Building a Commerical Eduction Resource with Dr. Brian Hanrahan

Now you know ... how to launch a successful neurology education commercial resource! Hear the behind the scenes story with Dr. Brian Hanrahan, cofounder and mastermind behind one of the most popular multi-modal commercially available resources for neurology board preparation: NowYouKnow Neuro. We discuss how the product was born, best practices in marketing, and how Brian and his team are swiftly adapting AI to improve their product and workflows. Where education and business meets! 

Brian Hanrahan, MD is tripled boarded in Neurology, Clinical Neurophysiology, and Epilepsy. He is a practicing neurologist at St. Luke's University Health Network where he also serves as the Neurology Residency Associate Program Director and the Clinical Neurophysiology Fellowship Program Director. He is the co-founder, with Steven Gangloff, MD of the board preparatory resource NowYouKnow Neuro (NYKY) and NowYouKnow Psych. 

Website: https://www.nowyouknowneuro.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nowyouknowneuro/

Neuropraxis: The Neurology Educator's Podcast is not recorded as an official podcast of any institution or organization. The views and opinions are those of the individual speakers themselves. Music from Pixabay. Cover art by Carolin Wollny. Editing by Valeria Roldan. New episodes drop first Monday of the month!

Ideas, suggestions, questions? Contact us at neuropraxispodcast@gmail.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hello and welcome to Neuropraxis, a podcast for clinician educators and trainees passionate about neurology education. I'm your host, Gelena Gekeman. I'm a neurologist and medical educator. On the Neuropraxis Podcast, we turn our attention to neurology education. We discuss the latest topics in education literature, meet the innovators shaping the future of neurology education, and hear about the career journeys of other educators in neurology. Whether you're building a career in medical education or looking for inspiration in your teaching, you're part of our community. So let's reflect and grow together as we blend the art and science of neurology education and put theory into praxis. Today I am joined by Brian Hanrahan, who is best known as the co-founder for the Board Education Prep course. Now you know Neuro and Now You Know Psych. I asked Brian about how he first got involved in medical education, how he creates gamified learning opportunities for his residents, and what motivated him to develop a board educational prep course as a commercial educational resource. Listen in and hear tips from Brian on navigating the commercial educational resource space and building your brand. Brian Hanrahan is triple certified in neurology, clinical neurophysiology, and epilepsy. He currently practices at St. Luke's University Health Network, where he is the Clinical Neurophysiology Fellowship Program Director and Neurology Residency Associate Program Director. He's also known as the co-founder for the Board's Education Prep course, Now You Know Neuro and Now You Know Psych. Welcome, Brian.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Thank you very much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

I'm really excited to talk with you today. I think you've had in some ways some elements of a traditional career and some elements of a pretty non-traditional career, and I hope that we can get to both of them. So for our audience, I'd love if we could just start with maybe you giving us like a short arc of your career journey so far, just so we get a sense of like the various things that you've been involved in, and then we'll delve into each of them. But how'd you get from training to where you are today?

