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The Hoeflinger Podcast
Welcome to the The Hoeflinger Podcast, where Dr. Brian Hoeflinger and Kevin Hoeflinger delve into riveting discussions about life as a neurosurgeon, the world of medicine, healthy living, fitness, and anything else that piques their curiosity. Dr. Brian Hoeflinger, MD, brings his extensive 24 years of experience as a full-time neurosurgeon to educate and inform. Get ready for engaging conversations that will broaden your understanding of the medical realm and beyond!
The Hoeflinger Podcast
#13: Social Media in Healthcare & Neuroscience Summit
In this episode, Dr. Hoeflinger and Kevin Hoeflinger discuss the Medtronic Neuroscience Healthcare Executive Summit that they went to and Dr. Hoeflinger spoke on a panel at. Dr. Hoeflinger spoke on a panel about the expanding role of social media in healthcare with Dr. Langer and Chris Gade.
Also, Dr. Hoeflinger and Kevin discuss their aim with social media, stroke awareness, and more!
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We had a really cool episode today Kevin and I are going to give you, and we recently had a neuroscience health care summit in Nashville, tennessee, and we met somebody really interesting. His name is David Langer and he was on a panel with me to discuss social media and so he's the star of the Lenox Hill Netflix series, lenox Hill, and so he's chairman of Neurosurgery there, and so I had some time to speak with him and pretty cool guy. But the whole gist of the conference that we went to was about how our doctors integrating social media into their practices and into the health care system, and so that's what I was asked to talk about, because we've become a little big, I guess, on social media and so they recognize that and asked us to be a panelist along with Dr Langer, who's the star of that Netflix series. And then there was a health care administrator from Rush who was asked to speak with us as well, chris Gotti yeah, he's that rush yeah.
Speaker 1:So we're going to talk a little bit about our experience and what we learned there. But Nashville is such a what?
Speaker 2:What are you saying? I think Nashville is a cool city. Oh yeah, no, I thought you were going to talk about the hotel. So we got the Gaylord Opryland. That hotel is wild. It's like a cruise. There's like four different areas, it's like you're in an indoor atrium and stuff. Yeah, it was a cool convention center though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's where the conference is at. And then one night we went down to the street where everybody hangs out. I think it's called Broadway Street. Yeah, Broadway, Main Street. Like every half an hour, the people down there double.
Speaker 2:And we stopped at Jason Aldeens. Aldeens, yeah, is that there? Yeah, because the country music awards was on Wednesday. The conference was on Wednesday night, so there was a lot of people there. We didn't even know that till we got there. But then Thursday and Friday was the conference and he spoke on the panel with the other two guys on.
Speaker 1:Thursday yeah, afternoon yeah.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so we got back last night, friday, so we're recording. This is going out the same day, we're recording this morning, but so I think it's a cool experience, yeah, and I think we all had different questions.
Speaker 1:But my first question was how did I get on social media, Like why are you being asked to be at a big summit like this and what's your role in social media? And so we kind of went through that. I know in one of our other podcasts we talked about how we started making patient videos for my patients for surgery so they can kind of hear what I had to say from the office visit at home.
Speaker 1:So it kind of extends the office visit into the home so they can watch us again and hear what we talked about in the office and what surgery would entail, and that way for anybody who wasn't at the office visit family member or friend they can hear it when you get home as well. And so that kind of led us into our social media presence and Kevin kind of was the head of that right. So well, I mean, we took our patient video experience and thought what can we do with this?
Speaker 2:And so Well, there was only like one or two neurosurgeons on the eyesaw on there, or even there's very few surgeons on social media. So I thought I could like edit stuff together, edit all these different videos. I had footage of my dad in the operating room and other stuff, so I just nudged him. At first my sister had done some stuff, but just someone who used social media. So we did that. But it was cool talking to all these other people, cause I think or like so I it was him talking, but we talked about the same things to each other.
