How To Improve Memory, Medical Education and Clinical Rotations | Chase DiMarco

Transcript

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Welcome to The Happy Doc, the voice of fulfilled physicians. Sharing life stories from physicians, health professionals and entrepreneurs, so that you can live your happy life.

[00:01:18] Dr. Taylor Brana: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Happy Doc. I’m super excited for our next guest, Chase DiMarco. Chase is a medical education podcaster, author, content creator, and speaker. He is the creator of the Medical Mnemonist and One Minute Preceptor podcasts. He’s also co-author of Read This Before Medical School: How to Study Smarter and Live Better While Excelling in Class [and on your USMLE or COMLEX Board Exams]. I know there’s a little bit more to that title as well, it’s quite a title.

[00:01:53] Dr. Taylor Brana: Chase, I’m super excited to have you on, how are you doing?

[00:01:55] Chase DiMarco: I’m doing great, Taylor. Thank you so much for having me on. 

[00:01:59] Dr. Taylor Brana: Awesome. Awesome. So, Chase, you do a lot of work, and you have quite a few podcasts, but what I’d like to do first is ask, especially for our listeners today, I wanted them to know how did you get started with your interest in medicine? 

[00:02:15] Chase DiMarco: it’s kind of long and convoluted, I suppose. But the short version is prior to med school, I was a phlebotomist. I had a friend that was doing a lot of healthcare stuff. He was a CNA first.

He didn’t like that. Then he went into phlebotomy school and he dragged me along to the class. And then we ended up getting jobs as phlebotomists for a while after that. And I really got my first introduction into the healthcare system there. Family is not in medicine or anything like that, don’t have doctor parents.

And it was really interesting and, really wanted to see where it could go further from that state, because as a phlebotomist, it’s fun to gain some initial interest and some experience, but you’re limited on what you can do later on. So I went back to school and continued with my undergrad in a dual degree in biology and psychology.

And then eventually a buddy of mine went to the school I ended up going to and said, Hey, you should come down here and come join me. So, I did that and joined them on a very small Island in the Caribbean and completed my medical school training there. 

[00:03:20] Dr. Taylor Brana: Awesome. And which Caribbean school did you go to?

[00:03:24] Chase DiMarco: It was St. James, it’s a small school. They have a couple of different campuses on different islands. 

[00:03:30] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. And you know, the one thing often, I mean, of course, because you bring it up, with a Caribbean school is that it’s a really challenging pathway. And a lot of people, have a harder time coming back to the States, afterward. Was that in your experience, something that was more difficult in terms of clinical rotations and coming back to the United States?

[00:03:51] Chase DiMarco: Oh, yeah, everything was a little, little bit more difficult.

And I’ve actually met a lot of students that graduated a few years before me now and are either in clinicals or already physicians. And the things that we seem to all agree on, a couple of points, is one: Just socially, it’s different. You’re on an Island. You’re socially isolated. You’re away from your friends and family.

You don’t really have that support that you do in the States. And it’s not as easy to really travel back and forth if you want to do so for vacations, for holidays, something like that. So you do have a little bit more of that – burnout can set in easier when you don’t have those supports in place.

Also from a smaller school, you have limited resources. So that’s in school, in class. And when you get to your clinical rotations, you just have a lot less options. So you do have some benefits as far as getting in. Maybe it would be a little bit easier and you can speed the process up to some degree, depending on how things go, there’s a lot of factors that play a part in that, but there are definitely a lot of potentially detrimental issues to be aware of as well. 

[00:04:58] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah, so obviously it was very – there’s definitely challenges in there, you’re mentioning isolation and certainly there’s things to look out for it in that process.

I’m curious, of course, now I know you started a bunch of projects and we’re going to get into that for sure. Oftentimes, so one of the reasons we do it was because the process was extremely challenging. Right. And there were a lot of frustrations along the way. So I’m curious what were some of those very difficult frustration points for you.