SPEAKER_00 2:52

Oh great. Yeah, let's start at the beginning. Um, so I guess I'll say that um beginning with medical school, um, I didn't really know I wanted to be a neurologist until I did my neurology clerkship, which was ironically my first MS3 rotation. Um, I was president of the surgery club before that. I tore both my ACLs prior to medical school, so I thought orthopedics and sports medicine was my interest, and then was really uh pulled into the value of neurodiagnostics, localizing lesions, and and the like to pursue a uh career in neurology. Uh, did a uh residency at the University of Pittsburgh uh for four years, and then at that point in my training, I knew that I was very interested in medical education and was trying to figure out ways to start bolstering a CD that would reflect that and help me get opportunities as I made the transition from being a trainee to training others. So I was able to become the uh education chief of my senior year at UPMC, uh, worked on a couple of you know significant projects internally to develop uh curricula for our learning. Um, and then being that I wanted to pursue a career in residency specifically education, you know, become an APD, you know, PD one day. Um, I felt that a clinical neurophysiology fellowship would be the um the most broad, you know, additional training that would allow me to be very competent on teaching services in the resident clinic, etc. Um, as I went through my clinical neurophysiology one-year fellowship, I realized in retrospect that while I wanted to practice general neurology with trainees when it came to the large portion of your time, which is when you practice solo, I really liked epilepsy and ended up uh pursuing a second year uh fellowship training uh at uh University of Rochester. So you know, it wasn't my plan in the initial you know process to bounce from two different institutions beyond my own residency, but um lo and behold, it was a really great opportunity for me because everywhere I felt like I trained, had great uh clinical educators, and I was able to kind of learn what works at all these other different places to kind of see what uh what you would need to become a successful uh leader in medical education. So when I was looking for my first job uh outside of my last fellowship, I was trying to decide where I wanted to be and look for opportunities where I could see like a five-year plan where I can hold a position, whether it was a core faculty member or something else more uh senior uh within a uh residency program. And the program that I'm at right now, University of St. Luke's, what just started a new residency program and didn't have an assistant program director position filled. Um, you know, being a and uh through the application process, you know, through going through all of my experiences, they felt that I had the you know the credibility and the background to justify being in that type of position. So I've been in that position now for five years, um, have really enjoyed it. And uh, once our program got accredited, I was able to apply that same week for a clinical neurophysiology fellowship. So now I'm the fellowship director in clinical neurophysiology and APD for neurology residency.

SPEAKER_01 6:09

It's so wonderful to hear your story and how, in many ways, there were really quite a few opportunities to like start something new. Is that something that you've always enjoyed? Like kind of being uh someone that starts something, that builds something?

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Yeah, I mean, I I think one of the main reasons why I found this program uh in the institution I'm currently at so appealing was that there wasn't any kind of system in place for a lot of the things that you need to have to operate a residency program. There was no night float system yet, no weekend calls, no jeopardies, um, you know, how we staff certain service lines wasn't clear yet, how we communicated with other service lines, what were the criteria for admission to the neurology service? Um, what's the you know, do we have caps on the service? These are all questions that we had to ask in those first couple of years of the program. Um and the idea of being able to, again, as I mentioned previously, you know, bring the best of all these other different places I trained and apply that to a new program, you know, was one very rewarding, but two, a very effective way to build what I would consider an established program in a relatively short amount of time.

SPEAKER_01 7:13

Yeah, you make a good point about not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but being methodical about how you implement it. And at the same time, I'm struck by the fact that, you know, there's almost takes a different kind of leader, someone who can maintain something that is that is already established, versus those who actually have the opportunity to build something and suddenly you realize that you know education is a living thing. It reminds me of my experience and kind of what got me interested in education was the curriculum was switching at my medical school. And I just looked around for the first time and realized the curriculum was not a static thing. And it made you interested and curious about how those changes are made.

SPEAKER_00 7:50

Yeah, and I think uh to to to double down on what you're saying, it's not only that the um the opportunities for what you're learning or how you're teaching changes, but also the culture of your program changes pretty significantly every year, right? So neurology, you know, you consider that like PGY two to PGY four, so three years of training, you know, every year a third of your your your team changes. So while you know, previously, you know, two years ago, maybe this group really likes the idea of doing black and gold weekends. Um, and then you know, two years later now everyone wants to do six and one, where you get one weekend day off a year. And realistically, there's so many different ways, you know, the ACGM allows us to teach our trainees. There's not necessarily a lot of wrong ways to do it. So realistically, I do enjoy reflecting every year or so with a new cohort of trainees about what they are looking for out of their experience.

SPEAKER_01 8:42

That makes a lot of sense. I wanted to go back to the point that you made about knowing that you were interested in education. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Like when did educate being you know, an educator, having a chance to be involved with education become that central part of what you wanted to do? And what led to you realizing that?