Speaker 2:But it's very interesting, cause what we've done with the patient education videos and social media the whole thing is that with every new media, people are using these things and all these patients are just people. So patients want information. Whether it's Google or YouTube or social or other social media is like TikTok patients are going to find information. So if it's not the surgeons putting out the information, they're going to consume other information. So that's why I think it's so important and that's what you were talking about too it's so important for you know, hospitals and doctors to put out good quality content and information so people can watch that and be educated and not just find some random person right Putting out information or you know what, like people Googling medical problems, then you get all sorts of things, yeah and I think social media is here to stay, so why not be on the forefront of it?
Speaker 1:And I think hospital systems are starting to recognize that. That's why they're having a section now just about social media at these conferences, because it's an important topic and, like Kevin said, everybody's going to find their information from somewhere. I mean, you're going to find it from somewhere, so why not hear it from the horse's mouth and hear it from your surgeon? And they had asked me how do you know what to put out and are you uncomfortable sometimes?
Speaker 1:You know talking about things on social media and I think if you keep it within your realm of expertise which I try to do and only talk about something I'm comfortable and confident of, I think that's fair game. I don't talk about things that I don't know about and I don't reveal any patient information. I don't give out advice to specific patients, and patients will often, or people will contact me, for you know they want recommendations or advice on what to do with their condition. So I can't do that, but I can give an opinion. I can give an opinion, my opinion, and I can talk about generalities, and so that's what we've been doing with our social media and also educating right.
Speaker 2:We do fun videos about education and well, you also do like you can create mock scenarios, like create scenarios that can be educational, to show people stuff. So, and yeah, and I think it's just about being authentic to yourself, like we do and we do obviously, stuff too. We started with neurosurgery but then you slowly expand. We spent I mean, that was the game plan expanding out to other meaningful stuff to us, which was drunk driving prevention, alcohol awareness and just showing, you know, the light side of being a neurosurgeon. That's another key is to show people that it isn't all just work. Any field is in. You know, there's also you hang out with your family, yeah, so it's important to show all those aspects because you don't want just social media, just like you just working all the time. That's not what, that's not the reality of.
Speaker 1:And I think you know each of the panelists had a different aspect. Right, my aspect is different than the healthcare administrator from Russia was there who really is looking at from a hospital's perspective is social media good for our healthcare system or not? What liability does it, you know, cause us? What's the financial burden of trying to do this kind of stuff? And then there's Dr Lange, the star of the Netflix series, who I think is caught in the middle. Right, he's got a Netflix series, show, documentary that he does, but also he's a neurosurgeon and so he's got to work with the healthcare system side and decide what kind of social media does he want to put out. And so he's kind of like right in the middle. And so it's interesting to talk to each person and to hear their perspective on things.
Speaker 2:It was funny too. And then there was a moderator. Yeah, rafael, I think he goes to Rafa, but he, we were making a TikTok at the end and so you can go check that out. We've made a TikTok with them and the audience and stuff. But it's funny because some of those people we were talking about all that but some of them don't even they probably never seen a TikTok be made or like seen what it's like.
Speaker 1:A couple of people after said I've never been in the TikTok, you know. So somebody in the audience you like? Stop this afterwards, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, it's cool talking to people afterwards too, because I think a lot of people do like that stuff, or they might not even know what's going on, but they like what you're doing with stuff. So it's very interesting and it's cool to see that stuff. It's just where. That's the only way stuff is integrated or changes if you start having conversations about stuff. So it was a cool event, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was an event sponsored by a company called Metronik, which is a very large innovative company that helps with all kind of stuff that we do in surgery as far as innovation for products that we use for brain surgery and spine surgery, computer navigation systems. They're into all kind of different areas heart related devices, stuff for bladder spasms and just all kind of things that help people in their lives, and so it was interesting to see how they even recognize social media, how important it's going to become in the healthcare. And then we had a speaker I don't remember his name who touched upon AI, artificial intelligence and it was really interesting.
