Scrubcast

Dr. Tom Handley has amassed a variety of research during his time at Stanford from the impact of COVID on emergency Medicaid programs to Hep-C on liver donation. But what may seem like a directionless mess to a casual outside observer boils down to one important mission: improving patient access to care. We sit down with the Brit to discuss life as a Knight-Hennessey Scholar, S-SPIRE Center post-doc, and Health Policy Master’s degree candidate.

What happens when two surgeons decide to create a video game? You get ENTRUST, a serious game-based virtual patient platform to assess entrustable professional activities (EPAs) in surgical education.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic derailed their plans for testing, the team found an unlikely ally in the College of Surgeons of East, Central, and Southern Africa (COSECSA). Now the platform is expanding beyond testing and into world of teaching with the help of Stanford Surgery Global Engagement and the University of Global Health Equity (UGHE) in Rwanda.

On the episode:

• ENTRUST Co-Founders Drs. Cara Liebert and Dana Lin

• Dr. Barnabas Alayande, a Global Surgery Fellow and Assistant Professor at UGHE

• Stanford Surgery Clinical Associate Professor Dr. Martin Bronk

• Medical Student Tyler Wilson

• Stanford Surgery Global Engagement Programs Manager Mohammed Al Kadhim

Today on the show we have several members from the Consortium on Advancement in Research and Education or CARE. Started in 2020, CARE is comprised of faculty, residents, and medical students across the US. We are joined by:

• Founder and Stanford PRS Clinical Assistant Professor Dr. Rahim Nazerali;

• CARE Member and Dartmouth Medical Student Priscila Cevallos; and

• CARE Member and Medical Student at the Medical College of Georgia Kometh “Tony” Thawanyarat

We discuss forming and operating completely virtual teams and mentorship in addition to the research the group is currently engrossed in.

If you are interested in joining CARE, visit their website: https://www.careprs.org/

Ask a Pediatric Surgeon about Pilonidal Disease, and they likely won’t be too enthused; like most abscesses, they can be filled with stinky pus and—despite medical treatment—they also have a high recurrence rate …until now. Dr. Talha Rafeeqi is the first author on new research published in the Journal of Pediatric Surgery. Rafeeqi details a new treatment protocol for Pilonidal, which led to significantly lower recurrence rates when implemented across surgeons and hospitals within the Stanford system.

Dr. Rafeeqi also talks about his abstract "Use Of Niclosamide Ethanolamide (NEN) As A Mitochondrial Decoupler In Neuroblastoma,” which won an Academic College of Surgeons Excellence in Research Award. We look forward to seeing him receive it at the Clinical Congress in San Diego next month.

Dr. Rafeeqi is a fourth-year surgical resident at the Valley Health System in Las Vegas. He spent his research time working in Stanford’s Division of Pediatric Surgery labs.

Stanford Hospital recently implemented a new clinical pathway for geriatric trauma patients. Dr. Kristan Staudenmayer joins us to discuss the new pathway and how it led to lower rates of delirium in older adults with traumatic injury. Her findings were recently published in JAMA Surgery.

Dr. Staudenmayer is an Associate Professor in our Trauma and Clinical Care section and Associate Surgical ICU Medical Director. She is also a member of the American College of Surgeons’ Committee on Trauma.

Can medical mission trips make a lasting impact? Dr. Anna Luan’s new research shows that it can. She talks about her paper published in the March edition of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery titled “Expansion of Reconstructive Surgery Capacity in Vietnam” and ReSurge International’s visiting educator program.

Dr. Luan is a Chief resident in Stanford’s Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Residency Program and was the Laub Fellow during her Professional Development years.

Dr. Ron Dalman discusses a new clinical trial that has just started recruiting patients. LIMIT stands for Limiting AAA With Metformin. The popular diabetes drug has been shown to be negatively associated with the progression of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease. Now with over population studies spanning two decades and several continents, the team at Stanford is ready to explore whether the same results can be achieved proactively.

Dr. Dalman is the Chidester Professor and Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs at Stanford Surgery. He is also a past president of the Society for Vascular Surgery.

For more information on the Clinical Trial, click here: clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04500756

If you would like to enroll in the study, contact Study Research Coordinator Lori McDonnell at lorimcd2@stanford.edu

On this episode of Scrubcast, Dr. Elsie Ross discusses artificial intelligence in vascular surgery. Dr. Ross is now an assistant professor but started her work with bioinformatics during her residency professional development years. We take a deep dive into one of her papers published in The Journal of The American Heart Association titled “Unsupervised Learning for Automated Detection of Coronary Artery Disease Subgroups.” She talks about receiving mentorship from Drs. Nick Leeper and Nigam Shah, providing mentorship to then medical student Dr. Alyssa Flores, as well as what’s next in her research plan.

In this special edition of Scrubcast, we interview two of our winners from our annual Holman Day celebration. 

Dr. Jeff Choi, a general surgery resident just finishing his professional development years, won the award for best podium presentation in the clinical and health services research category. His abstract was titled “Tackling the Bedside Artificial Intelligence Barrier: Natural Language Processing to Extract Injury ICD10 Diagnosis Codes Real-Time from Electronic Medical Records.”

Dr. Cinita Kimura, is a postdoc hailing all the way from Brazil. She won the award for best poster presentation in the clinical and health services research category with her abstract titled "Effect of an online home-based prehabilitation program on outcomes after colorectal surgery."

Drs. Liam Rose and Todd Wagner join this episode to talk about their paper published in JAMA Network Open: "Association of Expanded Health Care Networks With Utilization Among Veterans Affairs Enrollees.” The two authors describe the process of taking a project from idea to award-winning research.

Dr. Rose is a Health Economist who works at the VA Palo Alto’s Health Economics Resource Center and our own S-SPIRE Center. Dr. Wagner Directs the Health Economics Resource Center at the Palo Alto VA and is a Professor at S-SPIRE.

In this episode, we focus on a paper published in the journal Anesthesiology titled "Labeled Surgical Caps: A Tool to Improve Perioperative Communication.” 

Originally known as the #threatrecapchallenge in Australia, Dr. Nassar talks about how he teamed up with a pair of Anesthesiologists to bring labeled scrub caps to Stanford ORs.

Dr. Nassar is a Clinical Assistant Professor in our Division of General Surgery. He is Director of our Surgical Critical Care fellowship, and Director of Stanford Health Care’s Surgery Coaching Program.

The topic of Episode 2 spans surgical oncology, reconstructive surgery, and innovation as we look at a recent paper published in the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery titled "Creating a Biological Breast Implant with an Omental Fat-Augmented Free Flap."

Dr. Dung Nguyen describes how she and her team faced a unique breast cancer and reconstruction challenge that led to an innovative new technique.

Dr. Nguyen is a Clinical Professor in Stanford’s Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the Director of Breast Reconstruction at the Stanford Women’s Cancer Center. She is also the Director of the Adult Plastics Clinic at Stanford Healthcare.

Published June 1, 2022.

This episode focused on an original investigation published in JAMA Network Open titled "Trends in US Surgical Procedures and Health Care System Response to Policies Curtailing Elective Surgical Operations During the COVID-19 Pandemic.”  Dr. Sherry Wren tells the story of how she arrived at this topic from the POV of a global surgeon and assembled a varied team of specialists. She also talks about what she’s learned in the process and plans for further research looking at disparities and the impacts of the delta and omicron variants.

Dr. Wren is Dr. Wren is the Chief of General Surgery at the VA Palo Alto, a Professor of Surgery with Stanford University, and the Department of Surgery’s Vice Chair of Diversity and Vice Chair of Professional Development.

Published May 18, 2022.