SPEAKER_00 9:02

Yeah, I I will say that I grew up in a family of educators. While I'm the first um medical doctor in my family, uh my mom was an elementary school teacher, and her two parents were also teachers as well. So that kind of teaching mindset was something that I was familiar with growing up very young. And throughout, you know, going through all the STEM courses in uh undergrad, I always seemed to be able to learn the best by teaching others, right? The best way to learn is to teach. Uh, I kind of appreciated that mantra and it seemed to be very effective uh for me. And then as I went through medical school, I kind of realized that there was a career opportunity to pursue educational opportunities while also still practicing, you know, medicine. So uh it kind of seemed like the best of both worlds.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

You shared that you have the a lot of clinical work that you're doing, and you initially envisioned yourself being a particular type of educator on the clinical wards, and then that's shifted a little bit with the sub-specialty work that you do day to day. I'm curious, how do you balance that teaching work and the day-to-day clinical work? And what does what types of teaching are you involved in day-to-day?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

Yeah, I mean, it there definitely is a balance between the two, right? I mean, uh anyone who's holding a formal core faculty position, a program director or an assistant program director, has some time uh allocated and their salary allocated towards educational responsibilities. And that can be largely administrative, you know, meeting with leadership, recruitment, uh, etc. But there is a good chunk of that time that's actually allocated to face-to-face learning. Um, you know, for us, we do our didactics on Wednesday afternoons at our institution. So very often, um, one of those few hours of time, uh, I'll be present in giving a lecture on various different topics. Right now, uh, for many uh US residencies across the program across this the country, they're preparing for uh the neurology in service training exam, kind of helping them prepare for that, you know, looking at kind of uh subjects that our institution didn't perform as well as compared to others, and trying to figure out ways we can uh focus on those in the time leading up to the future exam. So, one thing that uh that we've been really doing a lot at our institution over the last few years is trying to pivot away from what a lot of programs were limited to regarding their educational styles during COVID. Um, you know, during 2020, 20, uh, you know, 20, yeah, 2020, 2021, you know, a lot of things were being done virtually. Um you were kind of forced to provide this like PowerPoint presentation, which when you kind of have your education chunked like that, it's really kind of hard to retain and stay engaging. Um, so we really have been able to do a lot of successful things over the last few years to diversify the learning experiences, making sure there's some more uh dynamic experiences, ones that gamify the process. Um, you know, many physicians in medicine are type A uh characters and do have this inherent competitive uh mindset. So I find uh some people who may be uh you know having their eyes fall asleep during a more traditional lecture are some of the most engaged people when you come to uh gamify something.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

And is it mostly the GOB teaching that you do, or do you work with students and fellows as well?

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Uh for for the uh fellowship as as the AP uh the fellowship director, yeah, we do have dedicated didactic time for for them. And then for the medical students, um, I don't provide too much time for their education, but I really enjoy the mentorship for them. Um, because these are the hungriest people uh that I encounter in in medicine. They are really doing everything they can to make themselves, you know, the most competitive applicants for this next phase in their career. Um and the way I kind of like think about it is, you know, when they come to me in their MS3 year, like around this time, right? You know, they have really only another 10 months, eight months to maximize their application before they get it submitted for the next year's match. And I kind of think about our all right, well, what can we accomplish over these next eight years uh or eight next eight months? And it's quite impressive the work ethic that that um the people I have interacted with over the years to come up with some really um successful, you know, projects that they've worked on.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Yeah, I love how you're touching on all the various elements that you have to be skillful as an educator. There's the teaching itself, there's the mentorship, and then there's the big administrative lift of organizing the programs, making decisions around scheduling and things like that. Is there a particular part of those roles of an educator that you like most?

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Um, I am definitely a fan of curriculum development. That is definitely, I think, the thing I find most rewarding.

SPEAKER_01 13:57

And I think curriculum development is particularly important in neurology, where neurology is perceived as a very difficult and challenging specialty to learn. And I actually wasn't interested that you weren't necessarily thinking of neurology as a student, but then kind of switched over. So you definitely had a big learning curve to try to master the neurological knowledge as a student and then as a resident. Is there reasons why you think neurology is particularly difficult for trainees to learn about?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

Um, I think it's definitely intimidating. You know, uh Ralph Josefowitz, who was a famous uh program director at the University of Rochester for for decades, uh, coined the term neurophobia, right? I think everyone uh who's interested in neurology uh has probably heard that before, but he is the one that published that term for the first time ever, a long time ago. I think conceptually it's kind of um tough to put together, right? You know, you have this eight-pound ball of jelly uh in your brain that, you know, realistically your Wernicke's area and Broch's area on gross pathology looks exactly the same, but they have very marked different functions. Um, so you have to really be pretty imaginative when you are thinking about localizing lesions when it comes particularly to the uh cerebral cortex. And then on top of that, you have all of these winding, crossed, you know, tracks of your peripheral nervous system that can be pretty tough if you're not a visual spatial minded person. That I think adds to the the uh intimidation of the subject matter.

