“I thought that education and medicine was a pathway for me to not only get out of my small town but to also make a huge impact somewhere in the world,” says Jermaine Blakely, a third-year medical student at Howard University College of Medicine. But Blakely didn’t wait for medical school to start making a difference. While an undergrad at Morehouse College, he created a program that paired students with local churches to help the homeless, as well as women who were victims of domestic violence. Although he was pre-med at Morehouse, his path to medical school included detours to get a Masters in Health Policy and Management at NYU and several years working in healthcare IT at hospitals in the San Francisco Bay area, giving him a broader perspective than his younger classmates on the opportunities before them. “I think we're asking the wrong question to medical students. Instead of asking what they want to specialize in, we should ask ‘what do you want to do with your medical degree’ because I think your degree should be a passport to many different career paths.” Possibilities for Blakely include creating a medical device company, joining a venture capital firm or maybe falling in love with a specialty and having a clinically-focused career. Regardless, there’s little doubt we will be hearing about his positive impact in the years ahead. Don’t miss meeting this inspirational young leader as our NextGen Journeys series continues. Mentioned in this episode: Howard University College of Medicine (https://medicine.howard.edu)
“I thought that education and medicine was a pathway for me to not only get out of my small town but to also make a huge impact somewhere in the world,” says Jermaine Blakely, a third-year medical student at Howard University College of Medicine. But Blakely didn’t wait for medical school to start making a difference. While an undergrad at Morehouse College, he created a program that paired students with local churches to help the homeless, as well as women who were victims of domestic violence. Although he was pre-med at Morehouse, his path to medical school included detours to get a Masters in Health Policy and Management at NYU and several years working in healthcare IT at hospitals in the San Francisco Bay area, giving him a broader perspective than his younger classmates on the opportunities before them. “I think we're asking the wrong question to medical students. Instead of asking what they want to specialize in, we should ask ‘what do you want to do with your medical degree’ because I think your degree should be a passport to many different career paths.” Possibilities for Blakely include creating a medical device company, joining a venture capital firm or maybe falling in love with a specialty and having a clinically-focused career. Regardless, there’s little doubt we will be hearing about his positive impact in the years ahead. Don’t miss meeting this inspirational young leader as our NextGen Journeys series continues.
Howard University College of Medicine
Michael Carrese: Hi everybody, I'm Michael Carrese, welcoming you to Raise the Line with Osmosis from Elsevier, an ongoing exploration about how to improve health and healthcare. On this episode, we're continuing our Next Gen Journey series featuring fresh perspectives on education, medicine, and the future of healthcare with Jermaine Blakely, a third-year medical student at Howard University College of Medicine.
Before starting med school, Jermaine spent several years working on electronic health record integration and Laboratory Information Systems Management at hospitals in San Francisco, which helps explain why he also co-founded the Health Innovation and Technology Interest Group at his school. Outside of med school, Jermain was previously a venture fellow at Health Innovation Capital, and he's currently an AI clinical fellow and assistant to the CEO at Glass Health, which is a health tech startup, and we want to thank a previous Raise the Line guest, Dr. Parsa Mohri, for putting us in touch with Jermaine Blakely, it's great to have you on the show.
Jermaine Blakley: Thank you, I'm happy to be here.
Michael: So we always start with trying to learn more about our guests and particularly what got into them on the path toward a career in medicine. Obviously you had quite a bit of work experience before you decided to go to med school. Why don't you give us some background?
Jermaine: Yes, I'm from a small town in Alabama, a very rural area. Access to healthcare was very limited, and one of my first experiences with the medical institution was probably around seventh grade. My mom was in a bad car accident, and we had to go to the emergency department which was about forty minutes away in Mississippi. From that particular instance, I realized how the lack of access to emergency care was so prevalent and so dire in certain situations because it hit so close to home for me.
And my mom is also actually a nurse. So she also pushed me into the direction of medicine. I came from a small town where most people in my town, they work at factories. That's mostly what the men do for good jobs and good living. But I think for me, I just really saw myself as being bigger than my circumstance and I wanted to see the world and I read a lot, and I thought that education and medicine was a pathway for me to not only get out of my small town but to also make a huge impact somewhere in the world.
I'm still figuring out exactly what I want to do but I do think medicine has been the best career choice for me giving all of the values and principles within this particular career. I don't think it's perfect for sure, because I have a lot of complaints, but I do think it's apparently the most favorable career. If I had to choose anything else, I would probably still choose this.
