Designing for Health: Interview with Resa Lewiss, MD [Podcast]

Show Notes:

[00:00] Intros

[01:00] Resa’s background and career

[04:52] Designing healthcare and ultrasound technology

[10:18] Change management in healthcare design

[14:43] Patient and family-centered care

[19:41] Medical simulation and training that improves communication

[21:09] The evolution of mentorship in medicine

[27:43] Resa’s new book: “Micro Skills”

[33:37] Podcast ventures

[36:23] Resa’s favorite well-designed thing

[38:18] Outros

 

Transcript:

 

Dr. Craig Joseph: Doctor Resa Lewiss, welcome to the pod. Where do we find you today?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Thanks so much for having me. I am delighted to be here. And I'm calling in from Philadelphia.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Looks like you're in a podcasting expertise type of booth. Tell me, are you all set up there, like, what's going on?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Well, in general, we tend to be serious about, well, almost everything, including podcasting. And I host two podcasts. And so, when I decided to go in, I went all in. So I invested in creating space, hardware, and software to help optimize the quality of that podcasting.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Sounds great. I aspire to your level of, podcasting ability, and I do want to hear a little bit more about your podcast. We'll do that a little bit later. First of all, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? You're an emergency medicine doctor. You're a designer. You're an ultrasound expert. What gives?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: So, I think I would put it under the umbrella summary of I'm a liberal arts geek. And what that means is I believe the sciences, the arts, the humanities, there's more in common than not in common. And the more you sort of pursue many interests, the better you are when you're going deeper into one sort of line of academic study in pursuit. So, I think, you know, as physicians, the more we read, the more we write, the more we learn about other fields, the better we are as physicians. And it's not just sort of willy nilly go for anything. It's truly pursuing your interests. And I do sincerely have lots and lots of interests. And, it's just fun to really explore those interests and see how there is, as I stated, more overlap than not.

Dr. Craig Joseph: So, let's talk about your career as a physician. Why emergency medicine?

So, in addition to doing my pre-medical studies, I did sociology classes as well as arts, like studio drawing and French, and ancient Greek drama. But I decided to name my concentration sociology, ethno-racial studies. And that was specifically because, understanding groups and group dynamics, group behaviors. This concept of in-group outgroup was always very interesting to me, and I thought it was really relevant to the practice of medicine.

Now, at that time, I hadn't decided upon emergency medicine, but I knew medicine was the path. When I arrived in medical school, I was not one of those people that knew exactly what field I wanted to pursue. And in fact, I was a little concerned because everything was sort of okay. Like every rotation when we got to clinical rotations was okay. I was more drawn to procedures and surgery. Then the non-surgical fields actually started the application process for Oto Rhino learning, also called EMT. I liked it, but I didn't love it.

I took a year off to pursue research. I was at the NIH, and during that year I did epidemiology and really just thought deeply about the specialty that was right for me. When I came back from that year of research, I did an emergency medicine rotation to get myself back in the clinical mindset. And literally I had my moment, where have I been? This is right. I can care for patients who are men and women and children and elderly. I can do procedures, but I'm not in the O.R. because I think you have to really love the O.R., and I really liked and was comfortable in the O.R. However, I didn't need to be there. You know, they say you can't. You have to not see yourself doing anything else. And I didn't have that feeling, so I knew that wasn't the right path.

Dr. Craig Joseph: I remember the joke, which wasn't a joke when I was in medical school, was, as a surgeon, what's the only bad thing about being on call every other night? And the answer was you missed half the good cases. And so, yeah, if you don't feel like you need to be in the operating room, 24/7/365 surgery is probably not for you. Yeah, well, so that's interesting. I went to medical school to become an emergency medicine physician, and then I spent about a month in a big downtown emergency room. And then I was like, this is not for me. I'm so glad there are people like you that love it. And I know that there are people who the idea of spending all day in a pediatric clinic makes them feel crazy. So tell me about the kind of the design aspect. Where did that come from?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: You know, I think actually we're all designers and we don't realize it, but specifically, healthcare design really started coming on my radar when I was at the University of Colorado in the emergency department, the University of Colorado on the Anschutz Medical Campus, and I led the point of care ultrasound section within emergency medicine.

