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- To me innovation means taking something new,
unique to you and bringing it forward.
And hopefully that can impact the world.
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I would describe the paths of excellence
as a way for you to be able to pick something
that's really interesting to you
and have the support of the University
and the Medical School as well as some chunk
of time carved out within the third
and fourth year of medical school to be able
to go and do it.
What drew me to medicine is I went into special forces
in the US Army and one of the specialties
on the team was as a medic.
I wanted to be a medic because I wanted
to be able to help somebody if something bad happened
and that was the first step toward the path of medicine.
The US military was having, discovered
that they had a problem with a lot of soldiers
who were dying what they call preventable deaths.
Meaning they didn't have to die
if somebody was there who knew what they were doing.
The problem was, the only people who were trained
at the time were doctors, nurses, medics like me.
So the way they found a solution to that
was what they ended up calling Tactical Combat Casualty Care
and that's basically in a nutshell
is training everybody at a very baseline
with the knowledge and skills
of what to do to save a life.
Once I was leaving active duty, coming back home
and thinking why isn't this something we do here?
I have the knowledge and skills.
I've been training people to do this.
That's what got me involved in Path of Excellence
in Innovation and Entrepreneurship
and starting the project what I called, The First Five,
Emergency Response for Everyone.
The idea being, what do you do in the first five minutes
of a medical emergency when the ambulance is on the way?
The typical path when people think innovation
and entrepreneurship, especially in medicines
is what they call diagnostics and therapeutics.
So my idea did not fit that at all.
But it actually wasn't a stumbling block.
I found support for that.
Both within this Path of Excellence
and in the broader Medical School community.
So the problem is I had no business background.
No experience in starting a company
or making a startup, or anything like that.
It can feel overwhelming if you have that blank slate.
And say, well, here's my idea.
How do we implement it?
You have to create a business model.
You have to find your customer discovery.
You have to find what is the gap
that you are trying to fill?
Who else is already out there trying
to fill that and how are you different or better?
So one of the first big things is you need other people.
You need a team.
For me that was other members in the post-bacc program
who were also studying for medical school
that had a background as being an EMT,
another was in the Navy and was also an EMT.
So we had some shared experiences
and we all had a passion for making this real.
And so from that we started a company
and made a startup.
Made our business model, did some different competitions
through optiMize and through the School
of Public Health's Innovation in Action.
We made business pitches and we actually raised
over 10,000 dollars in funding for our project.
The main mission of The First Five
is to teach everyday people who are bystanders
to a medical emergency what to do
in those initial few minutes after an injury strikes.
To bridge that gap before the ambulance arrives.
What we do is we'll run these two hour hands on workshops.
They have realistic scenarios
and they're tailored to each group.
So it's not like very group is just getting
the exact same thing.
We make sure to cover really important things
like stopping major bleeding,
making sure somebody can breath, CPR and AED
if they don't have a pulse.
But we also wanna know what do you wanna learn?
What situation have you been in, in real life
or do you fear being caught in and you don't know
what to do?
Having just those knowledge and skills,
you could really save a lot of lives.
I would not have tried to start a company
or tried to implement the idea without
a Path of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
I think that is the key.
Is that being told that if you have a good idea
you can make something of it and that's innovation.
You can find resources, you can find mentors,
and you can turn it into something real.
I think residencies want to see medical students
who are not just smart, but also want to make a difference
and have shown through a Capstone for Impact
that all of us will do, through the Path of Excellence,
that you have made a difference.
Something that can really impact people all across
the country and the world.