The challenges that made you start to feel like maybe you wanted to do something different. 

[00:05:38] Chase DiMarco: I’d say there are two points for me in particular, the first one was the education itself. I started the website for FreeMedEd, which we’ll get into a little bit later, my first semester there. And it was just to conglomerate different resources out there, free resources, tests, videos, all kinds of stuff to supplement what we were getting in class.

And, that just led on to the rest of the content creation later on. But it was due to the fact that you were getting a very mixed bag, a lot of the instructors and smaller schools, they switched a lot. They switched from schools where they switched from one discipline to another, because of our limited resources, again, they have to do what they have to do to make sure every student gets done with every class on time.

So, they might not always have the most preparation for that particular subject. You might not be gaining the most experienced education in a particular subject. So having supplemental resources is definitely mandatory if you’re going to a smaller school and this can be in the US as well.

I’ve heard the same thing from small US schools and small DO schools. Just knowing what resources do you have available can make a big difference. So that kind of led into the content creation to make things easier for students that didn’t have resources. But then I also realized, was tested, found out I have a learning disability, which was really affecting my testing. So my test-taking abilities were starting to fall behind, even though I was doing fine in class, I was at least average, if not above average, in every course during basic sciences, but I was having a lot of trouble with the standardized exams.

And part of this was just the lack of experience in these types of exams. And then part of it was probably the difference in the training received on the Island. But, I found that I wasn’t able to retain the information as well as some of my colleagues were. And it was just becoming very stressful and taking a lot longer to get certain things down or requiring more repetitions.

And that’s when I really found out how many things I was doing in my study prep that were completely incorrect, but was never taught that. No one on the Island taught that, a lot of the students were doing the same things I was doing. It just might be working better for some of them and actually worse for others.

So as I learned more about learning and a lot of that came through the Medical Mnemonist Podcast, even though I had a degree in educational psychology, I wasn’t able to implement these and notice these in myself. I didn’t have that metacognition of my learning abilities.

The first podcast was the Medical Mnemonist, and that was really to explore these a little deeper, to have cognitive psychologists on, to have memory champions on, to have learning experts and other educators on. to discuss learning how to learn, to be more efficient in our learning so that every other student that comes from here on out might not have to suffer nearly as much as myself or some others may have.

[00:08:30] Dr. Taylor Brana: Right. And I think that’s really powerful. Right. And that’s one of the reasons I started The Happy Doc Podcast was, I felt depressed and exhausted and burnt out, and I wanted to find a way to feel more fulfilled. And for you, you had the challenge, of course you had that background in education, like you said, but actually implementing it. And finding more effective ways to really do it. You reached out to those experts that were going to give you those tips and those pearls.

Now I’m curious, of course. my obvious follow-up question to that is you’ve spoken and to a lot of memory champions and experts. What are some, and I’m curious from a selfish standpoint, actually.

What are some, what are some tips about memory. Things that since you’ve been learning this, you’ve been starting to implement maybe on purpose or inadvertently, what are some like, core features of things that you have started to implement in that process? 

[00:09:32] Chase DiMarco: Yeah. There are definitely some things that we want to stay away from and some that we want to branch more into and I kind of associate them into two different degrees, two different fields of study almost.

And the, the book you mentioned at the beginning actually does this as well. We have one part that’s the more evidence-based cognitive psychology background of learning, how to learn. And then we have another section, that’s the memory techniques, the memory palaces, the mnemonics kind of like Sketchy, micro and Picmonic, and those things that a lot of students find very helpful.

So I find that using each of these independently, are great, but there was never really a good combination of this material, especially just for medical and healthcare students. So that’s what I was trying to do is bridge these ideas, these theoretical benefits in cognitive psychology, but also have a lot of research behind them.

So they’re evidence-based and then practical applications that memory champions use to memorize hundreds, thousands of different objects, dates, numbers, whatever it might be. And by intermixing these, at least for some students, it can be very beneficial. I’ve had plenty reach out to me and say that they really loved the material.

