Orlando, “The City Beautiful,” is emerging as a global center for medical care, innovation, and research. A new partnership between Nemours Children’s Health and the University of Central Florida (UCF) — highlighted by the launch of the Nemours/UCF Department of Pediatrics – aims to train future pediatricians and drive advancements in pediatric health research.
Guests:
Debra German, MD, Vice President of Health Affairs and Founding Dean, University of Central Florida College of Medicine
Heather A. Fagan, MD, MS, FAAP, Designated Institutional Official (DIO) for Graduate Medical Education, Nemours Children’s Hospital, Florida
Host/Producer: Carol Vassar
TRANSCRIPT
Announcer:
Welcome to Well Beyond Medicine, the world’s top-ranked Children’s Health podcast produced by Nemours Children’s Health. Subscribe on any platform at Nemourswellbeyond.org or find us on YouTube.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Each week we’re joined by innovators and experts from around the world exploring anything and everything related to the 80% of child health impacts that occur outside the doctor’s office. I’m your host, Carol Vassar. And now that you’re here, let’s go.
MUSIC:
Let’s go, oh, oh … Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
It’s called the City Beautiful. A city so nice it’s known by just one name, Orlando. Whether it’s putt-putt, golfing, music, shopping, relaxation, nightlife, or its famous theme parks, Orlando is the place where magic happens every day. And increasingly, Orlando’s Medical City in the Lake Nona section has become an International hub of medical care, innovation, and research. Thanks in part to a newly formalized partnership between Nemours Children’s Health and the University of Central Florida, which includes the brand new Nemours UCF Department of Pediatrics.
It’s designed to train the next generation of pediatric physicians and pursue groundbreaking pediatric health research. In Orlando at the 2024 American Academy of Pediatrics Experience National Conference, our podcast team had the opportunity to talk about the magic of this collaboration with two of its key stakeholders. Dr. Deb German, vice president of Health Affairs and the founding dean of the UCF College of Medicine, and Dr. Heather Fagan, a Nemours critical care physician, a professor of pediatrics at the UCF College of Medicine, and the interim dean of that newly formed Nemours UCF, Department of Pediatrics. What does all of this mean? We checked in with Dr. German on what makes this Nemours UCF partnership different.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
The difference is that we get to build it from scratch with a shared vision for making healthcare better than it ever has been. So we’ve been able to recruit talent from all over the country that exists in an environment that says, well, we’ve always done it this way or our infrastructure is such that we need to keep doing it this way. And we’ve been able to recruit the dreamers, the innovators, and the creators, and create an atmosphere of the future.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
The vision here is absolutely wonderful. What kinds of leaders do you think will be drawn to this really unique and visionary environment, Dr. Fagan?
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
As Dr. German said, it tends to inspire people who are innovative people and want to create new things and are really interested in doing, as she said, things the way that they haven’t been done before. So if you take education, which is a place that we’ve been partnering for a number of years now with our formal collaboration, we have been attracting students both on the campus at UCF and at Nemours, where they’re really learning in a unique environment with technology that’s incredibly creative and innovative with physicians and scientists who are in that exploration phase into the development of everything that we’re doing in Medical City.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
And I can give you some examples. For example, we have at our medical school, the very first medical school where every medical student had an iPad, and this was when iPads had just come out. So what did that mean? Our medical students had the entire medical knowledge of the world with them wherever they went, anywhere, anytime, and eventually, any device. So that was an innovation. Apple worked with us to create an anatomy experience for our students where, as they learned anatomy, they learned imaging, they learned ultrasound, and every bit of it was, again, on a computer that they could see.
And these are just a couple of the early innovations. But in each of those cases, I attracted renowned faculty from renowned places where people were saying, “I don’t know about this iPad thing for students.” But they came to us, and we were, of course, “The sky’s the limit. Let’s build the future.” And it reminds me of an expression … And I don’t know who said this, but I think we’ve all heard it. The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. We are a magnet for all of those unevenly distributed leaders to come because they can create the future with us.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. German, you pointed out that partnership with Apple. Building Partnerships is really important to this collaboration. Perhaps that’s where the magic is, but we’ll talk about that later. Partners in medicine, partners in education, in research, in tech, and beyond. What’s the importance of the cross-sector partnership to all of this? Dr. Fagan.
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
Well, you just reminded me of a perfect example of something that I’m going to get back to your question, but we were talking about the medical students and boards and the partnership across the community. It made me think instantly of one of Dr. German’s graduates from UCF College of Medicine who trained during her clerkship at our pediatric facility and then went on to create the mobile clinic in partnership now with the UCF medical students on that clinic where we’re serving the children in our community who otherwise may not be able to receive medical care out in our communities, in a way sort of driving those ideas about innovation forward.
So, that spirit that she developed in medical school, bringing that to the boards, being engaged with the way that we are serving the community, the children in our community, and bringing that full circle again. I think that’s just a microcosm of the type of innovation that we’ve been able to see and achieve, and some of those things that really bring real meaning start exactly like that.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
So get back to the cross-sector partnerships. Who else is at the table as we try to advance, as we work to advance, as we do advance, this effort moving forward?