Speaker 1:There was about a 45 minute talk, very interesting to hear about how artificial intelligence is really going to change the landscape of healthcare, and it already is starting to. I mean, you can have a robot put screws in someone's back, which isn't quite AI, but it's getting there, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, I think the biggest thing. He's been doing that for over 10 years and I thought it was crazy that he probably got very little recognition over the last nine years. And then, once chat GPT came out from open AI, what's?
Speaker 1:that.
Speaker 2:Jet GPT, that's like the main, that's finally where it blew up, where everyone's, and that, and like Dolly, what are you? You can type in prompts and it'll give you say say, write an essay on so and so. Or you can, you can type it in an entire paragraph and say summarize this copy text. I could, I could take an entire article you wrote and then say summarize this and bullet points. Or I can say what are 10 tips to get healthier? And it'll generate within like five seconds an entire list.
Speaker 1:So what's it called Chat GPT. So my friend Bill I think we're talking to him a couple weeks about this he's a business owner, he has his own business, but he said if I want to generate a letter, he said I'll tell this thing what I want, like put in different components, and then I just put in the components I want and he says it will generate a whole letter that sounds really good, just the way I would want it. He said you have to proofread it. But he said pretty much, pretty accurate, and it creates this whole generated letter that to the company that he's sending it to, that it just adds in all the things. That's Chat GPT. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:But you have to get. That's what when he was talking about. You have to become trained is you have to understand how to prompt engineer. You can't just input like the better the inputs, the better the outputs and the better you get at it like of making it tailored towards your thing. So now we're starting to be getting stages, but that's like the first time I think we want mainstream to the public as a technology AI. So he's been doing that for over 10 years Now. This year I think it's getting way bigger.
Speaker 2:But what he's saying is you, they need the. They're not getting the best. Like once the AI can be trained on the most recent medical data and more and more of that data. It's going to get better and better. And I think something very powerful he said was and I'll have to get his name, I have I have a picture of the slides and stuff because I missed the beginning but what was powerful about it is, he said, it's not supposed to replace physicians, it's supposed to be an ally. So some, it's a good combination with doctors, because doctors are really, you know, can reason, can go through complex situations and just humans in general versus AI can sift through really large amounts of data and just be a backup. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So he was talking about, like, some doctors have scribes, you know. So when you're in talking to a patient, you know you want to spend a lot of time afterwards. You know, go see the next patient, it helps move your day along. So you'll have a scribe generate a letter for you, which is a person, obviously. So he's talking about how AI now the doctor can just, you know, have artificial intelligence in there. It's listening, it creates the letter for you. So when it's done, it creates the whole office visit for you and you don't have to spend the time afterwards and then you can move on to the next patient. So I mean, all that's coming down the pike pretty quick.
Speaker 2:I mean it ties in because the whole summit was about just digital and like new digital technologies and trends and all that stuff, how it's going to integrate. So AI is very much to me like social media and other things is that there's so much potential to it, but there's also risk and also from the healthcare standpoint, they're always like super. They want to make sure because you can't with AI. If it, you don't know where this stuff stored and all that once we can. But again, it's about shaping how that stuff's going to. It's going to come into play. So it's better to try to be shaping it and working up front early on in the game and trying to make sure it's using the best possible way. But so it's exciting. I mean it's exciting stuff of how it can be used and spot things.
Speaker 1:And then we had the president of the American Association of Neurologic Surgeons came as a keynote speaker. There weren't that many neurosurgeons there really, but he came in and did a special keynote, dr Astru.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it was very good I mean very motivational for the future, about what the future holds for neurosurgery and medicine. So he was a good speaker, and then there were things like they had a panel on stroke and a lot of it was you know the cost, the healthcare costs of stroke, and things like that, but it was very good about identifying deficiencies. Like most people, a lot of people don't know the warning signs of stroke, and so part of this whole conversation was how do we get people to know the warning signs of stroke so they can recognize it earlier, call 911, get to the hospital early enough so they can get the treatments that will save their lives, so you don't have a permanent stroke, and so that's something that we're interested in. We're going to start working with the American Heart Association and Stroke Association about maybe doing social media to educate people who may not know what the warning signs of a stroke are, and that's very important because it saves lives. If you know when to call 911 and get early treatment, it's reversible. Strokes are reversible.
