Dr. Mia Finkelston: Medical Director of Amwell (Raise the Line)

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Hi, I'm Sh Ghani. Thanks for checking out the raise line interview series.
In which me and my cohost doctor Rishi Desai and registered nurse, Janna Amil, explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.
I hope you will watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Shu.
And today on Razin, I'm happy to be joined by Doctor Mia Finkelson. Doctor Finkelson is a family practice physician and medical director at Amwell, which is a physician owned and operated company delivering care to patients on a secure telehealth platform.
I'm looking forward to asking Doctor Finkelson about the surge in telehealth utilization and what impact it's having on the US healthcare system as well as what the future holds for this technology.
So can you start by telling us a bit more about yourself and how you got into, into medicine and then family practice? I'm the youngest of six girls and my mother was actually a physician.
I don't want to say it was all because of her. I never felt pushed into medicine, but certainly growing up, um, we lived about a mile and a half away from the hospital where she worked.
I spent summer vacations working there, uh, sick days, working at the hospital, dropping her off after church, things like that.
So it was a really big part of my life and also got to meet a lot of her friends who happened to be physicians as well. So um I think once I was in college and had to decide what I wanted to do, I realized, you know what II can't uh you know, fight anymore.
I love science. And so medicine um had my interest, I do really enjoy family medicine cause I get to see all ages, II love Children and elderly alike and I feel I can communicate well with people.
So family medicine seemed like a an easy selection for me. What advice would you give to someone considering a, a career in health care and then be considering adopting or experimenting with telemedicine?
I think there is no substitute for experience. So with telemedicine in particular, I think one reason that I excel at this is I like to talk to people.
But more importantly, I, you know, I had been practicing for 20 years doesn't need to be that long. No, you know, there may be obstacles, there may be some failures, but that's how we learn and we grow from those obstacles and those failures and, and successes of course too.
But my point is that if you have this in your blood, you know, you go into medicine and you go through your training and get as much experience as you can.
Maybe you decide you don't wanna do clinical work and that's fine too. But your medical degree will be so useful, you know, in, in many ways.
But so you're going to clinical medicine. I think you will start to get trained if you're not already in your residency in using telemedicine services, uh reaching out to your patients through telemedicine, doing longitudinal care.
But um I did wanna say that with the future of medicine, just keep working through it, you know, uh we grow with those challenges and um I think that you'll find a way to use telemedicine somehow some way.
Um you know, telesto tle radiological, there's so many different places that it fits in. But certainly, you know, primary care medicine, uh urgent care medicine.
This is a great way to um augment the care that you get in the office. Thanks for watching this preview of Raised Line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series.
Please go to osmosis.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.