OHLI's Unplugged: How It Started, How It's Going
August 15, 2024
Past Event
Questions are encouraged in this 30-minute AMA session with Osmosis Health Leadership Initiative (OHLI) hosts and regional leads Parsa Mohri and Yasir Taki in conversation with Shiv Gaglani, Osmosis from Elsevier's co-founder and current med student. Join them for a chat about how Osmosis and the OHLI program began, along with speaking to Shiv's return to medical school after nearly a decade as a CEO, his ideas for how we can all become better learners, and the group's experiences with the unique challenges of becoming a working clinician. Note: This recording is now available.

Transcript
Hello and good morning good afternoon good evening wherever you may be welcome to OHLI unplugged I'd like to welcome you all please feel free to use a chat and we'd like to just figure out where Everyone's Watching from let us know as we continue waiting and just to wait a few minutes till everyone trickles in all right so do grab your fluids keep hydrated and popcorn if you want this is going to be a could say a candid sort of a conversation with shiv and we are very excited for that so no PowerPoints do not worry about that and but yeah we're looking forward got my tea with me and we have some participants we have already people watching from Iraq and here I am drinking chai carak which is a drink from Iraq we love that there hello everyone hello zad Alexia adal kangu Louis Kayla and everyone else thank you all for coming all right we're just going to wait for a minute or two let everyone join in and just wanted to say hello again to whoever is joining please do write in the chat where you're from we're very curious and this is sort of you could call an international collaboration and I'm going to emphasize again don't worry there are no PowerPoints so without further Ado hello everyone and welcome to this very special episode of Al the unplugged my name is Parsa I am a final year medical student based in Istanbul I'm excited to be your co-host for today and joining me is my Ali Regional lead fellow Yasir and we're happy to have you all here and I'm sure we're going to have an incredible conversation ahead of us today we're going to be diving into some great topics with our special guest shiv he's a co-founder of osmosis and it's not every day we get the chance to sit down with someone who is not only transformed medical education that's also currently a men student himself and before we do start our conversation with Shiv I just want to take this moment to introduce osmosis and the Ally program I hope you don't I hope you know what osmosis is but as for the AL the program it stands for the osmosis Health leadership initiative and it's a personally I think it's a fantastic program that we help support and lead on behalf of Osmosis from Sor and at the same time as you may know as you probably using yourself osmosis is an Innovative learning platform designed for healthcare Learners whether they're students or professionals does offer enormous library of high quality medical content and I definitely hope you're not missing out on that during your studies from videos to clinical cases to really help the Learners understand the world of medicine you could say or Healthcare and as well to be able to better apply the medical knowledge you get during your career osmosis truly stands up for its approach to making complex medical comp sorry complex medical Concepts easy to grasp whether you're studying for exams rotations just trying to stay up to date in your field osmosis is super impactable super impactful it has a global reach it helps Learners worldwide connecting them to the community of fellow students Healthcare professionals and even patients themselves thank you yes sir now in case you don't know what the Alti program in specific is it is a year-long journey where Healthcare students nurses physiotherapists medical students across the globe get the chance to kind of serve as Leaders at their Camp campus and educational institute and as members in short we are able to host events share resources connect with students and as well mentors from around the world and as well help osmosis improve its educational offerings we're always open to feedback and wanting to hear how the quality of medical education could be best tailored I think it's time we can welcome our special guest shiv gaglani I'm sure we all know who shiv is but for listeners who aren't aware he is a lot to introduce he finished he finished his biomedical degree bachelor's at Harvard then started his MD at John Hopkins then he took a leave of absence after his basic science years and he co-founded the platform we all love osmosis he got an MBA from Harvard during this time and if that's not all after growing the company for a decade completing and completing a successful acquisition with Elsevier, he's now returned to medical school to continue his clinical experiences he's also a regular contributor to Forbes who also named him in 2018 the 30 top 30 under 30 list and Beyond academics and Entrepreneurship he's also very passionate about Fitness and triathlons so shiv thank you so much for joining us today yeah yes sir and Parsa thanks so much for having me and thanks also to Steph and Carolyn who helped create this webinar event so this episode is titled we want to know how it started and how's it going so Shi tell us I know you've heard this on all the podcasts you've do and everyone wants to ask you what inspired you to start osmosis yeah well high level I know since we only have 30 minutes I'll keep some of the original stuff a little short so some of you already know the story but high level my co-founder and I were Anatomy partners and we start with Anatomy during the first six weeks of med school at John Hopkins and by like week three or week four we realized that probably about 25% maybe up to 50% of the information we had learned the previous week had already left us and this was 2011 2012 time so tools like ANKI weren't that popular there wasn't like an amboss in the US like there were just not lot a lot of platforms out there and so we decided to start building our