Thank you to everyone who attended last week’s Quarterly Department Update. I think these hours are a useful way to discuss current events in the Department of Internal Medicine, as well as an opportunity to shine a light on specific corners. I’m grateful to Drs. Munish Ashat and Abdullah Abbasi for their presentation on the GI Division’s ERCP activity. It is truly impressive how much that service has grown in the last few years. Building on the trailblazing work of Drs. Fred Johlin and William Silverman, the clinical team, which includes physicians, APPs, nursing staff, and administrative personnel, have met a dramatic need, far deeper than the national benchmark, in the state of Iowa. In less than three years, they have expanded volumes by more than 42% without compromising safety and still maintained a commitment to scholarship, with increasing publication rates year over year. Truly impressive work and, again, my thanks to the team for their creativity, their diligence, and for sharing their successes with us on the Grand Rounds stage. You can watch the full hour here.
At the top of the hour I outlined some current priorities and questions about research in the department and in the college. I hope you will continue to share your feedback with us as we plot the course ahead. On Saturday, I attended a retreat hosted by the college bringing together some of the college’s leading researchers. There were about a dozen of us from Internal Medicine and I think it is important that our department takes the lead both in assessing the challenges we face as well as what solutions should take priority. We split up into some smaller working groups to tackle different questions around culture, resources, infrastructure, etc., and then reconvened to share what emerged. One consistent theme was that our greatest asset, our edge in this ever-increasingly competitive and uncertain environment, is the people. Iowa is all about the people and we are so much more effective when we put our heads together. We are a collaborative institution, each of us willing to dig deep to follow a good idea regardless of the source or whose “turf” is whose. This is not to say that there are not silos at Iowa in practice, but these divides are more structural than they are cultural. In other words, the challenge is facilitating connection, not creating the desire or willingness to connect. This is a far less troubling problem!
Photo for reflection
Between all the World Cup matches happening around the country and the NBA Finals, it is an exciting time for sports right now. It is no secret that my preference is for football and my Kansas City Chiefs, but this win by the New Yorks Knicks, ending a 53-year-drought since their last championship, has made me a basketball fan, even temporarily. This graphic depicts the disparity in scoring by the two teams. Of course one lesson from this data could be that the only score that matters is the one when the final buzzer sounds. But a deeper dive into this slightly misleading data, reveals a more powerful lesson for us. Across the five games in this series, the San Antonio Spurs outscored the Knicks by 57 points in the first quarter only. If you combine all scoring in quarters 2, 3, and 4 from the five games, the Knicks scored 69 more points. What does this tell us? The Spurs came out hot in the first quarter, and yes, they “led” throughout more of the games, but could not sustain that energy and slowly had that lead eaten away by the more mature and experienced team. The Knicks played hard not for just one quarter or for fifteen minutes, but all four. The real lesson here, especially in research, should be that even if you have a Jalen Brunson on your team, we still need to work together and plan for resilience that lasts a full career. A big multimillion-dollar R01 can be like that hot first quarter, but without collaboration and creative teamwork to build large decades-long programs, we will flame out in those later quarters.
Upi’s “Oh, WOW” moment
We are still in graduation season with only one more fellowship graduation event this weekend before we turn the page to a new academic year. Last week’s residency graduation event was a wonderful celebration of the trainees at the heart of our department. All praise is due to the vision of our residency program director, Dr. Manish Suneja, whose genuine joy for each and every graduate was apparent throughout the evening. It is easy to see on evenings like that why our program has the national reputation that it does, and it begins with Dr. Suneja. Nearly every graduate spoke movingly of how much he was a factor in their decision to train at Iowa or of how his support helped sustain them during their time at Iowa. The cumulative effect is inspiring, and I hope he knows just how much his leadership is valued.
A recent commencement address from Google exec Sundar Pichai put me in mind not just of Dr. Suneja but of our approach to research as well. I’ll let you read for yourself, but essentially, Pichai offered three lessons: 1) Choose optimism over negativity. 2) Work on hard things over the easy ones because failure teaches us more than success. And 3) Do what excites you. This, going back to the Knicks, is how we can play a career-long game.