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
We have a number of partnerships in the education and research space as well as people like the USTA, so the United States Tennis Association, where UCF and Nemours and our partnership more globally works to put ourselves in that space for training of young athletes. In the research arena, I think that brings up the University of Central Florida in their main campus where UCF College of Medicine, UCF, and Nemours are partnering in places like population health, something that’s incredibly important to our growth serve in the medical space and beyond.
One really unique thing I would say is that Dean Durbin’s team and our team together have been working with UCF Rosen College to think about the hospitality workforce or the tourism workforce, very critical to Orlando. All of those people, as well as the children in Nemours, in the wake of something like the COVID Pandemic, we recognize that we have to be certain that those kinds of people in our own community are carriage-borne.
We’ve been partnering to do that which will impact millions literally of people across Orlando in addition to the 6 million visitors a year that come here served by these people. In a way that Nemours is projecting in that space right now is really looking at asthma or a very common chronic medical condition of children sort of in this space. And so that’s a way where we’re taking the best of all of our worlds and trying to impact the public much more broadly across the Orlando area.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
And the cross-sectional partnerships are where all creativity lies because if you’re in a specific discipline, that discipline is defined. And if you’re in two specific disciplines, each of them is defined. But the space in between is where creativity comes, and we are involved in so many of those.
Our partnership is partnering with engineering, with optics and photonics. We just initiated an aerospace microgravity initiative and these things initially, it’s hard to imagine what will come from them. But that’s where the greatest new discoveries come because this space is completely unexplored.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I thought of a question as you were talking. Can either of you address how this ultimately benefits patients and families, not just in central Florida but across the nation?
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
We have many missions. Three of our core missions are research, education, and patient care. And when you bring all three of those missions together, you get the highest quality patient care because your students are there asking today and tomorrow’s questions of your doctors. And your researchers are there trying to find the answers to today’s problems for tomorrow’s cures.
For example, we have one of our scientists, a faculty member at the university, and a Nemours pediatrician who is working to eliminate neuroblastoma in children, and she’s using the Zika virus, so imagine using a virus to eliminate a cancer. And she’s working with our infectious disease and microbiology faculty. So this is a kind of a combo answer to the interfacing interdisciplinarity and what are we doing for the world? We are curing this now in mice. It won’t be long we will be curing it in children, and that will be something that will be adopted by physicians across the globe. So we are a fire, we’re going to ignite the fire that makes medical care good for everyone.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
I love it. And there’s so much more to come beyond the work that Dr. Westmoreland is doing.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
Yes.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Let’s talk a little bit about artificial intelligence. It seems to be very hot topic no matter what field you’re in, but especially in healthcare. Is there anything going on in this new partnership, this young partnership, regarding AI? Dr. Fagan.
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
I think you’re correct. There’s unlimited opportunities as we learn really how to harness the power of this technology. So, certainly, for Nemours, we are working on what would the use of…appropriate use of AI in our clinical workspaces. How does that engage improved healthcare or healthcare outcomes as we begin to use this technology.
And I would say the same in some of the research that our team is doing together, is how are we looking at AI, again, when we think about the health and wellbeing of children and the monitoring of children and the caring for children sort of outside of the walls of a hospital and in the focus of a community. I think that’s another place where artificial intelligence will make very meaningful impact.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. German, any thoughts there?
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
Our students are knee-deep in AI, and they’re teaching our faculty, and our faculty are also using it to expand the courses that they have. And our adult teaching hospital has been designated a clinical transformation in innovation, one of two hubs nationally. And we are involved in many pilot studies using AI to write notes for busy doctors in the emergency room using AI to create schedules for nurses on the maternity wards. And some of our projects have been so successful that they’re now being beta-tested at larger hospitals. And again, our faculty and our students are in this environment of creativity and forward-looking practice, and it changes everything.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
As you look at this partnership five years down the line, 10 years down the line, how do you see it changing and evolving?
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
Well, for me, when I think about coming to Nemours 10 years ago and meeting with Dr. German on that recruitment tour, thinking about what those green fields literally looked like in Lake Nona Medical City compared to where we are, it’s amazing thinking about that trajectory. So the growth of the students and the trainees and the hospitals and the engineering, as Dr. German said, and all of the technology that has come to Lake Nona.
When I think about what we are doing now in the confines of a partnership, making that more strategic in our thinking and in the way that we operationalize ourselves together, it really seems like the growth opportunity is certainly at the same trajectory we’ve experienced over the last 10 years. And for those of us who have been there, that’s literally going from two buildings surrounded by agriculture and cows to a thriving sort of mini little city within Orlando where things are really, again, at the forefront of technology and innovation sort of surrounding us. So me, having that lens and looking forward, it literally feels quite literally that it’s almost unimaginable what the next 10 years could bring in a partnership that wasn’t as secured and finalized as it is now together has really been incredible.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. German?
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
Well, so we have a medical school that’s part of the largest university. And by the way, most innovative university in the nation. I think we’re in the top five innovative universities in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, and we’ve got this amazing children’s hospital. And ordinarily when you’re in kindergarten, you learn that one and one is two.