And they’re so happy that someone is actually putting this out there for them because they heard this stuff before. Similar that I did, but having the prep optical knowledge is much different than the theoretical knowledge. So we tried to explain how to actually put these together. And if you want to really get down to the nitty gritty of it, I would say.

The evidence based ones, the cognitive psychology ones, would really be around a couple such as the Spacing Effects, Rehearsal Practice. Generally you have these two combined in the Spaced Retrieval. There’s a couple others like interleaving that you can use. The concrete examples are a great one.

If you’re teaching someone else, especially finding something that they already know about to associate that kind of a more theoretical principle to really help. And then on the memory side is really coming up with these visual mnemonics. So if you’ve seen Sketchy or Picmonic or anything like that in the past, they create very interesting visual depictions of a topic.

It’s an association and the association can be quite loose to someone that didn’t create them themselves, which has also why I advocate that people should try to, if they have the time or the skill, or want to develop the skill, to learn how to create your own visual mnemonics, because like writing your own notes, making your own flashcards, it’s going to stick much stronger.

Cause you’ve made that personal association, that personal connection to the material. And then the memory palace is kind of the storage facility for all of these visual mnemonics. So you can recall them later on in an organized and quick manner. 

[00:12:09] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. So you said a couple of really interesting key points, in terms of memory, which now that I’m looking back, I use some of them as well.

Obviously Anki is a big tool that has been popularized. And for those who don’t know, Anki’s essentially this digital deck of cards that people can use for spaced repetition. You mentioned the Sketchy and the Picmonic, which are these visual learning tools. I think that is interesting, right?

Because if you’re using someone else’s tool and you didn’t make those associations, like you said, something at times, you’re like, wait, what was in that image? That doesn’t really make sense to me. Instead of you practically coming up with these ideas in your own mind.

And the one thing I do, I’ll go a little deeper into is, I’ve always, I loosely understand the idea of a memory palace, but I’m curious how one would, and again, we don’t have to go too deep into this, but I’m curious how one implements this from a medical student perspective to really retain knowledge.

And again, for people who are listening, who aren’t in the medical fields – you have to remember so much. I mean, I, now that I’m at the other end of it, I just can’t believe how much data we really do have to remember. So how do we implement this memory palace into maybe a more practical way?

[00:13:28] Chase DiMarco: Yeah, it’s funny. You can honestly say without being too mean to people, like we probably forgot more than the people I’ve ever had to remember before.

So the memory palace is a technique like anything else, and it’s kind of an art as much as a science and it is very personalized, but some ways that you can think about it are to divide up your content, just like you would in class, by discipline, by a chapter, by a sub-topic within the chapter. And once you have this categorization, some people like to organize it ahead of time anyway, I do. Memory champions are good at just throwing stuff everywhere because they had to learn that when, when they were studying for their exams, their competitions.

But if you divide it up, you chunk it into reasonable bits of information, then you can organize the material in a sensible manner. So for instance, you can and put as much or as little into each memory palace as you want. And for those that aren’t that aware, a palace is any visual structure or even outdoor area, it’s a location that you can picture when you close your eyes. And if you can picture it when you close your eyes, you can add stuff to it, you can take away stuff from it. So by picturing this palace, visually, you can add your little visual mnemonics that you’ve created, and that’s a whole separate skill right there, but then you can visually walk through your house, your grandparents’ house, your school, or your hospital, and pick what locations within each room or macro station within the palace and each object, furniture, light switches, ceiling fixtures, and those would be your micro stations within your macro station, or your room within your palace.

And it kind of gets infinitely complex in that aspect, you can go smaller and larger, but, you can say, all right, well, I want my house to be all micro. So you start, you pick: this room is gonna be a gram-negative bacteria. This firm’s going to be gram-positive bacteria, and this room is going to be microbacterium. You can go infinitely dense if you want to, but spreading it out helps to keep things separate, keep them chunked in the relative area.