SPEAKER_01 15:24

That's a that's a really good way of describing some of the challenges. Sometimes when I teach neuroanatomy, I make an analogy because I'm in Boston to the Boston subway map, and I say, you know, like I I didn't build it, but I need to know how to, you know, how to get from one station to the right to the next and where they intersect can be helpful uh to determine where you are. Uh because you know the green line and the red line only cross in one place. So if they're both down, you know exactly where you are, where the problem is. Um, but it's kind of this funny thing. Uh just as you said, we don't really choose to choose the difficulty. And and I think neurophobia is a really important concept because you know, we don't necessarily want to make uh neurology easy, right? It's it's gonna be inherently difficult, but it's more trying to transition what that challenge is, is it's an exciting problem to solve potentially rather than it's an intimidating thing I'll I'll never be able to understand.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

No, I totally agree.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

So, one of the things I wanted to kind of transition to a little bit is actually some of the work that you've done outside of your formal roles as fellowship director and associate program director. And in particular, you are very well known for your innovations in board prep and education, developing the board prep or education course Now You Know Neuro and Now You Know Psych. And so I was wondering if for our audience who may either not be familiar with it or not be so familiar with what a commercial education resource is all about, can you share a little bit about the story behind this? And we'll get into some of the details, but I'll I'll let you kind of have an open start.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Yeah, I kind of can start at the beginning if that works for you. I mean, to be honest, that the concepts and the and some of the aspects of this project were started in my residency, particularly, I think, even my PGY two or three year. Um, I remember uh thinking about doing things to prepare for the in-service exam so I can showcase to my leadership how smart I was. And uh it seemed like the senior uh residents that I worked with really couldn't send me to a high-quality resource to prepare for that, and as well as just kind of my baseline fund of knowledge. Um, there really wasn't anything like online-based. There was a couple of textbooks, but a lot of the textbooks I think at that time when I was in training were very thick, many, many pages, very small font, and I just wasn't that type of learner. Um, I was much more of like a you know, the first aid to step one, where it's bullet points, very kind of succinct, a lot of tables, a lot of figures. Um I was like a more of a visual learner. Um, I just didn't have something available like that for me for this particular you know use. Around that time, I started trying to create outlines in that vein for different subjects within neurology. And um, as I was going through that process, I would find you know a fellow or some other uh specialist in our department in that field to review these documents to see you know if they were um accurate, most importantly, um, but that everything uh was high value. Um when I uh was going as I was going through that process, I also uh felt that it was a little difficult to find high quality uh radiographic or pathologic images that you would be encountering on your boards and in service exams and started you know accumulating those from my colleagues and also just as practice as I practiced medicine. As I was doing this, I had no idea where this was going to go. Like I don't know how I was going to share this realistically. It was just like an internal project at that time at my institution, which I knew hopefully next generations of trainees would value. Um, but one of my junior residents, Steven Klenglough, uh, is very uh skilled in bioinformatics and website design and search engine optimization. And I kind of went to him as a PDY4, having spent already like maybe a year and a half on this project and kind of showed him what I was working on. And I'm like, can we make this a website? He's like, absolutely. And you know, that was longer ago than I'd like to admit, and I don't think either of us would have predicted kind of what it grew into uh to what it is now.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

So bring us up to speed. I know there's a ton of work that went into it, but what is it now? Like what's the reach of now, you know, neuro and and what's how does it look like today?