own thing that would make us learn more efficiently and also as you can see with the background have more fun in the process we thought why does learning have to suck in med school you we have these great PhD professors who discovered it is in for example one of our cases but they just aren't promoted based on education so let's make a platform that's more fun more engaging and that's ultimately what has evolved in osmosis yeah and it's an amazing tool to use and we're all very thankful for it as students it has cared me throughout my basic science years 100% I would watch a video before starting a lecture and then go into the lecture and finally understand whereas before I would go in there and I'd be just sitting there for an hour confused on what we just talked about where a 10 15 minute osmosis video explained pretty much it all in less than half the time so that's osmosis for you and I completely agree for me is the opposite way I go to class get frustrated go home and like I have to find something and then I found osmosis and distinctly remember that it was during Endocrinology so a lot of enzyme names and just love the gamifying and creating like a cartoon out of all the processes and so I would like to ask Shiv how did the OHLI program come about yeah so it's kind of in our DNA you know my co-founder and I were Med students when we started it we recruited a bunch of fellow Med students not only at but all over all over the world really to create questions to give us feedback and so even before we called it all year before that OMEF we had a bunch of students engage with us it was kind of by students for students and then I think it was like 2016 2017 we started the osmosis medical education fellow which was the aim was to take some of our most active Learners and create a space for them to give us constant feedback and also to help us spread within their schools because a lot of Osmosis one of the main reasons we called it osmosis is that we believe knowledge wasn't just diffusing from professor to student but also between students so there really core to the features that we had built before the videos which were things like upload a document we'll automatically extract the text and recommend content but also allow you to create your own questions based on the document and other classmates can view those questions and notes and share things kind of what we see with decks now things like that so we were pretty early to that and had these local chapters basically that then evolved into this OMEF program and it's been really gratifying certainly we would not have scaled it without people I mentioned Caroline who runs it Steph and before Caroline it was Hillary Acer who really scaled it to what it is now and obviously great people like Dr Amin Azzam who've been involved along the way so it's been really gratifying to the alumni coming out of this program and all the things they've accomplished yeah it's amazing and that concept of just osmosis diffusing between students themselves it has led to osmosis being a global phenomenon there's people from believe there's over 50 countries now that are in this program in the O program specifically so it's amazing and was that a vision that you had when you first started osmosis actually no I mean you know it's there's this quote I shared when I gave a presentation about why I went back to med school which was the Bill Gates quote that people tend to overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 and that's just because you know our minds aren't built for non-linear thinking like compounding it's you know there's that famous story of the guy who comes and asks a king for something and basically his humble request was that he asked the king I want to take this chessboard and on every single Square I want you to give me one grain of rice and then raise it to the power of two so the first square is one then the next square is two next square is four eight and the King's like yeah like I'll give you rice no problem but two to the 64th wound up being so much rice the equivalent of rice that it was basically the entire Kingdom so humans can't really think in terms of compounding and so we thought we were just going to take a gap year that would and then kind of wrap it up come back to med school make our parents proud and finish it wound up taking a lot longer we thought it was just going to be a medical student product for the US it's wound up becoming a product that patients in developing countries all over the world use and so that's the compounding happened because we were able to recruit so many awesome people including OES and OMEFs as well as our teammates to osmosis and now ill severe and you know I'm not even actively building anything at osmosis but we have entire teams building things that are pretty cool including some generative AI stuff so yeah short long answer to your short question I love it though brings in so many different Visions from all over the place and that is very interesting to hear about generative AI I'm sure we'll talk on that a bit later as well yeah especially with I think you took a lot of like it was a lot of risk to take in order to you know do something so new and I was you were definitely sharing some of the challenges along the way but I was wondering what other form of challenges have you faced during I guess you could say the early days of Osmosis I can imagine it's a probably stressful era I would have probably be stressed like am I making the right decision and I was wondering what kind of challenges during that time was faced yeah it's a really good question I mean some share challenges that every startup whether it's a project or any pro any you try doing you get a lot of push back and so certainly we faced a lot of skepticism from not just fellow classmates but also from professors why are you doing this why you worked my parents you worked so long to get into med school now you're going to leave med school so some of that was just interpersonal stuff but my parents have been extremely supportive even from the beginning like after I answered some questions basically I think I've shared this on other