And then actually, I led the system wide hospital Committee for the Development and Integration and Education for Point of Care ultrasound, which for listeners that may not be familiar. Some people call it focused ultrasound. Some people call it clinical ultrasound. But the concept is its clinicians use ultrasound at the bedside to perform, interpret and then integrate those findings real time. It's like providing you with data to provide better, safer patient care or to perform procedures that are safer. And what I sort of came to realize was that I had been designing workflows and education programs for years, but also, I was often consulted by device companies to give my input about even the actual probe itself, you know, how did it fit in the hand?

And, you know, my hands may be smaller than someone else's hands. So, like, was the probe too big? Did it fit comfortably? When I was sort of scanning for long periods of time, was it actually heavy things like this? And this is sort of device design. You know, another part of health care design is storytelling. And not only do I feel that everybody is a designer, I actually think everybody's a storyteller. But specifically in emergency medicine, we are truly storytellers. We are witness to anywhere from 20 to 50 stories. Every shift where we receive the story of a patient and we have to listen, integrate it, put it on either a piece of paper back in the day of written records, but type it in, collate it in a way that often then we retell the story to a consultant or to a primary care physician, etc. So, I think the more you sort of dig into the fact that, oh my gosh, I am a storyteller.

Back to Anschutz, I started working with an architect named Monica Wittig, and Monica led the health care design on the medical campus, and we were creating an education model. One of the ultrasound applications that we taught was pelvic ultrasound. So, when patients come in pregnant identifying whether their pregnancy is in the uterus or outside the uterus, learning how to perform that pelvic ultrasound and becoming comfortable with that procedure is something that we wanted to create a simulation model, maybe even 3D print. The model because if you bought it from a simulation company, they're actually quite expensive, these models. But we wanted to see about 3D printing the model to create education opportunities for trainees, to then become comfortable with the procedure, so that the first time they're doing it is not on a live patient, but actually in a simulated scenario.

Dr. Craig Joseph: So, kind of that design bug and I have to say, I agree with you. Like everyone is a designer, whether they know it or not or want to admit it. I've asked that question at talks I've given, and people have violent reactions when I tell them that they're all designers because they've designed an agenda for a meeting, they've designed a workflow. And so we've all done that, just it's kind of the intentionality that, you know, maybe differentiates you from all the rest of us.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: One of my friends, Ellen Lupton, who is a designer, a graphic designer, but also she's done a lot of work in health care design. She said something so simple, so brilliant, so clear that when we get up in the morning, even deciding whether or not to make our bed is a design decision.

Dr. Craig Joseph: So, some of the things you've designed so clearly, you've helped design instruments like, an ultrasound probe or probably the entire machine. Right? Because you're carrying it around. It's connected either to your phone or to a small device.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Well, often at, for example, emergency medicine conferences, the companies will want to meet and speak with people who are in the ultrasound space. And they seek feedback not only on the design of the probe or the transducer that you hold in your hand, but at every point of care. The ultrasound unit is handheld. You know, they started as big, many pounds, very heavy machines that typically in the Department of Radiology stand still. But when I was starting out in training in 2002 that I did I was literally putting all my body weight behind this very, very, very heavy machine course. It was on wheels and rolling it to the patient bedside. Then they slowly, over time got smaller, lighter, more portable. And so listeners again may be familiar with seeing it's the equivalent of a laptop now in size, when it's sort of a bedside as opposed to a handheld.

But that kind of input about design of buttons versus touchscreen. I remember actually it was at the University of Colorado. I was involved with purchasing equipment and designing the resuscitation rooms. And we actually have similar to monitors and, you know, overhead lighting. We actually mounted the ultrasound machine monitors up. So, they were out of the way and not creating more crowding around the bedside. So, there's actually a lot of design decisions when it comes to even creating an ultrasound program.