Speaker 2:Well, I think one style that was crazy on one of the slides was, for every minute lost, like 1.9 million neurons die or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was a statistic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like that's so crazy, so literally every minute counts. If you can go faster, you can recognize it. Well, they had a video of a person who actually.
Speaker 1:So now they have those mobile stroke units that have a CT scanner on them, and they can give the TPA which is the material that dissolves the clot.
Speaker 1:So this guy was having an active stroke. He couldn't move his arm, couldn't talk. He was definitely having a stroke. And so in the mobile unit they had the neurologist, or interventional neurologist, on the line telling them what to do. And so they gave this TPA to this guy right in the mobile stroke unit, and so they could start seeing his weakness and his speech resolve right there. And so the guy, when he got the hospital, was much better. He just spent the night in the hospital and went on discharge the next day, normal.
Speaker 1:Now say, this guy didn't get the TPA and hours went by because he didn't know the signs of a stroke gets to the hospital, it's too late to give the TPA because there's a window of time you can give it. And then what happens is he has a full blown stroke and then permanent deficits. He can't walk or talk anymore and maybe even had you know, need surgery on his brain and he's in a rehab and a nursing home. And so it shows you how your life can be changed so drastically by knowledge, you know, just knowing that you're having signs of a stroke, getting early treatment, and that's the whole point of. And so isn't the thing fast, isn't that the recognition? Yeah, fast.
Speaker 1:So it's face. I think fast is face asymmetry, like if you see drooping of your face. That's the F part, fast. And then a would be an arm and it can be a leg to weakness in your arm, numbness in your arm or leg. That's the A, s is speech. So speech would be if you have slurring of your speech or you can't talk, and then the T is timely. You know, call 911 as quickly as you can. When you recognize those symptoms, call 911. So that's what fast is F, a, s, t, it's face asymmetry. It's A is arm or could be a leg, but it's your arm, weakness or numbness, s would be your speech. If your speech is slurred or off. Those are the warning signs, and there's other ones obviously. Can I have?
Speaker 2:many other signs. It's just I'm trying to create. I think when they like the idea of that is it's something that's memorable, it's mnemonic device, fast, so stuff like that. And please look into stuff more. Everyone, the more. The more knowledge you have, the more power you have in situations, because once you know that for yourself, but also the rest of your life, anyone else you might see, yeah, you have the power to help make an impact. I mean, you can be the doctor and save a life.
Speaker 1:I mean you, you, you seeing someone in a, in a store or in a restaurant, you know having this stuff. I mean you could initiate it right away. You know, you recognize a stroke, call 911. You may say that person's life. You don't have to be a doctor to say somebody's life.
Speaker 2:Well, I think one thing that's crazy. I mean I see in movies and TV shows and stuff, but I've heard stories in your life from people but no one ever thinks they're the one having a heart attack or a stroke, especially if it's not when you're not too old because you're like, oh, I'm healthy, or you don't want to believe it. Yeah, you don't want to believe it. I mean, we're, we're, we're going to come to our home health care. We think we're more invincible. You might be eating healthy and doing stuff, but you can be younger. You can still have a heart attack, you can still have a stroke.
Speaker 2:You can have these things happen to these, that's. I mean, they're not super likely, but all these things happen to someone. Even if something happens to 1% of the population is happening to a decent amount of people. There's so many people that live here, so knowledge is definitely power in that realm. But yeah, so look out for that more stuff. We're continuing to try to partner with people and trying to create engagements. We know people watch social media, so we don't want to read a packet on that. They would rather watch a video or a social media post. So it's trying to create engaging content that people will watch and then remember.