Then you can have a separate structure, a separate memory palace for a different topic, a different discipline for anatomy. You might need to have a couple of different houses for each subject, and that’s fine. You can go on as far as you want to.

And in fact, in the one interview I did with Lev Goldentouch and he blows my mind when he talks about this stuff. He, I think I titled it like this as well, like Memorizing 1 Million Items. So he creates, instead of a memory palace, it’s a memory city. So he actually builds his entire city visually from structures he knows personally, but he can then rearrange them mentally in his mind, and basically create his own neighborhood.

And within each room, there’s this topic within each, piece of furniture, there’s a different visual mnemonic and each mnemonic has different associations and it’s when you get into the weeds, it’s really cool and creative, but we don’t need to go that far to find benefit for students or anyone else.

[00:16:33] Dr. Taylor Brana: Is he literally creating these cities in his head, or is he choosing actual locations he’s been to? Now I’m just curious about that. 

[00:16:42] Chase DiMarco: My understanding of it is that he’s creating them in his head based on structures he’s been to. So you can make up your own neighborhood by putting your house next to your grandma’s house next to your best friend’s house, just because they don’t physically live in that space.

You can create your own streets basically, and have them next to each other. So as you’re walking down the sidewalk, you go into your house first, go through all of the areas there, and then you go into the next house, the next house. And by doing that. Each room, having dozens of different associations and each pallet holding hundreds, and then you can have many different houses together and you can visually walk through them within seconds, as opposed to physically walking through.

[00:17:20] Dr. Taylor Brana: Wow. It’s fascinating to me because I feel like for people who have never even really thought about this concept or even utilized it, I’m just thinking of all of these associations that I have in my mind. For example, if I was learning physiology topics, maybe I would throw something more physical. Now I’m thinking, Oh, well I really know my home gym really well.

So maybe I throw all my physical stuff into the gym, you know what I mean?

[00:17:49] Chase DiMarco: Exactly.

[00:17:50] Dr. Taylor Brana:  So you make, you make sort of these – whereas maybe I would think about my chemistry lab I used to go to school for something more chemical or bio – anyways, now my brain is going into different directions here, again, we’re not going to go into the weeds here, but I do think it’s a fascinating topic. And I love the idea that maybe someone will listen to this and be like, Oh, I’m going to use this.

[00:18:13] Chase DiMarco: It’s so cool to think about. 

[00:18:15] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. It’s great. And you could go so far. Now I’m thinking about the movie inception and how many cool scenes there are 

[00:18:20] Chase DiMarco: Exactly. Some people use video games and movies and other locations they know very well. So you can use anything. 

[00:18:28] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah, I mean, I can see why there’s a whole podcast about it. So let’s, let’s go ahead. And I want us to also talk about your other podcast, which is the One Minute Preceptor podcast. So, Obviously there’s a lot of challenges in medical education and one of the things you’re taking on is sort of the topic of preceptorship and how do we effectively handoff students to effective teaching, right.

And how can teachers be better at educating and how can students more effectively learn. So I’m curious how you came up with this topic and, and what you’ve learned along the way. 

[00:19:12] Chase DiMarco: Yeah, I think it comes back to the question you asked initially was, what were the obstacles that made me create the content I’ve created?

And I talked about the basic sciences stuff and then the medical, the mnemonics aspects of it, and cognitive psychology to help me with the testing. But then my next obstacle was with clinical rotations. And again, small school limited rotations. Sometimes you don’t get the best ones or they’re competitive or a bunch of different things can happen.

And so what a lot of IMGs will do – International Medical Graduates – is use third party agencies to find rotations in other cities, other States, other specialties that they might not get at their school. A lot of American students will do this as well for their elective rotations, but they generally have different resources available to them that aren’t always available to IMGs.

So I found a great diversity in the types of material being covered, how to prepare for these rotations and generally what the students were coming away from. I’m talking to my other classmates as well. So I wanted to answer a lot of questions that I was finding, being brought up constantly, but I didn’t see a good resource for it.