podcasts people tend to overestimate they tend to overthink themselves out of doing something and I think having a bias towards action is generally a good step or good quality in people especially people I've tried hiring but also just people who are successful I think they try and then they adjust along the way and number two is I think we tend to make these false dichotomies between trying to accomplish different goals where the example I always provide especially because so many of the people listening are Med students or in clinical training is that you may be deciding whether to start a company or whether to stay in school and oftentimes there's you know those aren't dichotomous obviously I've shown that to be the case the common thing we decided to do early on with osmosis was we said okay to get into residency you need to have more Publications research but also to sell osmosis to schools we need to have research and evidence behind it and so from the get-go we started publishing papers about osmosis some initially commentaries and qualitative type papers and then as we get more users more quantitative and that's how we know Dr Amin Azzam and Dr Sean Tackett they published a lot of papers with us and and now they've become lifelong friends and so I think that was a challenge that became an opportunity which was how do you have limited time how do you use that time to then accomplish goals in in two or three ways other things I mean hiring and firings common challenge to anyone how do you get people excited about your vision you just have to be okay getting rejected a ton you know we had tons of Deans and faculty who I went all over the country conferences and to schools and then you know made presentations and most of the time they went nowhere and then it's kind of fun now because you know I'm not even going out to schools but the schools are using osmosis I will say one of my favorite things now is with the OHLI program is when I do visit a school that has an OHLI you know like I did in last year I went to the UK for a couple weeks and I visited a bunch of schools like Cambridge and Imperial College London and there were OMEFs and O throughout it's so awesome getting to meet people like you guys in person and have events like that yeah that's incredible actually like it's funny because I never thought I'd be seeing another Aldi member as well in a different country or my country let alone but it has happened and I find it so beautiful how people of like-minded mindset are the same vision of improving you could say medical education at one part come together and form this Vision sorry Yer I cut you off no it's I just was amazed by this story as he was mentioning and yeah so that's a lot of progress that you've made with osmosis and so now we want to know how it's going so now you're back in med school and so this is another question you've been asked and I know you've already WR a Forbes article with your like six reasons for returning but in a quick what's your quick summary here to listeners who may have not read or seen you on previous articles or podcasts on why did you return to med school after nearly a decade like you said it was only expected to take like a year ended up being 10 so yeah no for anyone who wants like the full story I'll post the Forbes article or maybe Steph or Carolyn or someone can do that in the chat but high level like I really missed seeing patients and meeting people from very different walks of life and so just I just did the emergency medicine clerkship and in one month I've met more people who don't have health insurance who many cases are homeless addicted to fentanyl than I would have ever met like after a decade working on in Tech where everyone's you know college educated generally or further everyone's making good money you know generally it was very different and I think that helped give me a broader perspective on Humanity that was a big reason I joke that maybe 30 40% of the reason I did med school in the first place was making my parents proud as a kind of familial as a South Asian immigrant it's still there it's 5% probably like I mean and like telling my dad you know and so it's still there like I want to be honest number three it's much easier to go to med school now than ever before right not only a step one past fail which I'm currently studying for with osmosis and but also it's it's much easier to learn I mean much faster to learn I watch the osmosis videos as you 10 15 minutes I laugh I'm listening to podcast there's tons of podcasts about medical education now while I'm working out so much easier than a decade ago fourth is I know I'm going to create new things whether it's through Elsevier or outside and I have a whole list of ideas that I'm kind of keeping track of as I go through med school so those are the positives and those have mostly proven to be true over the last 10 months and six rotations there are negatives and I'll just preempt that question and share that I think it's very hard to be a student it's very hard to be in healthcare we were talking before this webinar started I think the three things that Dan pink shared in his book drive that help people find a sense of purpose or fulfillment in whatever professional career they choose are autonomy Mastery and purpose and certainly medicine is full of Mastery you know see one do one teach one you're always learning you're getting better at things and that's really exciting like I did ultrasound guided IV first time totally botched it second time kind of got it got it and third time was able to get a good blood draw not in the same person fortunately that person so Mastery is there purpose is clearly there helping someone though you have a limited number of things you can do for a person especially in some careers like emergency medicine super unfortunate like you can only do this much and the patient needs like that much right but then the thing that I think we lack in medicine as students or providers is autonomy right is especially like you know I think that that's been the most jarring thing for me going from like being master of my own time and Destiny generally I set my schedule