SPEAKER_00 19:25

Yeah, so I I will say I'm quite proud of kind of how things have progressed over time. There has been definitely a pretty significant growth in the utilization of this resource year on year, uh, to the point where you know I think we're actually being utilized a little bit more than True Learn or Board Vitals, um, and uh keeping track of like uh how much, how many users we have and activity and everything like that. We have almost a hundred institutions across the country that utilize this as a primary resource. You know, a large majority of that is in neurology and less so in Psych, but Psych was a was a newer project for us. Um so it's it's been uh incredibly rewarding, you know, knowing that you know our team is quite small. Uh we I think we've done a lot of things to make us seem a little more modern and a little more hip than some of the other traditional question bank resources out there.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

I'm curious as an educator who had designed educational curricula for your residents and fellows who did, as you mentioned, like these fun gamifications. Was there a particular type of like ethos or educational theory that went into the way that you developed the content for now you know neuro, now you know psych?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

So I can't say I know that the exact title of what that would be, but I will say that um as we were kind of growing the scale of the project, you know, when we first had it available non-commercially, it was largely just an image bank and these textbook kind of styled first aid out formatted uh chapters. Um and then we started to expand into other modalities of learning. Uh, and it's one of the few resources out there that I would consider multimodal, because right now we have those textbooks, we uh textbook style chapters, we have the image database, we have uh flashcards, and also a large question bank, which is really kind of what we've really focused on you know in 2021 to 2022. So realistically, you know, any type of way you learn, we have that type of learning modality. And I think that's really something I really perseverate on when I do work with our trainees, especially those who are not performing as well as their colleagues. You know, I I don't care what how you learn, but I just want to figure out your best learning style, whether it's you know, listening to podcasts, you know, watching lectures, reading books, you know, practicing, playing games, whatever. And when I meet people who utilize this resource, I think the most rewarding thing or fun thing is they say, I really like your resource because I use blank. And the answer is not always consistently the same thing. Love your lectures. I really love the flashcards. I really like the you know multiple choice questions. So it really kind of allows you to learn in a multitude of different ways, but also making sure that the quality and the content that's being shared amongst all those modalities is universal.

SPEAKER_01 22:17

Well, one way to call it is universal design for learning. That's a uh type of approach that really does emphasize the multimodal aspects, both for consuming the information and then being able to kind of demonstrate your knowledge. And so it sounds like for you, it's uh you're the people accessing your resource can consume it in multiple different ways. And then there's also this like testing enhanced test-enhanced learning aspect where because of the flashcards or the quizzes, they're able to actually get self-assessment, get information back.

SPEAKER_00 22:47

Absolutely. Let's go back in time and let's say that's what that's what my answer was.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

I'm curious, are there ways in which you guys are considering or already uh involving artificial intelligence in your product? Is that something that might be a next step? I know that's a big conversation piece for many educators these days.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Yeah, I'll start off by saying I'm a big optimist when it comes to artificial intelligence. You know, when I first read the article that was published years ago that talked about how uh ChatGPT was able to pass step one, uh I kind of realized like this is going to be pretty important. And if we are not utilizing this in the medical education space, then we're really doing us a disservice. So we've used it in a lot of different ways. It's it's hard to quantify even how how ingrained it is at this point. Um it kind of helps us, we've used it to help us draft multiple choice questions uh when we give it guidance about what we want with the structure and the format. Um, it can help us find uh deficiencies and and topics in our bank that we don't currently have. Other ways that we've incorporated it is uh we have built like new models to give insight to our users about their odds of uh having a successful board score. There's there's uh gosh, so many other integrations, it's hard to kind of go through them all. But it really has allowed us to come up with the same quality of content, but in a lot more of an efficient manner. I can't say that we're writing questions any better, we're just writing them a lot faster. You probably have written multiple choice questions before from scratch and know kind of the amount of time and love it takes to write a good one. You know, and I've been writing I between these two resources, I've written almost 3,000 multiple choice questions or or review that other people have contributed to the to the courses. It's it's really uh a lot of work and anything you can do to try to nudge and make it a little more productive with your time, then you can get more of your output and without sacrificing quality.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

That makes sense that you're trying to automate and make more efficient kind of the process as well as potentially future applications of personalizing the learning to this to the student as they engage with your material and they kind of provide some of their data.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Yeah, the way we kind of built it is like I don't want anyone to realize that there is an AI program that's generating these questions, right? Because there's a lot of them already out there, and you know, you can just say write 10 questions about you know medically refractory epilepsy, and it'll just spit a bunch of out, but there's no credibility there, there's no like screening by someone. So you really even if the product says like this is for you know your step one or for your your boards, you know, there's no one confirming that that topic is going to be seen on the exam or in the format or quality uh or level of difficulty that you would be seeing.

