Building bridges
Effective collaboration starts with a question. How can I help? Under ideal circumstances, everyone on a project brings their best selves to answer that question. They stay in regular contact, keeping the rest of the team aware of their progress, holding each other accountable and being held accountable themselves. They are also willing to push themselves outside of their comfort zones, learning from each other and teaching each other. Teams that experience success, whether it is measured by grant wins, publications, or new therapeutics, usually want to continue to work together. They know that what they might have accomplished alone is less than what they can achieve as a group. Beyond any group’s achievement, I think that successful projects should also leave us better—wiser or more experienced—than we were before. Of course beyond the willingness to help and support one another, what can also help a collaboration is a dovetailing skill set. This is the rationale behind the cluster hires that Drs. Josalyn Cho and Chad Grueter are helping to lead. If we can find mature saplings already beginning to bud and plant them in Iowa soil, a harvest of fruit should come much more quickly.
Anyone looking to model effective collaborations should look to the VA-funded health services research team, CADRE. A recent publication in the Journal of Hospital Medicine from members Drs. Jeydith Gutierrez, Peter Kaboli, and others looked at the disparity in outcomes for veterans with alcohol use disorder in rural and urban settings. The benefit of retrospective studies using VA data means building massive cohorts is relatively easy. The team evaluated nearly 3 million qualifying admissions to reach their conclusions.
Another effective team can also be found on our side of the street in the Fraternal Order of Eagles Diabetes Research Center (FOEDRC), which seems to have bonds that extend extramurally. Current and former FOEDRC members collaborated on this recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Anchored by Dr. Long-Sheng Song and his lab members, the PNAS publication identifies a mechanism in a heart protein that regulates the body’s ability to produce heat. Implications are ripe for treatments of metabolic disorders in addition to diabetes. Dr. Song’s broad research scope also finds him in regular collaboration with colleagues in the Abboud Cardiovascular Research Center.
Cross-departmental collaborations are made easier within UI’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Mo Milhem and Ophthalmology’s Dr. Elaine Binkley were instrumental in putting Iowa into the driver’s seat on a recent clinical trial of a therapeutic aimed at treating uveal melanoma. Their results, appearing recently in Annals of Oncology, showed the drug doubled treated patients’ five-year survival rate. Congratulations as well to Dr. Milhem on a successful presentation before the US Food and Drug Administration earlier this week in Washington, DC. More on that story soon.
Photo for reflection
The Golden Gate Bridge is a vital connector between San Francisco and the rest of northern California. Construction on that bridge and the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco and Oakland to the east, happened almost concurrently. When construction on them began almost 100 years ago, the city had a million residents. If you look at a map and think back a century, it’s easy to see just how isolated those residents were on the peninsula. The Golden Gate Bridge is not only critical to commerce and daily life, but it is iconic, instantly recognizable. For years though it was only a dream. It took government investment from six different counties in the area and the most novel and innovative architects and construction workers to commit to a singular vision. They would all return to that one goal again and again in order to overcome challenges, setbacks, and even doubt. What is your vision? What kind of help from others will you need to achieve it? How can you depict and define that vision in a compelling way so that others will join you in its pursuit? Imagine the world after your bridges are complete.
Upi’s “Oh, WOW” moment
I would like to once again extend my condolences to the family, friends, and colleagues of Dr. Tim Thomsen. The comments from colleagues gathered here and the ones shared with me in conversation drive home both the hole he leaves behind and the inspiring example he set for us to fill. The family’s obituary here also captures the importance Dr. Thomsen placed on collaboration. A lesson he tried to impart, they write, was “his insistence that the young doctors he trained learn to value each member of the medical team as essential and valuable.” Indeed, the team he built in Supportive and Palliative Care placed equal weight on the evaluation and recommendation of the chaplain and music therapist as much as the physician and pharmacist. Dr. Thomsen advocated for “whole patient” care long before it became more popularized. May his memory continue to inspire.