I can work out in the middle of the day to then you know needing to be there on someone else's time from a certain hour to another hour that's been probably the hardest thing for me so anyways those are some thoughts initially on how things are going yeah that's that was a lot in there so let's see in one question that we have in the chat that I also was thinking is how do you balance your day-to-day now so what is your day-to-day life like now and how do you balance being an entrepreneur and a medical student especially since you don't have autonomy over your time anymore especially with that yeah well I'm glad we left after the second year of med school not the third year the clinical rotations don't know I think OS would have died if I had rotations and tried doing this CU certainly like I feel more burned out after an 8 Hour Emergency medic shift and whereas the pre-clinical you know watching a video recorded or not going to the lecture or whatever it may be there's plenty of time to like do other things so phasing is important right now like I'm not you know I work for Elsevier still but I'm not it's mostly as a as a learner giving them feedback and doing things like this not like an entrepreneur right now so I'm not actively in the trenches building something from zero but the balance is yeah I'm back in med school I'm mostly focused on finishing med school so there's these periods of time where you go from like being expansive and trying a lot of things exploring things to then it's called exploiting which sounds bad but it's an if you just Google Explore versus exploit there's a lot of examples of this and I think a lot of careers evolve based on this period like creativity expansion exploring a bunch of things and then when you know something's working exploit it like Get Go focused on that and so for me 2011 to 2013 I started a bunch of things including osmosis most of them sort of kind of withered one thing really worked well and I focused on it that's why we took the Gap decade and that that worked out really well so I recommend kind of that that is a decision-making for balance yeah and I did see that on your previous podcast you started several like initiatives osmosis thankfully worked out and look where we are today and how successful it's been so that's awesome for you you did mention earlier on that studying and medicine has very much evolved during these 10 years and now there's also new tools on the horizon and with that Parsa you can ask yeah so definitely there's been some you're interested in the topic of AI and we were wondering in the upcoming future I mean the When J GPT came out it took the whole population of the World by storm whoever was aware of it and immediately started asking health related questions but I was wondering how do you see AI transforming medical education in the upcoming years or and as well if you think goes Moses will will play a role in the evolution of Ai and medical education yeah we definitely even before chat GPT was released we saw the future with do and these other kind of large language and large Vision models that were coming and so we have a channel dedicated to a lot of that stuff and have brainstormed quite a few things Elsevier has this product called clinical key which some Med students have access to check it out El clinical key it's like chat GPT with references based on else journals and books you know I use it how do I see impacting medical education I use it all the time like pretty much daily to maybe explain something a different way or to summarize a long chapter or transcript of Osmosis if I want a shorter summary I see it as being a really useful tool for patient education right so I had a patient who needed some discharge instructions about minimal change disease there was parents of a four-year-old came in with minimal change disease which is a nephrotic syndrome as you guys know and we had to talk about changing his diet he's from Burma parents didn't really speak that much English and so we took basic discharge instructions that were validated and has had ChatGPT translate them into Burmese and it worked pretty well so I a lot of like frankly last couple years I've been more excited about osmosis for patient education as a big driver and so those are just a couple examples I think everyone will have it'll democratize access to education and I think education is where I think we should be focusing because I don't think there are ever going to be enough cardiothoracic surgeons to do bypass surgeries ever around the world U but if we can get more people to change their behaviors earlier on and I'll also add some policy changes and you know tax big food and big tobacco and stuff there's a whole bunch of policy changes if we can change the behavior through education then we won't need as many cardio Thoracic Surgeons you know we just won't have enough so diabetes think about any condition it'll be similar absolutely and I just like to give a quick advice about the using chat GPT and education please don't do it in front of your professors don't get upset I got I learned it the hard way I yeah I was asking it to explain something a different way and then the professor just looked at me during clinics like are you really going to ask the AI instead of me but yeah that was just a side B but yeah and quick question in the chat people were asking what is this AI tool for medical use its clinical Key by Elsevier I was able to demo it when it was first allowed to demo back earlier on and it was very amazing I think I got into it as I was doing my emergency medicine rotation and I just wanted to kind of play with it I wanted to like describe what a patient was coming in with and then go through differentials and I did really like all the references it listed and it really improved my like decision-making algorithm that I have within me so that is something I did want to comment on to help answer one of those questions in the chat u a question I have now also is you were mentioning about things like Ai and use for the use of that in medical education and improving patient health care and basically raising the line as osmosis is