Michael: Well, I'll say two things. We've done nearly five hundred interviews for this series. And number one, you're not the first person to have complaints about being in medicine, for sure, and also what we hear from lot of folks is medical education just opens up so many opportunities. There's so many ways to be in medicine. You don't even have to be a clinical practitioner. You can be an advisor to a company. You can start a company. You can do all kinds of other things.
Jermaine: I'm sure.
Michael: I think what you're saying has some wisdom behind it. So you're on this track, you get a bachelor's degree in biology, but what might not make sense to people is that you, before going to med school, you get a master's in health policy and management. So tell us about your thinking behind that decision.
Jermaine: Yeah, that's a great question. So I was pre-med in Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. During my time there, I did very well academically but when it came to the medical school admission test, I wasn't super confident in taking the exam just yet.
So I went to graduate school, to be honest, to more so prolong my decision making to what type of career I wanted. But while I was at Morehouse, I started this organization called Project House, and that was an organization that focused on the homeless population there. We didn't have another organization on campus that focused on the homeless specifically. So I did a thing where I kind of saw a gap and I saw a need to fill, and I went out into the city of Atlanta, and I partnered with churches -- because churches have church buses -- and the buses would come to campus and pick up students to take us to the homeless shelter.
We also partnered with Krispy Kreme Donuts because they provided us with some funds so that we could purchase t -shirts. One thing I realized is that, like, the marketability of community service is a real thing. If you make community service seem like a very cool thing to do, more people will be interested in doing it and I think one way we made community service cool was by the t -shirts that we had. We had these nice, cool baseball tees that were sponsored by Krispy Kreme Donuts.
Then I also went out and we partnered with a transitional home that focused on women who were in domestic violence situations. I think from working with Project House and strategically partnering with community stakeholders like churches and homeless shelters and transitional homes and being able to influence large group of students at one time-- because at that time we were working with students from Morehouse, Clark Atlanta University and also Spelman College -- I realized, wow, I can really impact change via strategic thinking and operations and actually mobilizing people for a certain cause.
So, I applied to NYU because they had a master's in public administration and health policy and management. Specifically the school at NYU was the School of Public Service and they gave me a fellowship which paid for my entire tuition based on the work that I did with the homeless in Atlanta. So I went to NYU to just learn more about the operational side of healthcare. I was like, okay, maybe this is more my thing than the science. So that's how I ended up at NYU.
Michael: And during the NYU experience, did the science side click or how did you get back on the track for med school?
Jermaine: So, right, that's a great question. I chose NYU because it had the least scientific curriculum among the schools I was considering. My class was mostly focused on economics of healthcare organizations, stats, financial management, et cetera. However, I did do an administrative fellowship right after NYU at the University of California San Francisco Health System. It was really my experience at UCSF -- which I think has some of the most brilliant physicians that I've ever met that were doing way more than practicing at the bedside -- I think that reinvigorated me to go into medicine again. They were practicing at the bedside. They were doing research. They were teaching. They were also leading big strategic initiatives under the CEO who at the time was Mark Laret. And I was like, “Wow, physicians can do all these things. I think I want to go to med school again.” So I actually applied to med school because of my experience at UCSF.
Michael: Yeah, wow, well, you know, I think probably with all the thinking you did and all the experiences you had, I imagine that being there now, you sort of feel like you're in the right place. It's not just a whim, it's not something you're doing for somebody else, it's something that you really have decided is right for you.
Jermaine: Yeah, that's a good point because I came to medical school at twenty-eight-years-old. I took about five years between being in school at all. So I graduated from NYU in 2017, took about five years before starting med school in 2021. And the thing is I came to medical school a little bit older, a little bit more mature and also just more informed about what I wanted to do in my career. I came to medical school with the impression of maybe I just want to practice for five years. And then I went through my first and second year of medical school and I was like, actually, I don't want to practice at all.
However, in my third year that has changed I think because I started this organization that focused on healthcare innovation and technology and we bring industry experts on campus. I've been doing this research, more so picking the brains of industry experts and asking them, “Do you think I have to go to residency? Do you think I have to practice in order to be credible if I do decide to start a company one day?” I would say that majority of the answers is yes, they recommend at least doing residency more so for respectability politics, but also knowing that you had an experience actually practicing on patients as a physician or as a full medical degree professional, you just have way more insight -- if I do decide to create a clinical product one day – into how to operationalize that within a healthcare system or organization or institution.