SPEAKER_01 25:45

I'd love to peek behind the scenes if you're willing to share of your of your of the company. You mentioned it's a small team. So who are the types of people who you're working with? And do you have an interdisciplinary team that's bringing in some of these different perspectives?

SPEAKER_00 25:59

Yeah, I mean, I will say if you ask me this question every six months, it it changes. So I mean, realistically, at the our core team, you know, me and uh Steve Gangloff, we're the co-founders, we meet every day or every every week we talk almost every day. Um we have a small team of part-time employees that help us with some of the uh sales and kind of more of the labor-intensive, you know, um administrative tasks. Um but a lot of outside of that, you know, we have a couple of different cohorts that get involved depending on the projects that we're working on. Once a year we hold a lecture series, usually about five to six hours. Um we employ a handful of people every year just to give that one lecture. Um, we have had people that would help us keep track of our errors that are being marked in our system. I think that's one thing our user base our user system has that's really nice is that anytime a guideline changes or a new FDA approval is approved for a new medication, our user base you know lets us know hey, you know, the the criteria has changed now, and we have a system where we can change that the same day. So we're really able to stay really up to date, which I think a lot of other question bank or just board prep resources struggle with as they are more static. Um, outside of that, you know, depending on what we're doing with the product, we do have people that try to come up with new ideas and new concepts for new modalities. Like we're trying to see how we can convert some of our text-based content into more auditory quality outputs or you can listen to the chapters. We've had people help collect different radiographic or electrographic findings, so uh we actually are planning to expand into psychiatry, sorry, uh expand into epilepsy and clinical neurophysiology, so we need to get a couple more examples of various EEG and EMG findings. And then we also have some brand ambassadors, which are people that you some usually have some type of social media following or some other type of way to promote the resource where we have them as like affiliate programming where they help generate sales and we give them a cut of the sales that they are able to generate.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

You're starting to describe a lot of uh skill sets that I at least I don't have as an educator. Uh, and I'm curious how you've been able to kind of, you know, learn on the go to become someone who's running a company while also being someone who's really an educator at the heart.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Yeah, I mean it's really hard, and one of my favorite lines is the best way to do learn to do is to do wrong. Um, so we definitely made a lot of mistakes along the way. It is something that one of the most significant limitations, I think, of the growth of this resource is the time that I have to do it. You know, I'm a full-time practicing physician. Um, I take my time allocated to towards my residency and fellowship very seriously. I need to treat this as a separate entity. You know, I think one really important skill set that you learn a little bit in residency, but you really start having to master when you start having these leadership or administrative titles is the delegation of tasks. Um, so I think I became very skilled at delegating small tasks to people who express interest in participating in the project. And then one thing you also kind of mentioned that is uh I talked about a lot of different skill sets that are involved in this project. And whenever I meet with someone who's expressing expressing interest in being part of our now you know neuro team, I kind of ask them what they're hoping to get out of it. And I kind of at least go over three or four different projects and different phases of completion and um level of time and realistically trying to find the best niche for that unique person because the last thing I want is to say, I need help writing 20 multiple choice questions on anti-epileptic drugs, and this person is pursuing a fellowship in vascular neurology. You know, will they do it? Maybe because they really believe in the product and they'd like to be part of the team, but will they enjoy and get anything out of it? Not nearly as much. So anyone who has interest in certain skills, certain specialties, other types of skills outside of you know, fund of knowledge and learning how to leverage those into benefiting everyone is really kind of part of the enjoyment of being part of this project as well.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

I love what you're sharing about the way that you've made this work because there's such resonance with just building a team clinically and also with building a team, whether you're doing curriculum design or education research, it's your students come and you kind of have to get to know them and say, hey, what what piece of this do you want to be do you want to be part of?

SPEAKER_00 30:44

Yeah, I definitely made that mistake in training uh in medical school where like I'm like, I'm just gonna get involved in any project I can and taking the first opportunity and realizing, oh, you know, halfway through it, I have to see it to the end, and I could be doing all of these things I would have enjoyed a lot more.

SPEAKER_01 30:59

So again, learning from from your own experiences. That's a theme too. Exactly. So looking ahead, Brian, what excites you the most about the future of neurology education?

