University of South Carolina.

In this episode of Before the White Coat, learn about Dr. Cawley's career path toward leadership, which started with working in his father's podiatry office and an unlikely student council election win in high school.

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Watch out, Sanjay Gupta! SHM board member and physician editor of The Hospitalist Danielle Scheurer may be coming for your job.

"To this day, my dream job is to be a newscaster," says Danielle Scheurer, MD, MSCR, SFHM in her interview with SHM CEO Larry Wellikson. But before that, Dr. Scheurer traces her career from summer jobs to providing care in Africa, which included her own ailments by hanging an IV bag by candlelight.

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Hospital medicine is a team sport. And nurse practitioners and physician assistants are an important part of the hospitalist team.

In this episode of Before the White Coat, SHM CEO Larry Wellikson talks with Tracy Cardin, ACNP, a nurse practitioner who has dedicated herself to patient care as a hospitalist, about her career progression and how she has defined her role within the hospital.

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When Dr. Mary Jo Gorman’s hospitalist practice was acquired by IPC in 1999, she became responsible for the rapid growth of the hospitalist model in the Midwest, growing from 50 physicians to hundreds in multiple cities in just a few years.

“My role was to put air in the tires as we were rolling down the road,” she tells host Dr. Larry Wellikson.

In this episode, learn about how Dr. Gorman applied her MBA to life in hospital medicine and why, in her words, “one way to look like a genius is to steal some idea they’re doing on the west coast and bring it to the Midwest.”

Before he was one of the original architects of the hospitalist movement, John Nelson, MD, MHM, was a magician, worked in a gas station and even cleaned out an abandoned hotel with a convicted felon.

In this episode of Before the White Coat, Dr. Larry Wellikson talks with Dr. Nelson about how he began doing hospitalist work well before there was a name for it – and how his career in medicine led him to that point.

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As a young boy, Dr. Mark Williams broke his arm. What happened next inspired him to become a doctor.

In this episode of Before the White Coat, SHM CEO Dr. Larry Wellikson explores the early influences in Dr. Williams' career: the people and events that led him from working at his father's gas station to becoming a leader of the hospital medicine movement.

Dr. Williams is the director of the Center for Health Services Research, professor and vice-chair of the Department of Internal Medicine at the University of Kentucky. He is also principal investigator for SHM's Project BOOST.

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“I never really knew what I wanted to be. […] What I really liked doing was working, building or being part of a team that worked really well together on problems, or issues, or challenges or opportunities that we saw as compelling.”

Science and health sciences were always a career consideration for Dr. Brian Harte but in what capacity or to what degree was unclear. In this episode of Before the White Coat, Dr. Harte tells stories of the various points in his life where he learned the value of hard work and teamwork. From his childhood in Cincinnati public schools and unwavering family support to serving scoops at Baskin Robbins and putting cellophane labels on bleach bottles in a factory, Dr. Harte developed a strong work ethic.

Fast forward to today, and all is much clearer; Dr. Harte serves as the President of Hillcrest Hospital, a Cleveland Clinic Health System hospital, and as President-Elect of the board of directors of SHM. 

“I was sold. I knew at that moment. I was like ‘This is the right field for me.’”

In this episode of Before the White Coat, Dr. Nasim Afsar recounts her very first patient encounter as a medical student, from touching the doorknob of the exam room to presenting it to her faculty member and treatment.

From immigrating to America at an early age to becoming the Chief Quality Officer at the Department of Medicine for UCLA Health and an SHM Board member, Drs. Wellikson and Afsar talk about her early interests in community service and the defining moments in her career as a hospitalist, including her passion for quality improvement.

For more episodes, visit Before the White Coat on SoundCloud at https://soundcloud.com/b4thewhitecoat.

Before he became a pediatric hospitalist and CMO at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Dr. Patrick Conway thought he would either go into the Peace Corps, Teach For America or consulting.

In this episode of Before the White Coat, Drs. Wellikson and Conway trace his career path from the student union at Texas A&M University (where he booked popular country acts in order to finance alternative music bands like the Flaming Lips and R.E.M.) to being accepted as a White House Fellow.

CORRECTION: The podcast introduction incorrectly states that the interview with Dr. Conway was recorded at SHM's annual meeting in March. It was recorded via phone in May 2015.

"I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't want to be a doctor," says SHM President Dr. Robert Harrington on this episode of Before The White Coat.

Together with SHM CEO Larry Wellikson, Dr. Harrington explores his early life growing up and the factors that drove him into a career in medicine as a hospitalist. He talks about growing up in the Philadelphia area, going to medical school at Temple University ("the Harvard of Philadelphia," says Dr. Wellikson) and how his career evolved at the same time that the hospitalist movement began.

For more about Before The White Coat, visit www.beforethewhitecoat.org.

"The world's calling. You'd best go see what they want."

Those words from his grandmother, launched Dr. Jeffrey Wiese's career from a "dirt farm" in Kansas as an academic all-American football player in high school to Johns Hopkins and, today, to professor of medicine at the Tulane University Health Sciences Center.

In this episode of Before The White Coat, Dr. Wiese explores the many influences in his early life, including his grandmother, his basketball coach father and mentors throughout his path in medical education.

"I just cannot resist trying to help..." That has been the guiding principle behind Dr. Ron Greeno's career, which has taken him from a farm in South Dakota as a boy to New York City and, today, Los Angeles, as Chief Strategy Officer for IPC Healthcare.

In this episode of Before The White Coat, Dr. Greeno traces his early influences, including the personal relationships that have shaped his life and the very beginnings of the hospital medicine movement.

Before Robert Wachter sparked the hospital medicine movement by coining the word "hospitalist" in 1996, he was the answer to a trivia question: "Who was the school mascot for the last Ivy League team to go to the Final Four?"

In the first episode of Before The White Coat, Bob Wachter talks about his career progression -- from his first job as a golf caddy to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, residency at UCSF and the very moment he recognized hospital medicine as a specialty and said "This is it. This is the model."

Welcome to the sneak preview of Before The White Coat, a new podcast from the Society of Hospital Medicine!

On Before The White Coat, SHM CEO and host Larry Wellikson explores the early influences and personal inspirations of some of the most influential individuals in healthcare and modern medicine.

In this three-minute preview, Dr. Wellikson talks with Robert Wachter, who coined the term "hospitalist" in a 1996 New England Journal of Medicine article. Dr. Wachter talks about his stint as the mascot for the University of Pennsylvania Quakers and his experiences as an internal medicine resident at the University of California San Francisco at a time when hospitals were grappling with the emergence of AIDS.

The full interview with Dr. Wachter will be published on Tuesday, June 16.

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For more information about the Society of Hospital Medicine visit www.hospitalmedicine.org or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/SHMLive.