Speaker 1:Or we want to, like the heart association, wants to have one person, every household, know how to do CPR. I mean, that's their goal right now. That's the push that they're trying to do. So, you know, we would like to create a video where we show you how to do CPR and get that out on social media so people can see exactly how is CPR. And do you have to be afraid of breaking a rib? No, if you break someone's rib, you may save their life, but you have to give enough force. So, just a lot of misconceptions about CPR, and so we'd like to get a video to show you exactly how to do CPR, what to be worried about, what not to be worried about. But it saves lives. Cpr saves lives and you can.
Speaker 2:I was at a gathering for the American Heart.
Speaker 1:Association they had a gentleman who came in who actually had his family did home CPR in him. That's the only reason he's alive. And so he talks about the importance of people knowing how to do CPR and not be scared to do it. Just do it. You know, and you can't be worried if it's a woman that you're going to touch their breast or be getting trouble for sexual harassment. I mean, so many women don't get CPR because people are afraid that they'll get coined as somebody doing something weird or you're around someone's breast. I mean, if you're going to save somebody's life, that's what you have to do. So it's a lot of things like that.
Speaker 1:You have to know that are okay. I think the American Heart Association having a hard time with that.
Speaker 2:Well, just like a lot of misconceptions of, just like the breaking the rib, one like it's better to do too much force than too little, right? Because you can survive a broken rib, you can't survive a heart attack. Yeah, you can't survive the heart attack. So so, and I mean a heart attack too, it's recognizing if you feel confident that you know it's a heart attack. I feel like people you know, with the knowledge there, they'd feel much more comfortable fully doing it, because sometimes maybe people aren't doing enough force or doing it on females because they don't, they're not super confident that that's what it is. They don't like to be something else.
Speaker 1:And first you have to know if you need to do CPR. I mean, but if somebody is unresponsive, I mean if somebody is unresponsive and not breathing, you check their pulse. If you don't feel a pulse, I mean you definitely should start CPR, you know so.
Speaker 2:So there's just a lot of things and I think that's where, especially with your platform, there's a lot of possibility because there's tons of people are big on social media. But the issue is, with some of those organizations it's not coming from like a doctor or other person. It's not. It's not as powerful. The fact that you're a neurosurgeon and you have a social media presence, I think, gives much more opportunity on some of those things where the organizations want to do stuff. So I mean that's all a work in progress of, and I mean this is all still super new to us. I mean trying to figure out how to partner with people and do collaborations and stuff. So, but it's all. It's all exciting. It's really cool to hear about all the innovative new things and meet people that are doing really cool, cool things.
Speaker 1:So this was kind of an impromptu, this one, this, this was more so just kind of tell about our experience at the meeting, Because I don't get invited to that much stuff like this. So this was really, you know, I was very grateful I was invited and it was a chance to to hear what people have to say about social media and physicians and, and you know, meet somebody like Dr Langer, who's kind of like a star on TV and he's a very nice guy, not arrogant, and I think he's got a lot to say about social media, and then just to hear from administrators how they, how they view social media. And you know, I think healthcare has so many problems right now and there's financial burdens on healthcare systems. It's like the mobile stroke units they were talking about. Mobile stroke units are expensive. They save lives but they're expensive. They're talking about how the number of mobile stroke units in the country have gone down drastically and that's because of financial reasons. I mean, it costs a lot of money to have one of these services, to keep it updated.
Speaker 2:They're not getting reimbursed. They have trouble getting reimbursed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're not getting reimbursed for the services, even though they may say somebody's life, that one guy's life got saved and he left the hospital the next day. Think of all the money that may have saved if that guy didn't get that treatment and went to the hospital, had all the services he needed, ends up in rehab, nursing home. I mean that would cost millions of dollars potentially, and so that's money saved.
Speaker 2:That's the whole idea of preventative medicine versus I don't know what's the opposite of preventative medicine Just treating. I mean Just the current state of it's like eating healthy or exercising preventative medicine. Over the long term, in decades, it might save money, but it's way harder to see costs that are saved versus. You know what I'm saying. I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 1:We wait till somebody has the problem and then we treat it right. And that's the problem. I mean, the future has to change.