So, I think as I've matriculated through Howard College of Medicine, I've been able to inform what I think I need to do best. At this current juncture, I'm thinking that I should complete residency, but I'm very open to starting up my own company or going into a startup or going into a venture capital firm right after residency and foregoing practice, unless I feel like I'm very in love with a particular specialty.
Michael: We should definitely connect you with Shiv Gaglani who's the co-founder of Osmosis…
Jermaine: Yeah, I heard some good stories.
Michael: …and an entrepreneur. Yeah, he's quite amazing and he's been through a lot of this same thinking. He dropped out after two years of med school, started this company, really grew it successfully with the whole team and is now back in med school. He's a third-year med student himself at the age of thirty-three or thirty-four or something.
Jermaine: Yeah. Yeah, that's so funny. Because I actually read that he was going back. I remember when he was going back to medical school and I think I read the announcement on LinkedIn. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. Because I did hear that he dropped out of med school. And I was like, OK. And his career journey has been super interesting. We'd love to talk to him and learn a little bit more about him because I think we may share some similar perspectives about the medical industry and what we want to do and how we feel like we can impact change within it.
Michael: Yeah, right. And I think that's kind of a theme. It was not common, you know, twenty, thirty years ago for physicians to be entrepreneurs relative to what's happening now. People felt like they could only make change from within the medical system. Shiv's a great example, but there's many, many other examples, of people helping to improve healthcare from the outside. They still want to help patients and they want to improve people's lives, but they can do it from outside the system and pick their piece of it. In his case, it was medical education. In your case, it might be something completely different. But there's a lot of energy around improving healthcare. it's just sort of like from what perspective are you going to do that?
So you guys would hit it off, believe me.
Jermaine: I’d love to meet him. I’ll follow up.
Michael: You could learn a lot from each other. Obviously just listening to you for a few minutes, you have a real entrepreneurial sort of spirit and a great deal of leadership talent to put these organizations together and start all these things.
Jermaine: Thank you.
Michael: We'll have to keep our eye on you for sure. Listen, so, you did mention that there was a five year break there before you enrolled in med school. During that time you were out in California, as I mentioned in the intro, working on electronic health record and healthcare IT. I guess first I would like to know how that probably helped you in med school because you were already familiar with being in a hospital environment, you already understand how complicated hospitals are and how many moving pieces and parts there are. So talk about how that has influenced your journey in med school.
Jermaine: My introduction to healthcare technology was between my first and second year at NYU. I worked at Kaiser in Berkeley, California, and I worked in a clinical technology department. And basically the department that I worked at was responsible for the maintenance and the upkeep and the requisitioning of medical equipment across all of the Kaiser hospitals in the Northern California region. So it was about maybe twelve hospitals. My job was redesigning their website for maintenance requests and procurement of new equipment with project management and engineers. It was my first introduction to like the world of medical devices within a larger health care system and I think Kaiser is a great example of a well-run machine.
So, I went to UCSF and during that time I started an administrative fellowship. I would choose between Northwell and UCSF, and Northwell is in New York. So I was choosing between staying in New York or to move to San Francisco and I decided to move to San Francisco because when I thought about the health systems there in my twenties, I wanted my twenties to be devoted to learning from some of the best organizations and being in the best regional location. I think when it comes to healthcare, from my experience thus far, no one does it better than the West Coast. In the Northern California region, you have Stanford Health, you have UCSF, you have Dignity Health, you have Sutter Health, and Kaiser too, don't forget to mention that, that have been doing it really well.
During my administrative fellowship, we got to rotate around a C -suite. So, you get to choose anybody to work with and I have a great mentor there, Heidi Collins. She's the Associate Chief Information Officer there now. She's not a physician. And she put me on this big project where we had EPIC. So EPIC is the electronic medical record at UCSF. And UCSF acquired Oakland Children’s Benioff Hospital, and I was tasked with operational readiness for the migration of these two EPIC systems.
From this experience, it was like getting a crash course into what every specialty does because the EMR touched literally every aspect of the hospital. This for sure is a tool, but it's a tool that the nutrition department uses for their dietary plans; it's what the pharmacy use for their formularies ,which is the medication list for all their patients; it's what the clinicians use for their medical orders. So I had a preview into how every specialty, every physician, most nurses, every operational function within the hospital leverages the electronic medical record. I think it just more so opens my eyes to what technology can actually do when leveraged correctly for patient care and the continuum of patient care.