Dr. Craig Joseph: How does one, since you've done some of this design work, I would presume you have different audiences, and they want different things. So, the physician might want certain equipment in a certain place or, you know, need certain lighting. And then, we could go even down a rabbit hole of, well, there's the emergency medicine physician in the emergency department, but there's also actually surgeons that run in for and internal medicine docs that run in to help with certain aspects. You've got the tax, you've got the nurses, you've got the patient. How does one kind of find the sweet spot of all of the differing needs of those different constituents?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: I really love this question, and I think it really highlights something very, very important that health care design should be human centered design. And what that means is we need to have the end user at the table when we're iterating, when we're iterating, and when we're making these design decisions. So, what does that mean? That means, you know, rather than just buying equipment and putting it up and being like, look at how great it is. And then it's not that great and the team actually hates what you've done. You really need to be having conversations as you're going through the process, from the resident doctors to the nurses, to the faculty, to the respiratory techs, to the pharmacists, to the patients, to the patient’s family members who are in the room during, for example, resuscitation.

So, I think the more of these sort of roundtable discussions where you bring end users to the table to talk about the design, the better your ultimate outcome. And that's just health design thinking 101. So, it reminds me of a conversation I recently had with a friend. We share, doctor Graham Walker, and we were talking about leadership, and we're talking about behaviors in organizations and on teams. And what I found in running community care ultrasound programs in three different major academic centers is that the more you make changes, the more frustrated people become. And even though you think these are small changes and they're easy to remember, they're not, they're actually quite disruptive to human behavior.

And so, I over time, became more careful in how and when and with what frequency changes were rolled out. So, there's got to be a huge communication campaign. And you can't just tell people, you shouldn't just tell people you want buy in. You want people to see like, oh, this is going to be a positive change. This is going to help my workflow. This is going to help my patient care. But that takes time. So, one of the things I learned to do was, for example, make presentations at faculty meetings a few times, not one and done, but a few times because not everybody attends every faculty meeting.

This is just as an example present at a conference. Talk to them about it. Design like have the core organizing team that's making those communication, not just you, but have it come from the residency director, have it come from the chair. Those two stakeholders, I would say in an academic department, are key to have on your team to help you communicate, because it's not one person and it's not me, it's we. And so, the more you can get that buy in from leadership, people are like, oh, they start to pay.

Dr. Craig Joseph: When I first got involved in implementing and optimizing electronic health records, the term change management was not in my vocabulary. Like we didn't talk about that. We basically just said, well, here it is, and here's how you use it. And maybe a little bit of the why I've often found especially physicians, they are the toughest group to deal with when it comes to health care, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for not good reasons. But they are the toughest group. Often, if you just give them the why, you're 90% of the way they're sitting down and intentionally designing the changes. You know, if I do something once a week, I'm pretty much never going to be that efficient at it. It's just something that I do infrequently. And if it's a complicated maneuver, just going to remain that way, and I wouldn't ask someone to put time in to try to make that, a few seconds or a few minutes faster.

But for things that you do all the time, then it does tend to make some sense to kind of go. But it's painful to learn, to relearn something. And so are there other particular aspects of design that one has to take into account when, when thinking about the patient who's going to be at the center of this, I'll start us off with just the idea that a patient's family or friends might be in the room when you're doing a resuscitation. To me, that's a design decision. You're designing the workflow, your design. Yeah. How does all of that come into play? Have you had to deal with something like that?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Absolutely. In fact, I'll just say that I don't think it's ever wrong to focus on the patient and patient care and patient safety in better patient outcomes, full stop. And also, they are a part of what we're doing in the health care environment. So certainly, we should take into account the caretakers, the parents, the family members, the friends, the physicians, the nurses, the pharmacists, the respiratory therapist, everybody who is playing a role. As you know, we're speaking about the emergency department. It's a very dynamic environment, and it's team oriented in a way that arguably other parts of the health care system are not. There's a classic study that came out of Chicago, and I think it was Northwestern Children's Hospital that talked about asthma and return visits to the emergency department for children with asthma, and they couldn't figure out why there were all these bounce backs.

And when the children bounce back with their asthma exacerbations, why medications weren't filled, why, you know, parents weren't, you know, getting the meds. And then they decided to actually speak with the caretakers, speak with the moms.

