Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: And I also believe that in order to make a systems level impact, I think that I need to draw inspiration from seeing patients on a day to day basis. Maybe not every day if I am doing 60, 40 split between innovation and medicine, but I do think that if I am going to be somebody that tries to make a systems level impact in healthcare, I need to be informed by clinical medicine.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome to Skinview. I'm Dr. Ana Chacon and today we have a very special guest joining us. Get ready for some expert insights you won't want to miss.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: So I'm Jeff, grew up right outside of Philadelphia. After growing up there, I moved to Connecticut for undergrad. Two big things were part of my time there was track and field. I was a sprinter and hurdler as well as of course you go to college to study academics. I studied neuroscience there and then after undergrad I actually moved to Boston thinking I was going to go down the like standard, quote unquote non traditional path to medical school, which many folks know these days are taking complete gap years doing research or gaining clinical experiences while you take the MCAT and kind of gaining that real world experience before moving on to medical school. I did do that. I moved to Boston. I was doing research at Brigham and Women's Hospital and had a fantastic experience there learning with a brilliant cardiologist scientist. We were actually studying a signaling pathway that was implicated in two diseases. One was a musculoskeletal disease and the main one we were studying was pulmonary arterial hypertension, as many folks in the medical field know, devastating cardiopulmonary disease. And so it was really interesting learning about how we could probe that pathway in order to potentially make therapeutics. And actually we were able to help make therapeutics in that lab. There's actually a molecule that was originally Sotatercept and, and it is now FDA approved as Wynn Revere for pulmonary arterial hypertension. So fantastic experience and it was wonderful being able to contribute to that cause for that disease in terms of after or during. And after that time it sounds like, you know, I was kind of going down this path to be a researcher, which I still am very invested in. I think that biomedical research is the bedrock for medicine. But I actually was learning about healthcare innovation and blending business, technology, healthcare and even policy to make a systems level impact.
I learned about these didactically, but serendipitously in 2019 met some folks that had won MIT hacking medicine and we ended up starting a company called Med6 back then. And that was to automate surgical drain monitoring. So another fantastic experience that I had. And so I was really excited about the world of healthcare in these adjacent fields of clinical medicine. But it was then my time to go into clinical medicine itself. I matriculated into medical school in upstate New York at the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. And during that time, I always had a push, push, pull between clinical medicine and healthcare innovation because I knew that I wanted to always practice to be a strong clinician, but I also wanted to be able to innovate at the systems level. So what ended up happening was it did have some family things go on, which were unfortunate at the time. I'm thankful that those are resolved now. But during that time, that kind of pushed me to need to know where I would live immediately after graduation to help with some family care. So I actually opted out of the residency match and was able to find an opportunity that meshed with my skill set in healthcare consulting at Boston Consulting Group. So I took that offer, which allowed me to know the city I would live in to help coordinate care. So that was actually a really serendipitous experience as well.
So that takes us all the way up to 2025, and now I'm doing some AI consulting and. Yeah, and I'm also applying to residency in internal medicine.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: I'm just curious. You opted out initially and then you're applying now?
[00:03:55] Speaker A: Yes. So I always knew I was going to want to go to residency. I'm pursuing internal medicine now. The reasons were, yeah, to help with family care. But I actually took step three, which many folks also in medical field know usually take as an intern. But I actually took step three immediately after graduating medical school because I knew I was locking myself in to a residency in a couple years as I knew that I always wanted to be a clinician, but also a clinician innovator. Hence why I've had these other experiences that I've been very excited about.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: How long did you do all those things, like the consulting, all the other. I think you started coming that you were mentioning and just curious, why would you go back to residency? Residency for a lot of people is a really hard time. You get paid very little. Why would you go back knowing that you've accomplished so many great things? You know, a lot of doctors, they do residency and their dream is to start their own business or invent something, you know, like with surgeons or patent something or build something.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: To answer your first question, I know there were a lot of experiences packed in there, but my research experience was from 2016 to 2019. So after undergrad and 2019 was actually when I started that company, Med6. And I was a part time co founder from 2019 to 2021 to end of 2021, beginning of 2022. So this was during my medical school years. But I also rolled off into an advisory role and eventually rolled off with the company as I was entering my clinical years of medical school because those would be, as you know, the most busy times. And so I knew I had to kind of load balance and choose to train to be a clinician. And in terms of why I am going back after doing management consulting, as I mentioned doing some AI consulting, it's because I always knew that I wanted to go back. I think that I really enjoy seeing patients, especially at the bedside and being able to help them during vulnerable times.