From that experience, I was like, wow, okay. I just really learned the possibilities, if I was to be a physician, but also have the understanding of the nuances of how to leverage technology within this current time, because there is an AI revolution happening right now within medicine. But at that moment, there was a revolution in electronic medical records consolidation.
So being there at that intersection at that right time, I think I've been very fortunate to have preview into experiences at the right place, the right time, being in proximity to some of the best tech startups, since we're very close to Silicon Valley, and from all of those experiences, I came to medical school just way more informed about what the future of healthcare can be and what I can do potentially to serve in that.
Michael: Sure, Yeah, that's fascinating. And we are going to get to AI, but first on electronic medical records, I think sometimes people lose the context that they're new, really. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it's only been fifteen years, or something like that, that these things have been around and they've gotten a pretty bad rap for interfering with the delivery of healthcare. The classic example is the doc is looking at his computer screen and typing instead of looking at the patient and engaging in that way.
As somebody with all your experience on the tech side, but also now on the practitioner side, what's your take on the overall impact or EMRs and how they could be utilized differently?
Jermaine: Right, I totally agree. I think that it's like a Swiss army knife. There's pros and cons to the electronic medical record. I think to start with the pros, you have a very enhanced continuum of care where you can share a patient journey with literally anyone who needs that particular information at a given time upon the interaction with that particular patient. I think it’s definitely a form of record keeping. Also, most health systems -- if they're not acquired by a bigger health organization – are simply breaking even or maybe in the red, and I think electronic medical records have been able to enhance revenue capture in a way that we've never seen before in terms of billing and coding. Finally, I think it allows a larger form of collaboration within your own health system.
Electronic medical records are here to stay so it becomes a matter of how you use them. There’s interplay with the government about how well are you using your electronic medical record to decrease readmissions or improve patient care and patient outcomes?
For the cons, I do think that at times it can take away from your patient one-to-one interaction in a conversation but the provider has to actually document exactly what was done: the diagnoses, the medical treatment, the assessment and plan. That can be very arduous and can increase the length of time that providers stay within their particular day-to-day functions. So, if you don't have a good electronic medical record, I do think it increases frustrations for everyone, medical students, residents, and physicians. And if it's not a good one, that means it's not easy to use and you're not choosing the right one.
So I do think that healthcare organizations should invest a significant amount in a really good one because it pays itself off. But if you go with the cheap version and get an electronic medical record that's not as sufficient or efficient, the consequences down the line can be very drastic financially and also emotionally and mentally for everyone that works there.
Michael: Yeah, because we do hear a lot about their contribution to burnout as well. But that kind of leads me into the AI conversation because there's all kinds of AI tools that are coming on board to automate some of the administrative side of being a physician. Well, some of it's clinical, you know, taking notes and all that, but there's automated transcripts and there's other ways of kind of helping the workflow of physicians. What do you see in terms of how AI is being applied now? And do you think it’s going to stay on more of the admin side of things or how far into the clinical realm do you see it going?
Jermaine: I'm very excited about this revolution of AI within the healthcare space because I think this is only the beginning and the advancements of these large language models like your ChatGPTs are moving so fast. One of the reasons why I started the Healthcare Innovation Technology Group at Howard is because I want to just make sure that my peers and my colleagues are aware that if you don't get involved now, you can get left behind. Not left behind in the sense of your clinical knowledge, but left behind in the sense of the type of opportunities that are going to be there in the future. Once you graduate with your medical degree, it should open doors for you in so many ways. There's like Chief AI Officer positions today that never existed before. So if health systems believe that they need a Chief AI Officer with a large salary, there's a reason why that's to come.
So my particular opinion about AI within healthcare...I think AI clinical decision support integrated within electronic medical record would be the bread and butter of AI for health systems. I think physicians today may be scared of potential risks that comes with AI, but AI clinical decision support if used correctly can be a positive for doctors. At Glass Health, we have a platform called Odyssey which integrates AI within the electronic medical record, Epic specifically. And not only does the AI create differential diagnoses, which, of course, as a provider, you're learning to create your own differential diagnoses, but the AI would just spit out multiple differential diagnoses and you may miss one because we're human.
I think we just kind of have to surrender to the fact that AI will always be smarter than any human being in a lot of ways. Maybe not in bias and in emotional intelligence, but in terms of facts and having that volume of knowledge at one time, AI will probably win every time over a regular human physician. However, today, AI can help with assessment and planning because there things that a physician just may not think about. And again, these are only recommendations.