Now, sidebar in my experience as a clinician in the emergency department, moms always know. In fact, I always say, what do you think's going on? Because in my experience, moms have a sense and every single time there is this smile and this appreciation that I am involving them in the conversation, I am asking them what they think because they’re mom, they know than their child, more than I do at this one photograph in time.

Now, what you brought up was having family members in the room during a resuscitation when there's a very unstable patient. Culture change happened when I went from training to being an early faculty member. So I did not train resuscitating patients with family members in the room. And then the literature supported it very much in terms of, patient care, that it didn't not compromise patient care or physician performance. But also, there is a healing and an important psychological safety aspect that occurs for family members.

So, I actually remember a case I won't go into specific details, just for patient protection, but, it was a traumatic case of a child in New York City and, in training, parents would not have been in the room, but it was front of mind for me that I just read the literature and had a presentation that I heard when I joined a resident conference about the importance of having family in the room. And so, I asked the parents if they would like to be in the room. One parent said yes. The other parent said no. And, it was a very traumatic accident that happened to the child. And ultimately the child died. And, I very much was appreciative that in the moment I had the presence to ask the parents their wishes. And also, I thought it was interesting that one said yes. The other said no. And I very much, you know, as the senior faculty, I wasn't as directly involved. I was, watching and sort of there were other faculty in the room, as well as residents in the room that were actively engaged, the patient's bedside.

So, I was able to have a little bit more of a standing, outside the perimeter a little bit, but certainly in the room. And it was just interesting to watch, the experience of the parents that stayed in the room. You know, I do believe in evidence-based medicine. And I sort of saw firsthand the it's hard to say the positive effect, but that, sort of that giving that agency to the parent was, I think, a very positive action. And ultimately, although I don't know, because I never had a follow up conversation, but I think that basically, was something that was very well received and appreciated by the parent that was able to have that make that decision real time.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Do you need to do anything, like how does one even broach that conversation? How like, how have you changed the way you've kind of that you talk during the resuscitation? I think we've all on TV seen what we're talking about, you know, and there's a team of 5 to 10 people just kind of aggressive working on a patient. Sometimes you can be using terms that are they're professional. They're scientific, but they, they sound harsh. So do you change the way you're talking when there's a loved one in the room?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: It's an interesting question. What came to mind initially was sort of the role of medical simulation and simulation in medicine. Not only has it become a specialty and specifically is, you know, really something that a lot of medical educators go into and bring it back to ultrasound. We use simulation as I described, even in creating a model to help teach people pelvic ultrasound. So the role of simulation has really changed the way we communicate as teams during resuscitation and trauma and cardiac arrests. But it's also playing a role in teaching us how to have those conversations with family members. And, you know, the dynamics. It would be unrealistic say that the dynamics don't change when a family member is in the room versus when a family member is not in the room.

And also, I think knowing what to say, how to have those high stakes conversations, difficult conversations, potentially emotional conversations is something that is much more rehearsed and taught intentionally now than it used to be. You know, one thing that comes to mind is sort of giving news of death to family members. Like that used to be like something you figured out, or you just kind of learned by seeing how someone did or didn't do it. Now it's very intentional. It's an important part of a curriculum.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Glad you're making me feel my age. Because we didn't have any of that when I trained. And again, even this sounds like, to me, designing the curriculum so important.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: In that way, less is left to chance of like, you had a good, you know, mentor or a good model or a good faculty member, or you had someone that actually didn't engage and didn't teach anything. And so, there's less chance in more of a level setting of the quality of the education that trainees get.

Dr. Craig Joseph: I'll use this as a pivot point. One of the things that you, you've talked about or written about is mentorship in health care and the role of kind of designing that relationship. Whether you're a mentor mentee, can you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: So, I've thought a lot about mentorship, and it has become codified, as we'll say, over the years. It used to be like you had someone you called for guidance or coaching, but you didn't really recognize them as, quote, a mentor. And then, you know, over time in the workplaces, not just health care, many workplaces having an assigned mentor and a mentor mentee relationship was something that became recognized. And then, you know, there are other people that play roles in your life like a coach. I mentioned a mentor. Then, you know, people talk about sponsorship and all these different people.