SPEAKER_00 31:11

Uh gosh. I mean, I I will say we talked a little bit about the integration of artificial intelligence and and being able to do things that used to be a lot more labor-intensive, and maybe the reason why we wouldn't pursue those things into making them more widely available. Um, one cool project that we're working on right now with my one of my current residents is that uh we have some unassigned time for preparation for the in-surface exam where we're trying to come up with something. So we were able to quickly meet, come up with an idea of coming up with like a mix and match game with flashcards regarding different various topics like you know, you know, neurogenetics, pediatric uh epilepsy disorders, uh yada yada yada, and then uh be able to utilize you know ChatGBT or some other model to generate the content on those cards, get them screened by the resident, approve them, and then we can have them printed for this gamification of learning these more difficult subjects, um, and do that in a day when that would have taken you know a week or more back before we have these resources available.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

I do agree with you. I think it's one of the ways that we're really transforming education, and it's transforming at a pace that's also getting more and more rapid. So we it's hard to predict where it goes.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yeah, I mean, I think what's going to be happening is people are, you know, I I don't foresee a like a generative AI program that's at some point going to take over the education of our medical train like professionals at any time. I mean, open evidence is a great resource, it's you know, but it's built on JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine and all these other really famous, prestigious, and very well-written journals and publications. So there will always be that kind of oversight and other aspects where there will be a human component of it, right? Um, and that's kind of one other thing I thought I've thought about too, or or I've realized about you know building a resource or building a product is that um people like people. People don't like things. So if whenever you can put a face in front of whatever you're selling, whatever you're doing, um, it relates a lot more than a no-face you know, Instagram page or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 33:30

Well, as we wrap up, I was just wondering for those students listening or other clinician educators, is there any final advice that you have, um, any tips from what you've learned uh that you think they should, or I guess things you wish you had known uh earlier that you've learned along the way?

SPEAKER_00 33:46

Yeah, uh so you're guessing you're saying for trainees that are interested in a medical career.

SPEAKER_01 33:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Yeah. So um when I was at MS4, I got this great lecture again, uh mentioning Dr. Ralph Josephows. It kind of went over what it was like to go through a career from beginning stage, mid-career, end career of a medical educator. And the way he kind of talked about it is become a master of your field locally and then extend from there. So locally to nationally to internationally. So you have to start small. So, how can you become that go-to person when there's someone needed to talk to the medical students about you know localizing legions? How do you become the educator for not just maybe the residents, but also the nurse practitioners, or maybe the internal medicine needs a neural needs neurology lectures? So saying yes to a lot of these opportunities builds the CV and the credibility of your skill set. And networking, all in all honesty, is very important. One of my other kind of pitches or spiels that I have for our residents is, you know, this is the first time in your life, like what your scores are don't really matter anymore. It's really about who you know and what you do to kind of make that network. So a lot of the opportunities that I've had for me to bolster my C V outside of my own institution is because I've met so many great educators through the American Academy of Neurology, or locally, or through my, you know, my state uh neurological society. So getting your fingers out there, and then when opportunities come up for those people who you know, they kind of remember, oh, this is something that maybe Dr. Hannerhead would be interested in.

SPEAKER_01 35:29

Well, that's a perfect way to end because I was just gonna say I still remember how we met sitting uh at next to each other at a little round table in the AN education room, started a conversation there, and I'm so glad that we were able to circle back and continue it here. And hopefully I'll see you at the AN conference or elsewhere, and we'll continue to have these conversations.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

I've been there every year, so looking forward to catching up.

SPEAKER_01 35:51

Thanks so much, Brian. It's wonderful to talk with you and have a great day. NeuroPraxis, the Neurology Educators podcast, was created and produced by Glena Gayman. It is not recorded as an official podcast of any institution or organization. The views and opinions are those of the individual speakers themselves. Music from Pixabay. Cover art by Carolyn Bolney. Editing by Valeria Rowlden. Want more content like this? Be sure to subscribe to the Neuropraxis Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Have questions, comments, or suggestions for other podcast episodes? Contact us at neuropraxispodcast at gmail.com. Tell your friends and spread the word. Thanks for joining us.