And that’s, how do you prepare for this specialty? How do you get along with your preceptor? What do you do if you’re the only, one you and a preceptor, versus in a room with 10, 15, 20 other students? What is the best way to ask for a letter of recommendation? What if you don’t really like this rotation, you’re just doing it because it’s a mandatory credit, one of your core rotations.

So I wanted to take those questions and bring them to preceptors in all of these different specialties. Season one really covered that in many different specialties where I asked them these questions and got their feedback from it. And really helped to consolidate a couple of key points as far as the communications and the expectations that both the preceptor and the student should have.

And then season two has recently started and kind of branched out. We still do those topics in some sporadic episodes. We’ve branched out into online courses and MOOCs for medical school, for diversity training, multicultural training, a bunch of different things that we’re also going to find in the clinical setting in our mostly third and fourth year of medical school.

So it was just to really help students better prepare for those rotations and get the tips ahead of time so that they can make the best of their experience there. 

[00:21:35] Dr. Taylor Brana: Right. Right. What do you think are key components to – we’ll go from the preceptor side first. What are key components that a preceptor or physician can do when they take on students to be effective in their teaching?

[00:21:51] Chase DiMarco: I think the one that’s been brought up by every preceptor that I’ve asked so far is to really set clear expectations. And this is on both sides. The student needs to set the clear expectation of what they’re hoping to get out of it, or if they want to go further, if they are looking for that as a specialty, or if they’re just doing it to complete it, you can say this in a nice way to your preceptor without hurting their feelings, if you don’t like that specialty.

But also the preceptor can really feel the student a little bit better, and sets what their expectations for the student is. And, just this little starting off point, starting off on the right foot makes such a huge difference throughout the rest of the weeks of that rotation.

So that was the one takeaway I swear every single preceptor mentioned was, to be a better preceptor you have to set clear expectations. To be a better student, you also have to set your clear expectations at the beginning. So everything starts off on the right foot. And then from there, you can get into more of the nitty gritty. You can be proactive if you’re the student, with being there more frequently, with staying later, showing up earlier, attending more surgeries, more procedures. And a lot of students do this without a guiding point, they just do it because they’ve been told to do it. So if you don’t really like that rotation, you show up all the time and you’re not really giving off the sense that you’re enjoying it. That’s not going to help you. So make sure that your expectations of everything are clear again, with the preceptor.

From a preceptor’s point of view as well, once you’ve started to explore what the student does know, and there’s going to be a big gap, especially as students are starting to enter the clinical setting earlier and earlier, some as early as their first and second year now are going into the clinical setting, not just third and fourth year students. And then some preceptors are also going to have residents and maybe even fellows with them. So being able to decipher who is at what stage of education, what knowledge they need to know right now, and who they can turn to for more information.

Maybe you’re not the best person for them. And you can guide them to another resource, whether that’d be a book or a colleague or the lead resident or something like that. So really all of that clear early on, especially if you can hand out some documentation or something beforehand, can smooth out the process when a student is first starting off, at least. 

[00:24:14] Dr. Taylor Brana: I mean, and that’s a great tip. In psychiatry, we talk a lot about framing, or psychology, framing. How are you framing a situation? So from the preceptor side, because they’re the leader, they need to frame the experience in a way that’s going to be effective for the student.

And I think it’s very important. And if that doesn’t happen, I see it not happen a lot when students are coming in like mid-month or something, when there’s already other students there and then another student’s hopping in. And so technically they’re coming in at a different point part of the cycle, and so they kind of get thrown into the mix instead of there being that moment.

What I have personally enjoyed, as you’re bringing this up, the ideas that came from me, was the importance of when a preceptor would sit me down. And we might even go into their office and we would just sit down for a little bit. And we would just talk about the month as a whole, or a couple of weeks as a whole, and, and really go through, these are the things that you want to look out for.