And it could be one person that plays a few hats and some, you know, many people, are all the people that help you navigate your professional world. I have been a mentor for many years. In many ways. Sometimes it's something that forms organically. Like, you just start talking and someone wants to continue the conversation and ask you for advice. Sometimes it's a little bit more inorganic where there's actually an assignment. Sometimes those assignments work, sometimes they don't. I've written, with coauthors and a little bit solo about, how to be an effective mentor.

And, that mentorship doesn't have to be draining. I co-wrote an article, with doctor Adara Landry, with whom I actually wrote a book as well on micro skills. And in there we talk about mentorship and, one of our articles is entitled Fuel Efficient Mentorship. And that was written, and came out of Covid, where everybody was just so drained and overwhelmed and felt like they had a lot on their plate. And I think a lot of people thought, well, I'm just going to take these mentoring duties and obligations that I'm not getting paid. It's not doing anything for me. And we sort of push back on that concept. And we said, listen, there are ways to be fuel efficient in the way you mentor, and that it shouldn't just be one way and that you're giving, giving, giving, and therefore you're becoming drained.

And we highlighted aspects of a mentor mentee relationship, which I think are true to this day, that you know him. It should be a two-way relationship. Everything shouldn't rely upon you as a mentor. The mentee should play an active role. You should feel that you're getting something out of the relationship similarly, but differently than what the mentee is getting out of the relationship.

The fuel-efficient part. Like we gave some specific examples, like rather than having five one-hour meetings, why not crowdsource and invite your five mentees onto that one-hour meeting? And then everybody is getting mentorship. You're spending one hour rather than five hours, and you're ideally helping them develop peer coaching, peer mentor relationships. And also, many of them probably have the same questions. Now, of course, if there is confidential information or something specific, one on one that needs to be had, of course, have that separate one on one meeting, but there are ways that you can, as I said, crowdsource the mentoring so it doesn't feel draining. Another is, you know, you can even have an ethics, where if you are specifically mentoring on a specific topic or specific industry or specific subject matter, you can actually send out fake news and that information, you're basically providing mentoring information, and it's all written out on an FAQ that you can post on your website. You can just send out on a list, you know, and then it's done. But there are ways to think about it, rather than the must be a one-hour meeting. And I think it takes a little bit of creativity and also realizing that it's okay to ask and require some expectations of the mentee.

Dr. Craig Joseph: You know, to me, this relationship is somewhat like when I was an attending and had medical students with me. And, those are that's not exactly the same as a mentor mentee relationship, but it's along those lines and every single time I interacted with medical students, I, I got something out of it. Certainly, I had a lot more experience and, and knowledge than they did just because I was way ahead of them. But, you know, the questions that they ask, hey, why is that? And sometimes I would be like, that's a great question. I, I don't know, that's just how it is. Let's, let's figure that out. Or sometimes I was, I was, I was, I was told, oh, well, you know, we just had a lecture from so-and-so and apparently there's a new medicine that is out that I didn't, I was not aware of or was coming out, you know, some, some new research coming out. And so certainly it's, it's a, it's a give and take for sure and makes a ton of sense.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: I was going to share that so much has written about how to be a mentor. And I remember even, you know, my college alumni association had a mentorship program, and I got a whole packet on how to be a great mentor, and I was great. I ate up the information, but not a lot is actually written on how to be a good mentee. So, Doctor Landry and I recently put out a piece in Doc Simone on how to be a good mentee. And I've had many people tell me they've shared it with their mentees. I've shared it with some of my mentees who are outside medicine. It's not just, you know, a medical mentee, it's any mentee. And, you know, providing them with the information, like, you know, if a meeting set up, you can send the calendar invite or, you know, be respectful of your mentor's time, like have your questions ready.