So if you leverage AI correctly, you will see it for simply supporting decision making. So recommendations, but it's not directives. And I think the narrative around AI should be, this is another form of clinical decision support, which we already have within electronic medical records, which often serve as pop -ups. Before AI, if you were to give a patient a medicine and he's allergic to like penicillin, you will probably get a pop -up with an electronic medical record saying the patient is allergic to penicillin. Are you sure you want to prescribe penicillin? So we already had these things.
I think we just have to wrap our mind around that we now have enhanced, advanced versions of what we already have. We don't have to put 100 % of our trust in AI, but if we were to use it correctly, patient outcomes will increase, physician burnout will decrease because you even have ambient listening within most of these AI platforms where you can talk to the patient and literally the AI would just scribe everything for a provider. And not only would they scribe everything for a provider, hypothesize what they think the differential diagnosis is from that conversation and the assessment and plan and the management and I think that's a whirlwind for everyone.
And also, we currently have scribes today, which are a human form. AI can actually replace those people, which can also save money for particular departments within the healthcare system. I don't advocate for the replacement of people but I do think that there are some low level jobs that potentially could get not only replaced, but maybe you could give additional responsibilities to that particular person and we can focus on really advancing the healthcare system instead of staying stagnant.
Michael: Yeah. You gave a great example of a Chief AI Officer position that didn't exist, you know, a couple of years ago. So there's some creative destruction of jobs, but openings in other areas. Elsevier, for example, has a decision support, system, ClinicalKey AI which is addressing the concern you were implying there about accuracy. Elsevier is able to tap into this vast library of journals and research publications that they have to help reassure clinicians that this is trusted, vetted clinical information. It's not coming off a Google search or something. So all this is still in the early days and I think there's this balance... finding that balance between using it as a tool and not maybe going overboard with it, but making sure you're using all of the advantages that it brings with the proper caution, you know? So, it’s a really fascinating time to be in healthcare.
I'm afraid to say we're nearly out of time, but we always like to ask our guests to leave with a little advice. You've got a lot of experience under your belt, more than an average medical student. What's your go -to advice for people coming into medical school about how to navigate all that and how to think about their career?
Jermaine: So what advice would I give an incoming medical student? I would say that I think that each of us, everyone in medical school, comes in with a vision for what they want their career to be. I think most of the time, because it's so constructed, when people ask a medical student a question about their future career trajectory, the question is often, ‘what do you want to specialize in?’ I think we're asking the wrong question. I think we should ask medical students, ‘what all do you want to do with your medical degree?’
I often emphasize that for me personally, my medical degree is a stepping stone. And from my current time in medical school, I've had to be very protective about my vision, even during the times when I just thought I didn't want to practice at all and I wanted to create my own business, but also be clinical so that I could work on clinical products and I have the clinical knowledge to make clinical decisions about future advances in technology. A lot of people don't understand what I'm talking about. And that's okay, you know?
Also I would say that is important that whatever your vision is, to protect that vision, to know when to speak that vision, to know when to share that vision, to know when to ask for advice and input about what you want to do. Because if you talk to too many people, their fears and also their limited thinking in terms of what a medical physician is can sometimes distract you from what you feel like your ultimate goal is.
So to summarize, I would say that my advice would be to get your medical degree, as a passport to do a variety of things that are yet to be imagined. And if there's something that yet to be imagined, imagine it. Also keep a list in your phone on your third year and fourth year rotations of the things that you want to change. I think most of us have complaints. I think I'm very hypercritical of this organization and I think so many things can be done better. You should keep a list of the things that you think that you can create and build.
We should be pouring that into our medical students. We should empower them to make changes in even the small places. Even if we don't like a syringe, how can this syringe be better? Even if we don't like a Foley catheter and how we insert them, we should create a better one that we think would make the patient more comfortable. So again, your medical degree should be a passport to many different career paths.
Two, I would say to dream big. You know, we work really hard to be here and to obtain a medical degree. So I would say dream very big with what you want to do and protect that vision for yourself and your life. Yeah, and be courageous in that path.
Michael: Wow, I think people a lot younger than me call that a wisdom drop. There's an awful lot of wonderful stuff for folks to think about there. It's really been great to have you on the show and this has been an inspirational conversation. So, thanks again for your time and best of luck.
Jermaine: It's been so fun, thank you so much.
Michael: And with that, I'm Michael Carrese. I want to thank you for checking out today's show and as always, remember to do your part to raise the line and strengthen the health care system. We're all in this together.