Speaker 2:It has to be towards preventative medicine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it has to be that you learn to eat healthy and exercise and you learn to see your doctor and you have to know. A preventative medicine is knowing the warning signs of a heart attack and a stroke, because that's all stuff that can prevent you from having something. So what medicine is now is we wait till somebody has a problem and then right, and then I end up operating on them, or they need to see their family physician, or they need to see their cardiologist. So I mean, that's definitely something in the future that has to change and I think it will slowly, but there's a lot of financial constraints to it right now.
Speaker 2:Well, right now medicine is reactive versus being proactive, and that's what needs to shift and it's good. That's why the conversations are happening. People recognize that it's. Then it takes a lot of time, especially in large organizations, and something is with so much risk and compliance as healthcare in the United States of it's not gonna happen overnight. It has to slowly keep pushing and showing these things and doing big studies. I know the mobile stroke. They did a big study on how it saves money For the long term.
Speaker 1:So I think we're very anxious to see what the future holds with social media. What Kevin and I have done is just kind of gradually unfolded and organic way. I mean, we never meant for all this to happen, but it seems like we're gaining more traction and so we really have to think about what we wanna do with social media in the future, and that's what we're always talking about. Where do we wanna take this Cause? We really haven't tried to steer it one way or the other, but now we're getting to a point where people are noticing, I guess, what we're doing, and so we have to think about what we really wanna do with our social media.
Speaker 2:Well, I think one way I mean we have steered it in the way that we haven't done with the only partnerships we've been interested in and told people I think people are taking notice is we only wanna do like meaningful stuff, like American Heart Association, oregon donation speaking on that, trying to get social media more ingrained in healthcare, stuff like that. We know all these little constant collaboration ideas we get about supplements and all that stuff and promoting clothes or products. I mean that's not of any interest. There's tons of other people that can do that. Like, what's powerful about your platform is what we can do. Let other people do that stuff. We can do other things. And so I think the conference is really cool and it's cool to keep doing that stuff. And yeah, we're constantly thinking more about how we can shape this and how we can do the most good with the platform we've been given.
Speaker 2:And I think one thing that's cool is why I wanted to start this is when we're at like a conference like that and we meet some more people. Hopefully we can get some of them on the podcast when I'm like communicating with people and following up where that's our but our goal is get going with the podcast, kind of learn ins and outs and trying to make one ourselves, and that's been the ultimate goal is people that might not be on other podcasts that are way bigger, just some of these other healthcare administrators, because that's it's all about. Just like that conference on a much larger scale, on a smaller scale, podcasts like this, where we can get a healthcare administrator and, like my dad, who's an actual physician, or other physicians, they can have those conversations and pushes the narrative for it and it's facilitating those conversations and making them happen. That's how change eventually happens, and it's not just us doing that, but then tons of other people doing it too. That all comes together and then eventually we can have positive change. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So, just usually, one thing leads to another, I think, and it's unfolding in front of us and we just have to see where it leads us.
Speaker 2:But I mean, I think that's from the beginning too. We kind of at some times when we didn't feel there's times where you feel more inspired and we have good ideas and then we put those out and it's cool seeing the feedback. And other times we don't have a ton of good ideas, we're just not, nothing's coming to mind and sometimes we're like, okay, we'll make something, but we don't really think it's that educational or it's that valuable and we don't want to waste people's time. So we're just constantly working on that and hopefully we can keep. Hopefully we're doing good and you guys enjoy and we keep doing good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we do read the comments on the podcast, so if you have comments or ideas, let us know.
Speaker 2:And one thing, too, that really helps if you do enjoy this podcast, like when we see people in real life one thing that really helps is, if you enjoy this podcast, share it with someone you think might enjoy it. Whether it's not the entire podcast, but if there are specific episodes that you think someone might find valuable, definitely share those with people. Give us a like or a rating on the podcast apps. That helps a lot with discoverability If you think it's valuable. But thank you. We appreciate everyone who watches and listens to the podcast and we're anxious to talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:Yep, but everyone have a good day. Bye, bye. Song plays.