I was really excited about internal medicine because of the cerebral nature of it. So those would be two threads as to why I want to go back and the other reason I want to go back. You kind of mentioned building these great experiences but wanting to go back to medicine. And there's a lot of things in residency that are fantastic, but there's some other things like working conditions maybe there's a lot of hours and things like that. I think I initially took the Hippocratic Oath in 2019, went to Matriculia Med school and I want to be a full physician. I don't want to just finish with my MD and not go all the way. And I also believe that in order to make a systems level impact, I think that I need to draw inspiration from seeing patients on a day to day basis. Maybe not every day if I am doing 60, 40, split between innovation and medicine. But I do think that if I am going to be somebody that tries to make a systems level impact in healthcare, I need to be informed by clinical medicine because I don't think that you can be as effective if you're not a practicing clinician unless you've done it, you know, for 25 years and you can draw on two decades and a half of experience. I think that somebody right out of med school won't be able to make the impact as a resident would be or as a residency trained physician would be able to make.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: How old are you? Just curious. You've accomplished so much and you look pretty young.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: I'm 31. I did. So I was doing research from. Yeah, 2016, 2019, med school, 2019, 2023, then management consulting, 2024 for just over a year and a half to the latter half of this year and have been doing AI consulting since then. In the almost decade since I've been out of medical school, I've kind of had a very circuitous path.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Tell me a little bit about your podcast. So you thought I was going on your podcast? Yeah. Then you booked with my link, which is, you know, the Google Meet. Tell me a little bit about your podcast. How did you get into that? How many years?
[00:07:33] Speaker A: My podcast is the MD Podcast. It is a community of aspiring physician innovators. There's about 4,000 of us now and they are medical students, residents and freshly minted attendings. So early you can imagine early career folks in medicine. And it's called MD plus because we are exploring what that plus is in innovation. So whether it's in policy, venture capital or innovating in digital health or telehealth, I think that that's what those pluses we're exploring are. And so the audience are really folks that could truly be educated by somebody like yourself with such a fantastic background. And in terms of number of years, I've been podcasting for about two years. It's definitely a part time thing and I'm running most of the show with some help from other folks on the executive team at MD but or a nonprofit and have no, you know, true funding, you know, a couple grants here and there over the years. But the podcast is almost a passion project. We have about 15 episodes on there and have have had some great guests from health that will be published in the near future. So I'm excited for you to see who those guests are.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: You're involved in several community health initiatives. What are the some of the most pressing challenges you see in public health? How can innovation address some.
[00:08:49] Speaker A: There's a few aspects that need to be addressed and I think that these would be aspects that are top of mind for many folks, but sometimes are not ignored, but don't come to top of mind for many folks because they're. Because a lot of us are laser focused on providing that reactive clinical care after patients are sick. So I would say there's three things. One that we need to focus on is preventative health at the public health and the systems level. As a society, I think that we need to focus on that and be more preventative as opposed to reactive. That's just like one theme I think is really important. And in terms of what are the most pressing challenges that face certain communities, I would say it's really access to care primarily. And then even if these individuals in underserved Communities or rural communities are able to access that care. I would say that it is cost of care because not everything that they need to get done can be covered even by some of these public programs. So I would say those are the two biggest challenges. It's really access and cost.
[00:09:45] Speaker B: Where are you hoping to do your residency and are you applying this cycle?