Because from a student side of things, and I know you’ve gone through this, as a student, you don’t know what’s common in general surgery, for example, versus what’s not common. These are the things you really want to get down versus don’t worry about this, this is minutia.

And so to have that sort of, overarching framework, I think is really powerful. So I think that’s a great tip for preceptors. And as you’re saying this, I take on students in my rotations too. So it’s really important that I think about that. 

[00:25:54] Chase DiMarco: Yeah, definitely. And for instance, a lot of my classmates had general surgery as their surgery core, where I didn’t, I had an orthopedic surgeon as my surgery core.

So it was a very different experience. So we couldn’t even share with each other what to expect. And if the preceptor doesn’t make it very clear, then it’s very hard for the student to know where to go from there or what to really do, to make the best of the situation. 

[00:26:17] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. So now I’m curious, let’s flip it around for a second.

And I also dealt with this as a student. Sometimes you’re gonna have a preceptor or a supervisor who’s just, quite frankly, not good at teaching and is not giving you a good experience and is not being effective. What tips or strategies have you found have been effective for students to maximize their education when that’s the case? 

[00:26:45] Chase DiMarco: Great question. And that definitely is going to be the case sometimes. And not everyone can be the best instructor out there, but when that arises, the best advice that I’ve heard from all of the interviews that I’ve conducted is, to take the initiative. As a student, you can ask questions in a polite manner.

You can ask for more depth without really, I know some students are afraid of maybe saying things wrong or giving the impression that they don’t believe their teacher or something like that. And you don’t want to get on their bad side, but if you frame it in the right way.

And you can think about it. Come back in an hour, come back the next day. Think about it overnight or on your break. How to ask it in the most appropriate way or how to ask alright, so I know this now. What do you want me to know next? What are your expectations of me? And kind of dig in deep, still coming back to the expectations, whether it’s the expectations on your actions, expectations on your knowledge. But you can reach in there and just kind of find out more, dig a little bit, and usually that will suffice to get some useful information, at least bring you to the next step. 

[00:27:49] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think sometimes we work with different, even for me as a resident, sometimes I’m working with different attendings and I don’t know why they chose one medication or the other, or why maybe they thought it was this diagnosis when I thought it was this diagnosis.

So I think one of the things I always think about, and I tell students too, is if you come from a standpoint of curiosity no one’s gonna really, give you a foul, say that you made a foul statement or be upset at you, but if you come from a standpoint of accusation or saying, Oh, I would have done this. What are you doing here? Or like, why did you choose this? I’m thinking.. So how you phrase it, the way you phrase it, the moment you’re phrasing it. Clearly not asking it in front of a patient when it’s happening. Timing, obviously, but if you come out of place, like, Oh, that’s an interesting choice of medication. I’ve read this. I’m just, I’m wondering why we chose this one. 

[00:28:55] Chase DiMarco: I never thought to do it that way, hmm. Like, what’s your line of thought behind this.

[00:29:01] Dr. Taylor Brana: Right, and sometimes I’ll have a student ask me that question. I’m like crap, they’re right. You know what I mean? I’m like, wait a second. Oh, they’re right. Maybe we should do that. So sometimes a student can jog my memory and I’ll be like, Oh, that is a good option. Good, good idea. 

[00:29:18] Chase DiMarco: So if we have less of this competitive student-teacher mentality, then it’s better for the patient anyway. I guess that’s another thing I forgot to mention.

A lot of the interviews I conducted. They’re like, we need to get out of this old school mentality where I learned it this way. So you need to learn it this way. We need to get away from this competition and be more collaborative even with our students. 

[00:29:38] Dr. Taylor Brana: Right. It’s so true. And I’m seeing it. I’m definitely seeing it from year after year. I think we’re getting better at having that collaborative feel, obviously culture in different settings is going to impact the experience. But again, as a student, you have to maximize it and then hopefully as an attending or as a preceptor, you’re also trying to find those possibilities to maximize education for others, which I think is very important.

