On this episode of The Slice, Dr. Ami Bhatt, Chief Innovation Officer at the American College of Cardiology and Director of the MGH Adult Congenital Heart Disease Program joins Osso VR CEO Justin Barad, MD to discuss her early foray into telemedicine, including the hurdles and challenges with implementation and utilization, as well as how the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically changed perceptions of remote care.. Dr. Ami also shares her inspiring life’s journey, where passion and focus have been central to becoming a fearless leader and highly determined innovator.

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(00:58) - Introducing Dr. Ami Bhatt, Chief Innovation Officer at the American College of Cardiology and Director of the MGH Adult Congenital Disease Program: “Such a wonderful thing, right? That it's recognized as a field and it needs focus and it needs attention, and it needs people to train in it and understand how to do it and talk to each other.”

(04:37) - Building a new field: “The adult cardiologist hadn't really seen this before. This was a new field. It was a blossoming field of people who had grown past age 18 and now needed care.”

(09:34) - Passion and focus: “You can have passion about a hundred things, but at some point, you need to focus to really get something to the next level. And I think it's probably that combination of what I was raised to think about that ended up making me who I am.”

(14:00) - Innovation in Telemedicine: “There's that phrase necessity is the mother of invention. Right? And I feel like my phrase is a little different. It’s desperation is the mother of innovation.”

(17:31) - Empowering patients: “You say you want patients to be motivated. You want them to be empowered, but if you keep stripping their power, putting them in a blue gown, putting 'em on a table and in a nice cold room, you can't empower people if you keep stripping them of their power.”

(24:53) - Ami’s path to Chief Innovation Officer: “When you start getting good at something, people expect it to be perfect. And it's never perfect. There's always the next challenge.”

(30:44) - The importance of technology in healthcare (+Pizza talk!): “It falls on us to get them excited, to teach them, to help them understand why a lot of the things that we're doing makes sense for the patient, makes sense for the system and in fact, makes things better.”

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Connect with Ami on LinkedIn

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The Slice is produced by Sterling Shore and Rachael Roberts at StudioPod Media, and Shauna Davis at Osso VR. Engineered by nodalab.