Another is sort of in empowering them that this is a two-way relationship. So, you know, you should have your questions and your mentors should be there to help you, you know, with your CV or finding the summer job or fill in the blank. But also, you know, if you know, your mentor studies edible mushrooms and you actually see an article that comes out in the New England Journal on edible mushrooms, why don't you say, hey, you know, you probably saw this article, but like, in case like, I know this is your area of study, that there's a way to participate in the relationship and to let them mentor, know. Listen, I'm in and I'm thinking about what's important to you as well.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Those are great tips. Speaking of great tips, you a just reference that you have a new book out Micro Skills. Is it out? Is it officially out?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Thanks for asking. And yes, it is out. And we launched in April 2024 and Harper Harpercollins published our book. It's called Micro Skills: Small Actions, Big Impact, and it's a business self-help book, which, to be clear, I didn't even know, is a category. But it is a business book. People often think it's a health care book because two physicians wrote it, but it's a business book. And basically, we are addressing the epidemic. That is the skills gap in students and in early career professionals.

Although, to be clear, we've been told by mid-career and late career professionals that they learn something, but we really talk about skills that not everybody gets and when they arrive to the workplace, it's information that takes a while to acquire if you're not somehow told it. So, the book starts with three truths. One is that time can only be spent. So, we want the reader to think about time as a currency. The second is that the world is not equal. We don't start at the same starting point, which is what I referenced about access to those skills. And so, you know, we all have different inherited wealth.

We all have different finances, we all have different pedigrees, we all have different networks. So, when we arrive to the workplace, everybody's not the same starting line. And we really wanted to write a book chock full of content to help level, set and fill in those gaps to, you know, make it a more even playing field. And finally, we believe that learning is limitless, if only it is accessible and it's that accessible that we're trying to provide with the book but also raising awareness that not everybody has this accessibility.

Dr. Craig Joseph: It's a great idea, and it's one of those books that one would think like, well, of course that exists, but it didn't. And it reminds me of a book I once saw, I think it was called adulting 101, which again, was not a term, but now seems to be a very, well-known term, at least among my adult children who regularly tell me that adulting is difficult and they would prefer not. And I always agree adulting is difficult. Like, what a great idea to kind of talk about it and then to break it down into these smaller chunks, kind of edible. Did you think about that purposefully, or how did that come about, that idea of a micro scale?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: It's very intentional, actually, because we feel that every large task or overwhelming project, or even something that you think is a habit that's instinctual to one person and not another, we actually think everything can be broken down into small, fundamental building blocks or behaviors or units. And one of the ways we feel that our book is unique compared to all the others out there. And to be clear, there are a lot of books written about workplace productivity and efficiency, and you know, how to be a better team player. What distinguishes our book is we actually have something called critical actions. We break it down into the how to, because what we found, and I'll use an example of finances. When I finished residency, I had a good amount of debt and I wasn't sure how to even approach it.

And so, I started with, okay, I need to start reading finance books, and almost every book I opened just was overwhelming. And it made me paralyzed. And I didn't feel it. It spoke to me until I found one that did. And it was very actually microscale as, like it broke things down into steps, like get a filing cabinet, get ten file folders, label one with this, one with that. And basically, it broke it down into these small digestible steps. I'm like, it wasn't overwhelming. I'm like, I can do this.

So similarly, we wanted to create a book that spoke to many people that didn't make assumptions about their background or their access points and also told them literally the how to. I'll give one example we talk about this is related to coaches, mentors, sponsors, the personal board of directors, and I love this term, I didn't create the term, but I love the term, and these are your go to people. These are the people that are invested in you and your professional journey and success. They care about you and they know you, and it's part of that organic development of relationships over time. And I think, when you say to students or early career professionals where you need to build your personal board of directors, they look at you like, what are you talking about?

But figuring out, like, who do you call when you do have finance questions? Who do you call to figure out, what do I need to do with this job to get promoted, or having a bad conversation, or we talk about in the clinical environment, having a bad patient outcome, you know, who can you call to talk to, that's not going to judge. That basically has you in mind. You trust and you know there's someone that's going to just be there for you. So, I think it's really important for people personally, professionally, and in life to figure out those members of their board.