trying I was wondering what your opinion was with regards to things like online medical education I know you wrote an article also in like 2018 before Co and all the online education really came about so how has your opinion on that evolved yeah I feel I feel very strongly that like a lot of that's panning out right like because of companies like SpaceX has Starlink like here's a very specific example 2016 I went to Namibia which is where I was born and osmosis was being used at Unity of Namibia I gave it to all the students and faculty but like the internet even at the campus and maybe like a mile out of the campus was just too slow to like stream osmosis videos that well YouTube even and then La two years ago I went to Rwanda to visit our partners at the University of Global Health Equity in bharo and I took this dirt road it was even more rural than where I was in Namibia and with my 5G access I was able to stream all the Osmos videos I wanted so like because people are getting more connected to the you know the world these new technologies are coming out I'm even more bullish on online education and I also welcome like you guys to tell me what I'm missing like that's partly why I went back to school is to be a beginner again and to like see what people are using and learn and keeping track of ideas there's some OMS and OES I'm very grateful to know and be really good friends with shout out to zad is on this call he's from Egypt and he sent me a bunch of stuff over the last year that I'm I've been looking into we've been collaborating on a project with regards to AI generative AI tools and then people like Lewis who some of you guys may know Lewis is wonderful he helped basically led the year the zebra newsletter all of last year and worked with me on some AI stuff too so if you guys have ideas and thoughts like please do share along the way you have my LinkedIn you have my email you guys can reach out yeah well that I hope that also answers a question that we had in the chat about tips for aspiring entrepreneurs anything so just reaching out and asking and getting mentors do you have anything else to help give tips for aspiring entrepreneurship the only advice that I'm confident to give to everyone is to take care of your physical emotional Financial Health like that's number one take care of your health and ideally if you have bandwidth take care of the people around you and number two is read like read a lot learn a lot because every other piece of advice like leave school to start a company don't leave school to start a company raise money don't raise money work all the time don't work all the time all that stuff you can find people who are successful saying both of those things on both side of the so it's It ultimately is very contextual to you but the two things I think are actually sorry the three things reading Fitness and relationships which is partly emotional health like make friends and that's why again kind of wrapping up because I know where at time the OHLI program so great is hopefully some of you will leave this not only like having contributed to the product and having gotten some access and things like that but ideally with at least one or two good friends and contacts who when you're visiting turkey you can go visit Parsa or the UK or wherever Parsa is going to be or same with Yasir that's lovely and thank you so much for your time so far and I'm sure everyone has a lot of questions that they can want to ask but I'll just like to end it on a question that's asked in the razor line podcast and I personally very much appreciate it it's what is one piece of advice you would like to share with future healthcare workers or current Healthcare students I think the I'll go back to that essential piece which is you know your own health I've seen I've now I've met so many people I met like for example I like being very Concrete where possible not just being General my first rotation was Psychiatry and most of the Psychiatry residents I was working with were burned out like they were already sort of like burned out one had never heard of headspace or calm or waking up three really helpful meditation apps you know we're very quick to go to drugs to cure problems when really what we need is relationships sleep food kind of the basic stuff that Hippocrates used to talk about all the time and so I think that's the number one thing just take care of your health because I've even when I first started med school a decade ago I wrote about this I gained like 15 pounds I was pretty depressed my first year of med school despite having started osmosis was a bright spot I channeled a lot of my energy into that and that help helped me pull out pull me out of that coming back to med school despite having all this like you know outward success or whatever it may be and confidence it's been hard like lack of sleep lack you know eating poorly not having my time to go to the gym for an hour or two in the middle of the day like I used to it's been really hard so take care of your health that's number one well thank you very much I really enjoyed this conversation with you I think everyone really took a piece of advice or their own sort of note to keep in mind during their Journey in their medical or their healthcare career so thank you very much and I'm going to pass it to yes here to kind of end the I guess this first lovely episode of OHLI?s unplugged thank you Parsa and thank you once again Shiv Hillary Steph Caroline and all the other members at osmosis who made this possible I wish we had more time there's a ton of more questions I wanted to ask personally we'll have to say that for perhaps another time or I can just follow off and you can always reach out to the people in the chat who have follow-up questions you can reach out to us we can pass them on to shiv and thank you again for all for watching joining tuning in and if you're watching recorded version thank you for watching we hope that you enjoyed this and thank you again for coming thank you all take care helping current and future clinicians Focus learn retain and Thrive learn more ?Music?
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