Another aspect I know of your podcasts with the preceptorship, is I know part of it too is you’re trying to collect really effective preceptors, hopefully to be as mentors as well. How far along? I know you were creating a project for that. How far along are you in that project or,  is it still happening?

[00:30:30] Chase DiMarco: It’s definitely still happening. So, you’re talking about FindARotation. FindARotation is a platform, I call it the Airbnb of clinical rotations, and it’s basically set up to be exactly that, where preceptors come on, kind of like the hosts, and set up their clinic, their hospital, or whatever, or the admin does it. Whoever is in charge of that. And then the student goes on kind of like a guest and you search by price, by location, by specialty, a bunch of other filter requirements. And as I’ve discussed with you over the past year, this was supposed to come out a long time ago, hit a lot of road bumps, especially when it comes to app development. The programming teams can promise you the world and sometimes not always deliver. 

[00:31:11] Dr. Taylor Brana: Well, technology is tough for sure. 

[00:31:13] Chase DiMarco: Yeah. And then COVID and half of the team got sick too. So it’s still happening and luckily, no one has been severely ill or beyond recovery, so we’re thankful for that, but yeah, as soon as some of them can get healthy again and are able to work again, we should be able to hopefully finish this platform in the next couple of months, hoping to get it out this year, at least.

And start allowing students and preceptors to come on and find rotations, give their clinical education and experiences a more diverse field, because we have so many more students coming in too, and we’re lacking sites and a lot of specialties, and a lot of demographics and for a lot of different students too, not just medical students.

[00:31:58] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. I mean, it’s a big need. And also, what I think is a great aspect about it is you’re vetting these people out ahead of time and you’re speaking to them and you’re checking in. How are you, as a student, going to guarantee you’re going to get a great rotation? Well, one of the ways to do that is, let’s have professionals speak to these individuals beforehand, get a sense of them. Maybe have other students who’ve already been to that rotation.

And so you have a process almost like with your Uber driver or something. Right? Well, this person has 800 five star reviews. And so, you know that you’re going to get a safe and effective experience as opposed to, especially if you’re an IMG and you’re picking in the wild, so to speak, and you’re trying to reach out to different sites and who knows what you’re going to get when you hop into this rotation.

So I think it’s, it’s a resource that makes a lot of sense. And hopefully, obviously, technology takes time. I think that’s a big thing that you and I both know about entrepreneurship is. The idea comes fast, but the execution takes a lot of work. And I think that’s a whole other conversation but, I think that’s great 

Now, I’ve, I’ve asked you plenty of questions about your process, what you’ve done. One of my favorite questions, I always love to ask, especially because your focusing on medical education is: In an ideal world, what would you like to see for medical students? What would you like to see for their experience to be so that this process is one that will be more effective?

[00:33:35] Chase DiMarco: I think it has to be. All around, we need to improve on what we’re using. Get away from the traditional lecture-based and passive teaching methods and teaching at students, and implement more active learning strategies.

Teach students about active learning, teach the instructors about active learning. Shape the educational environment around correct methods. And that’ll just make it so much simpler for students to remember what they need to remember, to learn what they need to learn when they’re in that limited amount of class time, without hopefully getting too stressed.

But we also need to really think about what we’re testing, when and why? I think that was a big part of the discussion revolving around Step One going to pass fail is just, what was the point of it? There are no benchmarks that I’m aware of or from any of the literature showing that step one proved anything except that you were likely to score higher on step two and maybe step three. So it just showed you’re a good test taker.

So when we have these markers, whether we’re using actual markers or surrogate markers, kind of like in research in pharmacology, are we actually testing the end product that we want to figure out? Are we just testing something in between because that’s all we have at the moment?

So figuring all that out. Getting everyone together, getting the educators and educational systems more intertwined, so they’re on the same page. They don’t have to teach the same thing, but so they know the same methods and they can help each other develop stronger methods within the different communities.