[00:09:49] Speaker A: I am applying this cycle. So my goal, I'll be, like, completely transparent. My number one choice is Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
I'm crossing my fingers for that, but I applied broadly because I wanted to manage my expectations. But that's been my number one choice for a long time. That's actually. I may have mentioned it earlier. I think I mentioned it earlier in my research answer. But I first got interested because I was doing research there in 2016. That was my first exposure to that ecosystem. And I got very enthralled by the very strong academic system there, but also the culture for innovation on top of training to be really strong clinicians.
[00:10:28] Speaker B: And then where'd you go to medical school?
[00:10:30] Speaker A: Yeah. So up in upstate New York. That was Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. It was renamed recently after a large donation. It used to be. It's the University of Buffalo, but it used to be called University of Buffalo School of Medicine, but now it's the Jacobs School.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: So BCG Consulting, I think you did that. I read it in your profile. Tell me a little bit about that. I've had a few consulting calls with them. But how did you kind of get into that? What exactly did you do?
[00:10:56] Speaker A: I got into it by stumbling upon this program that they hold called Bridge to bcg. And that program is for advanced degree candidates. Advanced degree candidates or holders. So it's basically for folks that don't come from a traditional background that would go into consulting. So the more traditional backgrounds are undergrad, post undergrad, or post mba. They do a summer internship, and then they recruit into these firms such as BCG, McKinsey, Bain, and some of the other firms in the Big Four, for example. So I stumbled upon Bridge to bcg, which is for, as I mentioned, advanced degree candidates. So MDs, PhDs, JDs. And I stumbled upon that, and I applied into it at actually the last minute. I submitted my resume. I did a resume drop at like 11:53pm before the deadline, because I was always interested in learning about experiences where I could leverage the business side of healthcare or learn about the business side of healthcare. Ended up getting into that program where a select few get selected into it, and then you Run a case with some folks that are actual consultants at bcg. And I'm sure that that's evaluative throughout that week. So you run a case over the course of a week, present your recommendations in your small groups, and then eventually you interview in the first round. And I made it to the final round and I was lucky enough to secure an offer in the Boston office. And so that's how I got into it. This was, I believe, the summer between my third and fourth year of med school when I discovered it. So I got the offer around that time as well. In 2022, I believe. Yes, 2022, summer of 2022. And then I started January 2024 because they do recruit pretty early. Kind of similar folks might know in the field of investment banking better. And as those kind of companies recruit very early, so do consulting companies and management consulting consultancies. In terms of what I did there, I actually did a lot of gen AI work. So that's why I'm doing some AI consulting now. After bcg, there's a few projects I was on. Of course I can't divulge a lot of information about the clients, but one of them is public. So I can say the first one, this one was not Genai, but first client was actually the US government and it was an electronic health record transformation. That's a very large billion dollar effort and that's rolling out across the VA and dod. That's the one public one I can mention because it's, you know, you can Google that one. There were some other very interesting clients that we had after that. I served as a role of almost a quasi product manager that worked with the product team on the other side. So you could think of it as that way. That's the scope of work for that first government project. Government client project. In terms of my other projects, they were for a couple biopharma companies, the large ones that we all know. One of them was creating a generative AI tool for essentially deviations from SOPs or standard operating procedures. So let's say a box gets mislabeled. It's kind of creating a Gen AI tool to say, hey, if this box gets mislabeled, what needs to happen after that? And being able to kind of notify the managers that need to be notified, sending it back to the process line to get relabeled, et cetera. That was an interesting one. And then another one was a biopharma company that was optimizing their immunotherapies. So these novel cancer treatments Essentially a lot. One of these companies was having some difficulty with the manufacturing process and meeting FDA standards for it. So we had to essentially explore what their manufacturing whole pipeline looked like and identify any potential areas that they could optimize so then they would meet the threshold that the FDA requires for the infusion of these immunotherapies into patients. So those are some interesting projects I worked on.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: What legacy do you hope to leave in your work in medicine after residency? Kind of what are you hoping to do, work, work on and all that?