And in the book, we actually have diagrams. We have a nice circular table and with intentionally an open chair, because there should always be open seats at your table. And, you know, there's no term limits. People don't come and go, or sometimes they do. Some people are with you for a lifetime, and some people are just with you for that one presentation you're giving, and they're going to look at your slides and tell you how to make better slide design.

Dr. Craig Joseph: It's super important. Actually, the first time I encountered that was in the Wall Street Journal, on their Saturday edition. They always have something similar to what you're describing. And so these are for high powered CEOs who are there, who they go to for advice. And then, you know, they give a little blurb about three or four of them that you know, and how they help the mentee, I suppose. And so yeah, this is important for everyone, no matter where you are in your professional development and career. As we're getting closer to the end of our conversation, I did want to talk about, something we teased at the beginning, which is your podcast. So you have a couple. Tell us about those.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: My more recent podcasts hosting venture is, I am the host of the Academic Emergency Medicine Education and Training Journal podcast, bimonthly. The editor selects an article, and I record an episode with the first author, typically of the article. And we go deep into the medical education content and inspiration and what should the audience know about this article.

So that's been super fun, and my own podcast I founded in 2020. I now have dropped 176 episodes. It's called The Visible Voices. And some people are like, Resa, you can't see a voice. Now, I'm very aware that you can't really see a voice, but actually, if you think about the deaf and hearing community, then yes, you can see a voice, so to say. The visible voices came out of my own experience, in health care and seeing that certain people are tapped to speak or tapped to be the subject matter experts, or you're the ones you see on the news often it's people who are in underrepresented or marginalized groups and my goal was to amplify the stories and the subject matter experts doing interesting things top of their field and specifically in the content areas of health care, equity, and current trends. And bringing in the word design.

I talk about that. I actually design these conversations to really make their voices visible, amplify their stories, and to be clear, not that they need me, but I am happy to do it. And, you know, speaking of sort of a little unconscious conscious, someone said, well, you know, you're telling their stories, but you're really telling your story. I'm like, no, I'm not. They're like, yes, you are. I'm like, no, I'm not. Like, yes you are. And so, I'm obviously because some people have said, how do you select your guests? So, it is it's topics that are interested to me or somehow have affected my professional journey or, you know, it's sort of that liberal arts geek aspect that I find interesting.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Love it. All right. Well, we will put, in the show notes, links to both of those. As we get to the very end of our conversation, we always like to ask the same question of all of our guests. And that is, are there one or two things that are so well designed that they bring you joy when you when you interact and use them, and so do you have anything like that in your life?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: The designed object that came to mind today, although it can change daily, but this is a constant, is the three piece moka pot, and listeners hopefully are familiar with the stove top coffee maker that some people will see in Cuban coffee shops or in Puerto Rican coffee shops or in Italian coffee shops, in Russell Lewis's household. It's a three-piece, beautifully designed, originally an aluminum, but now it comes in stainless steel coffee pot. And it's so simple and makes a very consistently delicious, smooth, not burnt tasting cup of coffee. So, it brings me joy to use it. It brings me joy to drink the coffee that is produced by it. It brings me joy to clean it because it is so easy to assemble and disassemble and clean.

Dr. Craig Joseph: It makes coffee. Does it make anything besides just traditional kind of coffee? Does it make espresso or?

Dr. Resa Lewiss: It's espresso style? But it's more like the old-time percolator that perhaps your people of the household where you were growing up, perhaps a grandparent household or a parent household. So, it's three pieces, and the base you fill with water. And then there's a metal coffee basket that you put your grinds in. And then, the third piece that you screw on and that has a percolator piping through it. So, as you put the unit on the heat, the water gets pushed up through the grinds through the percolator tube, out into the top container that collects the coffee. And based on the sound, you know, when it's finished and you pour it and it's just, you know, 99 and 44/100. Fantastic.

Dr. Craig Joseph: Each time I love it, I love it, and now I want some coffee. Well, Doctor Lewiss, what a pleasure it was to talk with you and learn from you today. I really appreciate it. Thank you for coming on and enlightening us about design all the work that you've done. I thank you for the patients and the clinicians that you've been helping.

Dr. Resa Lewiss: Thank you so much for the invitation. I've loved our chat.