But when we put together what we have, the medical school, the academic health science center, and the university, with what Nemours has with their hospital-based care, their outpatient care, and all of the expansive projects that are going, we get one and one is way more than two. And, I think, what we’re going to see is an explosion in the next five to 10 years of new care and we will become a globally relevant medical city.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Which goes to the question of impact. What do you see as the impact this partnership brings to the broader healthcare system? Dr. Fagan.
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
I think that together we are willing to secure our foot hold of that next generation of thought leaders and innovative technology education and research. I think that together, although not without this partnership, we’ve really been on that course as Dr. German described. We have been getting national recognition in both arenas. I think the power that together is certainly more than one plus one equals two.
And I expect that the sort of forward-thinking that brought us to have the ability to even secure this partnership will make it that we come in force in the healthcare arena space as it relates to clinical care of children, both in Florida and beyond in this country, as well as the research and both of the basic sciences, political sciences, and social sciences, which is something that Orlando is highly invested in as we look at the community that we’re serving.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Truly benefiting all children.
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
Mm-hmm.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. German, any follow-up?
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
Well, I’ll go back to the future is already here.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
There we go.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
It’s just unevenly distributed. It’s coming to Orlando, and there are reasons why it’s coming to Orlando-
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
And a beautiful city.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
… and you’ll see the future here.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
A beautiful city to come to. I was going to ask this question. This is really audacious. This goal of having growth and partnership and cross-sector partnership is audacious. How do you plan to achieve that, and how do you know when you will have achieved it? Dr. German.
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
So I have absolutely no doubt that this will be achieved and I’ll tell you why. So I came here. I guess I was the first one on this cow pasture. And here’s what I saw here in Orlando. First of all, already a global destination, already a city known by its first name only, correct? And think about the ambiance of the city. We have a team called The Magic. We have a team called The Pride. We have an industry where dreams come true, and we wish upon a star.
Our university has a knight in shining armor as its mascot and a flying Pegasus. It’s not a mean animal that would eat you alive. It’s a flying horse that makes dreams come true. The name of Orlando, Orlando, the city, beautiful. If you think about the language that we all hear every day when we’re talking about sports, when we’re talking about the university, it is all language of the future and of dreams and of encouragement.
So the reason I know this will come true is, one, we have an airport that’s already globally, so everyone can come here, right? And we have the spirit. The city has the spirit to make the dream come true. There is no obstruction here. And the people who come here find that out almost on day one, and they take the ball and run with it. It’s happening.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. Fagan, any follow-up?
Dr. Heather Fagan, Nemours:
Well, that was amazing. She just outlined everything that is really special about Orlando, and I think I’ll just go from the physician’s perspective. That the physicians that are recruited to Orlando … And I’ll speak specifically about Nemours UCF College of Medicine. We aren’t really looking to think that change that the audacious goal from the more size of changing healthcare for all children. We’re well beyond medicine.
We’re already sitting in an audacious space where we know for certain that there is a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done in order to ensure that the children both inside our hospital walls and outside our hospital walls, in our community, have the life and the ability to grow and thrive as we would expect. And in this space, has recruited many people who would really want to think about these problems in a different way.
And the only way we’re going to do that from the clinical arena is to partner much more broadly across that technology space and the engineering space and the hospitality industry. There is a way in a city like Orlando that has been very welcoming. The vision and mission and drive to create something that absolutely extends well beyond the walls of our city.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. German, you mentioned several times the word, magic. The title of this presentation is The Magic of Collaboration. Where do you believe the magic of this partnership lies?
Dr. Debra German, University of Central Florida:
I think that there’s an expression, I think a Disney expression. A dream is a wish that your heart makes. And I think that the magic here is that people come with their passionate, heartfelt dreams. And those dreams come true, not just by happenstance because everyone wants to dream with you. And I often tell people, my job when I came here to build my part of this, was simply to dream out loud. And that’s my job. I dream out loud and in this environment, fertile soil, the dreams all come true.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Dr. Deb German is vice president of Health Affairs and the founding dean of the UCF College of Medicine. She was joined in conversation by Dr. Heather Fagan, a professor of Pediatrics at the UCF College of Medicine, a Nemours Critical Care physician, and the interim chair of the newly formed Nemours UCF Department of Pediatrics.
MUSIC:
Well Beyond Medicine.
Carol Vassar, podcast host/producer:
Thanks to Dr. German and Dr. Fagan for joining us on the Nemours Well Beyond Medicine podcast. And thanks as always to you for listening. More of our interviews with healthcare leaders from AAP on the way in the coming weeks, as well as interviews from Health 2024 in Las Vegas. Recovering topics that include whole child health, obesity medication use in children, and the effects of dark design. Don’t miss an episode. Visit Nemourswellbeyond.org to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. That’s Nemourswellbeyond.org. Our podcast team for this episode includes Cheryl Munn, Susan Masucci, and Lauren Teta. I’m Carol Vassar, join us next time as we talk with the Assistant Health Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Admiral Rachel Levine. Until then, remember, we can change children’s health for good, Well Beyond Medicine.
MUSIC:
Let’s go, oh, oh. Well Beyond Medicine.