Moving more to gamification, to online learning, and effective online learning, not the last minute stuff that’s had to happen recently with COVID. I just think the whole system can be done so much more efficiently. And I really hope that some of my materials will eventually lead to, at least promoting those ideas and educating others that might make it happen.

[00:35:24] Dr. Taylor Brana: I mean, I love it. And I think we’re at the early stages of that and you know, it will take individuals such as yourself to notice those issues in the process and developing systems and ways of making things better. I mean, the fact that we’re still here and we don’t have these technologies in place or integrated systems, says a lot and I think we have a lot of work to do.

The other point you make, which I think is a fantastic point. I didn’t even think about it, is metrics. Is the thing that we’re using as the Gold Standard of how we’re getting these professionals out into the world even actually the right metric to say we’re providing great patient care? And I think that’s a fantastic question. And you know, I’m sure there’s plenty of research, and if there’s not, we really should be focusing on that question because it’s a powerful one is, what is the right metric?

What, what is the secret sauce of an effective, humanistic, professional, that’s really going to take care of patients well? I don’t know what the answer is. 

[00:36:30] Chase DiMarco: I haven’t seen a good one for patient care or professionalism, anything else but test-taking ability so far. 

[00:36:37] Dr. Taylor Brana: Yeah. But you know, that’s the reality we live in right now. So it is, is what it is, right?

So I’ve asked you lots of questions. Is there anything you feel like you wanted to share in today’s episode from all your learnings and things you’ve done so far that maybe I haven’t asked you yet? 

[00:36:58] Chase DiMarco: Well, we’ve covered so much. I think we’ve covered all the main points.

I just want to say, especially now in the time of COVID, there’s a lot of stress. There’s a lot of uncertainty in life and education and everything else, but I also think now is a great time to explore these other technologies, these other methods.

Whether it be memory techniques, whether it be a better educational, education-based, evidence-based technique for your studying habits. Whether it be as an instructor, adding in just a little gamification, try one new project a week or a month, and add a new software. There’s a lot of free stuff out there you can use to make your class more integrated, more active, and more enjoyable.

Try everything out now while you have time, if you have time, and continue to evolve that scale, both as students and as instructors, and start making this educational system what it should be. 

[00:37:51] Dr. Taylor Brana: That’s a great point. I’d love to explore the gamification side with you at another time, for sure, because there’s so many tools out there and, and possibilities.

Now, if people want to reach out to you to ask you more questions or get to know maybe that other side of education, how can they reach out? 

[00:38:11] Chase DiMarco: All of the material we’ve mentioned so far, the podcast, the book can all be found on FreeMedEd.Org. I got one of the old .orgs as you did back then, but I guess it doesn’t help too much anymore.

Links for everything can be found there, reach out to us on social media and follow them so what’s going on when. The material for FindTheRotation starts coming out. We do have social media pages. I’m not too active right now, but obviously, you can follow any of them, but reach out to me too on social media anywhere. I have accounts on everything and that’d be happy to discuss more with anyone interested in knowing more or even maybe collaborating on future works. 

[00:38:51] Dr. Taylor Brana: Amazing. And we’ll share all of the links that you have as well on our show notes. So if anyone wants to go to The Happy Doc website or check out the podcast, you’ll find all the links on the post as well.

Well, Chase. Thank you so much. That was awesome. I really appreciate your time. Thank you for answering all of my questions and offering your time. 

[00:39:11] Chase DiMarco: Thanks for having me on. 

[00:39:12] Dr. Taylor Brana: And that’s the episode for today. I want to thank you so much for listening to The Happy Doc Podcast. Again, this is a podcast that is going to inspire you as a physician, as a health professional, as an individual to be fulfilled in your life, so please look out for the other episodes in The Happy Doc. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please leave a five star review on the podcasting application of your choice. You can also reach out to us by emailing the happydoc1@gmail.com. I’ll see you on the next episode.