[00:14:45] Speaker A: In terms of legacy, I actually don't have an answer to that at the moment. I guess if I were to think of one, it would be just to make an impact and move the needle a little bit in the US Healthcare system in terms of having folks have more, you know, a better process when it comes to accessing care and affordability of care. As I mentioned earlier, in terms of barriers to access and barriers to due to cost. I think that moving the needle on those two fronts would be the legacy I'd want to leave. But I haven't thought of that. So that's a, a really great question for me to brainstorm. And then the second, to answer the second part. After residency, I really envision my role in the paradigm of a physician scientist, where they do most of their work in science and research. So 60 to 80% and then 20 to 40% clinical. I envisioned that kind of time blocking, except time division, except for innovation work. So I would love to work on innovation initiatives, whether it's startup advising, maybe it's back in consulting or doing the healthcare, AI consulting, things like that, for 60, 80% of my time. But then as I mentioned, in order to make that impact, I think I'd want to work 20 to 40% clinically down the line in order to kind of draw inspiration for that, to inform what innovation initiatives and projects and work I will then take on.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: How do you balance scientific rigor with accessibility when you're communicating complex topics to an audience for this is for your podcast. And then do you kind of come up with the guests and the topics or do you have like people suggest them to you and also talk about the health conference? It was actually my first year going. Do you go every year? How did you kind of find out
[00:16:23] Speaker A: about it in terms of distilling kind of scientific dialogue based on audiences? I think that hasn't been a huge challenge on the MD podcast because our audience is, you know, medical students, residents and early career physicians. So if we are, quote, unquote, talking shop about clinical medicine or research. It's. We don't have to distill a ton. But of course, if we're talking about a niche scientific topic as like, let's say like aspects of car T cells and like the targets and aspects like that, I think that creating analogies for them, so easy for the audience to visualize, would be helpful. But as I mentioned, we haven't run into that challenge as of yet. And then in terms of the health conference, I may have missed a question there, but in terms of the health conference, I don't go every year. This was my first one that I went to. I did go to Vive in Nashville earlier in the year and I enjoyed both of them. I think that what I drew from Vive, because it was my first time going, my learning experience was to connect with folks there. You kind of have to reach out proactively like weeks ahead. And I didn't know that going into Vive, so that's a great learning experience for me. I thought that you could use that networking app and book 20 minute time slots with folks like, you know, two days before and they'd be free for that. But I soon realized that that was not the case.
So I actually drew a lot of inspiration from the talks that were held at Vive. In terms of health, as I mentioned, I had that learning experience from Vive, so I actually reached out to folks ahead of time. Kind of like when I reached out to you several days before the conference and sometimes weeks ahead, but mostly several days. And then I was able to kind of connect with a lot of folks and meet folks in person and either for the MD podcast or just to chat with them and meet other physician innovators and other folks working in the healthcare field. So my experience at Health was more that super connection with all these folks that are looking to make an impact as well. So really different experiences. And I do plan to go to Vive in LA in February.
[00:18:14] Speaker B: What advice would you give to early stage founders or clinicians interested in transitioning into biotech or health innovation spaces?
[00:18:23] Speaker A: I would say be resourceful and look at resources at your medical school. For example, if you're a medical student, if you're a resident at the med school affiliated or the hospital, look at the innovation resources they have there. And there will be at least one professor or one person that's working in that field that you can at least talk to and they will know other programs or other projects or they might have a project for you to work on and that could be your starting point and then explore kind of what these healthcare adjacent fields that have been mentioned on this podcast episode have been so like, look into what healthcare consulting is if you don't know about it and see what that looks like, what that lifestyle is like and kind of the scope of work of consulting. Look into these fields that you hear some other physicians being in and explore what might make your clock tick. I guess. So really, I would say be resourceful around you and be resourceful kind of look, researching these healthcare adjacent fields, if you want to kind of join the innovation fold.
