Healthcare Leadership

The healthcare industry is confronted by unique challenges such as complex regulatory environments, new demands for higher quality and transparency in the face of escalating costs, and disruptive technological innovations. To help healthcare leaders meet these challenges, I worked with Dr. Nirav Shah to create an online course to teach the systems, processes, skills, and abilities that are cultivated over time in effective leaders. Topics covered include change management, crisis communication, conflict management, and shaping organizational culture, among others. We designed the course on behalf of the Stanford Center for Health Education and in collaboration with 2U, Inc., an online program manager. Intended students include healthcare administrators, physicians, nurses, and others. The course provides an opportunity to train a large and diverse student body from around the world, and will be especially transformative in settings where few resources are currently devoted to healthcare leadership development. The course went live in February 2022.

The Digital Future of Health Care

Digital health tools, technologies, and services are poised to fundamentally reshape how patients and physicians interact. COVID-19 has only accelerated this transformation. To provide medical trainees with frameworks to think critically and strategically about digital health solutions, I created this weekly seminar series, led by clinicians, digital health investors, and entrepreneurs, that explores various digital health technologies and their impacts across the entire healthcare ecosystem, today and tomorrow. Application areas include: telemedicine, AI, wearables, social/behavioral interventions, and healthcare at home. In addition, discussions will cover the creation process of digital health solutions, the stakeholders involved (ranging from individual patients to healthcare enterprises), and the opportunities and challenges in the implementation of these solutions within healthcare’s unique regulatory, organizational, cultural, and ethical contexts. The course was first offered in spring 2022.

Meaning in Medicine: Staying Connected to What Matters Most

Burnout—defined as emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and apathy toward one’s work—is endemic in medicine. A significant cause of burnout is a loss of connection to the deeper values that drew healthcare workers to the profession in the first place. I co-direct a course with Dr. Tyler Johnson to help medical trainees identify and articulate their own ethical, cognitive, and humanistic impulses for pursuing a medical career. Through lectures, discussions, small group reflections, and role-plays, students will develop skills that will allow them to nourish a connection to their values throughout their clinical training and into practice. Specific topics covered include: honoring priorities outside of medicine, appropriate self-care, managing difficult medical encounters, and grappling with suffering as an inevitable part of clinical practice. The course was first offered in spring 2022.

Being Mortal: Medicine, Mortality, and Caring for Older Adults

Although healthcare professionals in practice must face circumstances in which a patient’s life cannot be saved, medical education, which focuses on treating illnesses and prolonging life, does little to prepare clinicians for these encounters. To address this knowledge gap, I co-created a curriculum with Dr. Peter Pompei that introduces students to the medical, economic, and ethical considerations pertaining to geriatrics, palliative care, spiritual care, and hospice. The course features guest lecturers including physicians, senior care workers, medical writers and filmmakers, and chaplains. To foster interdisciplinary learning, students are drawn not only from the medical school, but also from the business, law, and other graduate schools. Since it was first offered in 2018, this course has been one of the most popular electives at Stanford Medicine.

Approaching Serious Illness

To prepare medical and physician assistant students in managing difficult conversations with patients facing serious illness, I developed a follow-up to the Being Mortal curriculum that covers practical skills in grief management, advance care planning, geriatric mental health, and goals of care discussions. Students participate in case-based sessions involving peer-to-peer role play, as well as on-site visits to hospices, nursing facilities, assisted-living centres, and adult day care facilities. While this course, offered since 2018, is co-taught by physicians from the disciplines of palliative care, geriatrics, and oncology, our broader goal is to equip students with paradigms and strategies of compassionate patient communication that are applicable across all fields of medicine. The curriculum has been disseminated to medical schools in the U.S. and Asia, where it is in various stages of implementation.

A Multimedia Curriculum in Oculofacial Plastic Surgery - From Beginner to Expert

Working with Dr. Benjamin Erickson, I am developing a multimedia curriculum introducing surgical techniques of oculoplastic and reconstructive surgery. The curriculum, designed as a reference for both novices and experienced surgeons alike, consists of a textbook with accompanying illustrations, videos, and animations. Topics covered include basic instrumentation, tissue-specific suturing techniques, and application of anesthesia, as well as in-depth tutorials of key procedures such as orbital fracture repairs, eyelid surgeries, ptosis repairs, and tear duct surgeries. The curriculum will be published in 2022 by Springer Nature.

Ophthalmology Microsurgery Curriculum

Recognizing that medical school course offerings at Stanford University did not have a curriculum introducing students to techniques in microsurgery — a core component of ophthalmology, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, and other specialities — I created a course to fill this need. The goal was to help medical students better understand whether they would enjoy career paths involving microsurgery. The course, offered since 2019, was supported by the Stanford Society of Physician Scholars Grant and conducted in partnership with the Stanford Medicine Department of Ophthalmology, with all ophthalmology resident physicians serving as assistant instructors.

Clinical Topics in Ophthalmology

Since 2018, I have served as curriculum advisor to Stanford’s recurring general introduction to ophthalmology course, which covers professional opportunities available to ophthalmologists in areas of clinical research, community health, biotechnology and pharmaceutical development, international blindness prevention, and graduate and postgraduate education. My duties included designing the curriculum, recruiting faculty and resident physician instructors, and coordinating logistics for dissections and surgical sessions.

DCI Presents: the Being Mortal Seminar Series

Partnering with the Stanford Distinguished Careers Institute (DCI), I co-created a seminar series in 2021 for DCI fellows on long-term care options in the United States, advance care planning, dealing with dementia in the family, and finding meaning in the context of chronic illnesses and the end of life. The course emphasizes non-clinical aspects of physical, emotional, and social wellness. DCI is an educational program that seeks to improve the life journey of accomplished individuals in midlife by helping them renew their purpose, build a new community, and cultivate intergenerational engagement in an academic setting. Plans to integrate this seminar series into the core DCI curriculum and to create a massive open online course (MOOC) version are underway.

Applications of Clinical Genomics

At China Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan, I designed and taught a short course for graduate students in the departments of bioinformatics, medicine, and molecular biology, under the direction of Dr. Jan-Gowth Chang. Course content included a survey of next-generation gene sequencing methods, the use of gene sequencing in clinical diagnostics, and the ethics of clinical genomics.

Interdisciplinary Medical Genomics Seminar

To foster interdisciplinary dialogue among physicians, data scientists, molecular biologists, and medical ethicists, I created a seminar series that invited participants to share cases in order to stimulate discussions on the clinical applications of genetic sequencing, gene editing, and other emerging genomic technologies.

Paleography of Early Modern English Manuscripts

In a departure from the health care-related courses listed above — during college, where I majored in Medieval Studies with a concentration in Irish art and philology, I created a course on analysing Latin, English, and Irish manuscripts from the British Isles dating from the 15th through 18th centuries. I covered methods for reading, transcribing, and interpreting these documents, as well as the cultural context of their production. This was the only course in paleography at Rice University at the time, and thus many students studying art history, medieval studies, religious studies, and history were enrolled.

Introduction to Irish Culture

Also during college, I created a survey course introducing students to the literature, history, language, music, and politics of Ireland. The original course was offered in fall 2016, but has since been taught by other student instructors.

A TEDx talk that explores how we can make medicine more humane in a time of rampant physician burnout — and how embracing the power of human connection and a sense of mystery can help us rediscover what makes life meaningful.

Recorded at Stanford University, May 2023.