Selected Podcast
Meet Dr. Ellison
Get to know our new Medical Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Dr. Trevor Ellison! Growing up, Dr. Ellison witnessed firsthand the value of compassionate healthcare professionals. His siblings had medical conditions and watching them receive care inspired him to pursue a career in medicine. He shares how he made his childhood dream of becoming a doctor a reality, what he wants his future patients to know about him, and why he chose to work at Genesis and serve our community.
Featuring:
Dr. Ellison’s surgical interests include coronary artery bypass surgery, transcatheter and open valve interventions, endovascular and open repair of the aorta and surgical management of atrial fibrillation. Some of the procedures performed by Dr. Ellison include coronary artery bypass grafting, TAVR, Tevar, MitraClip and open valve repair and replacement.
Trevor Ellison, MD, PhD, MBA
Trevor Ellison, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiothoracic surgeon with the Genesis Heart & Vascular Group. He earned his doctor of medicine degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Dr. Ellison completed his general surgery residency and a cardiothoracic surgery fellowship at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is certified by the American Board of Surgery in general surgery and by the American Board of Thoracic Surgery in cardiothoracic surgery.Dr. Ellison’s surgical interests include coronary artery bypass surgery, transcatheter and open valve interventions, endovascular and open repair of the aorta and surgical management of atrial fibrillation. Some of the procedures performed by Dr. Ellison include coronary artery bypass grafting, TAVR, Tevar, MitraClip and open valve repair and replacement.
Transcription:
Scott Webb: Today on Sounds of Good Health, we're going to meet Dr. Trevor Ellison. He's a cardiothoracic surgeon at Genesis. And in addition to being an MD, he's also a PhD with an MBA who somehow finds time to spend quality time with his family.
This is Sounds of Good Health with Genesis, brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. I'm Scott Webb. Dr. Ellison, thanks so much for joining me today. You are what I would call an ambitious dude. I looked at your credentials, if you will, MD, PhD, MBA. You've got a lot of letters after your name, certainly more than I do. So, this is going to be an interesting conversation to hear about your journey and what you do today and so on. So as we get going, tell us why did you decide to become a doctor?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: My journey to become a doctor, I guess there's kind of several different aspects to it. One is, you know, I grew up with some siblings with some disabilities. And so, a lot of time with doctors and in and out of hospitals, I think that definitely played a part of it, seeing kind of a whole group of whose, you know, whole life's endeavor is just to treat a patient. It's not like you're out shopping for a car or, you know, a nice house or anything like that. You know, you're going to them just for basic, you know, "I need to be healthy. I'm not doing well, I want to do better," really kind of these more vulnerable moments and, you know, a whole profession that's designed just to address that. I found that very attractive. And then, growing up, just science in general and the intricacies of science. From basic science to physiology in a human body, it's always just fascinating. And when I was 12 years old, I had asked for a fetal pig dissection kit for Christmas, so that's what I got for Christmas. And spent some time down there in the basement dissecting that, and it came with a Johns Hopkins poster of the heart. So, way back in the day, kind of had an inkling of which direction I was heading.
Scott Webb: Yeah, it's really interesting. And again, in reading about you, we saw that your family was involved in the steel industry, which kind of piqued my interest because my grandfather worked in the steel industry and I know this podcast is for Genesis and they're in Ohio, and I grew up a Steelers fan, which may bring some sadness to some listeners out there, but many of my family members are Browns fans and some are Bengals fans. And so just frame through the steel industry, and when we think about your journey, it's an opportunity here to discuss your education, your training, and what it means to someone who came from a family, you know, of steel people, if you will, to receive scholarships and to get those educational opportunities.
Dr. Trevor Ellison: So first, just with this steel industry, I was born in Pittsburgh. You know, we lived there for the first few years of my life. So, there's pictures of my two other brothers and I all in our car seats, all in Steeler's gear. So, in Pittsburgh, my dad was one of three brothers as well, and he was the only one to go to college. But he ended up going to MIT in Boston and swam there and did some work there, and then came back to help kind of run the family business, a contracting company in the steel industry. And two other brothers, union workers, you know, doing plumbing and electricity and the whole deal.
So, you know, growing up my parents provided me with tons of different opportunities and a sense that anything that interested you or you were passionate about or you thought might be interesting was something that you could pursue. And my parents, you know, were gracious enough to provide me the ability to pursue lots of different avenues. And medicine was always the kind of driver, like I said, since at least age 12.
And when I got to medical school, my first goal was I wanted to be a congenital cardiac surgeon. But medical school, there's four years there, there's five years of general surgery. So anyway, as you see things and as you kind of develop, your interests kind of change back and forth. And I remember after I had finished my research years and some time overseas, I'd come back as a fourth year, four out of five. And I was sitting in one of the call rooms in one of our satellite hospitals, and it was like one in the morning. And we got another call from the ED about, I think it was appendicitis or diverticulitis, all important stuff. But I'm sitting there on the bed at one or two in the morning and I was like, "I can't get up at one or two in the morning and kind of get really excited about appendicitis or diverticulitis," as important as they are for the individuals who have them. So at that point I said, "You know what? I got to go back to cardiac," because it's so unbelievably exciting and interesting every step of the way, that if you get called at one or two in the morning about some heart disease, I'm going to be awake and I'm going to be interested and I'm going to be fully engaged and ready to go. So, you know, at that time, I switched back to cardiac surgery. And, yeah, just finished off my training from there.
Scott Webb: Well, tell us more about that. The heart is a very complicated thing. And even for an expert like yourself with lots of letters after your name. Obviously, there's some specific training and a lot of work goes into becoming an expert in the field. So, why'd you really choose, besides that aha moment, why cardiothoracic surgery and what does that mean exactly?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Surgery is fascinating and endlessly interesting. You have the medicine side, and then we also have the ability to do the surgery. And, you know, if you look at the end of the road, the last kind of fashion of being able to help somebody, it ends up being in the operating room. If there's something mechanically wrong that needs to be fixed, the last place, the last stop is in the operating room. And there's something, you know, definitely exciting and intriguing about that.
And, you know, I think one of my favorite images of cardiac surgery is that, in most surgical ORs, they have a back table. In cardiac surgery, there's actually two or three and they're up high because they need to be hanging over the patient. The scrub tech can't really, you know, go back and forth between the table behind them and hand instruments, they need to be right next to you. And so, they have these tables that are high up. There's about three of them with a ton of different instruments on them.
And when you look in a room, you'll see two people operating. It's the surgeon and their first assistant or another resident or fellow. You have these two or three big lights on the ceiling aimed down. You have one, maybe even two of the surgeons with these extra high-powered lights on their head. Both people will be wearing loops, which magnifies the field, about two and a half to three and a half depending on your loop size. And they're sitting with their heads really close together. And the surgeons as they're operating together, you know, don't even need to do anything more than a whisper to communicate. They're so close, their heads are practically touching. And so, all these people are staring at this tiny little spot with such interest and fascination and importance. It's one of those things you walk by and you're like, "I want to be a part of that."
Scott Webb: So, you mentioned being born in Pittsburgh and traveling abroad. So, what brought you to Genesis and, you know, that desire to serve the Genesis community?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: So, I graduated from my training in 2018, and we moved here to Ohio. So, we had moved around quite a few times, growing up in about six or seven different places. And one of the places we lived was actually in Dublin, Ohio. And out of all the places we lived, it was the shortest place we lived, but it was actually our favorite place to live.
So, you know, looking back, when I was applying for different positions, we looked academic, we looked private, we looked hospital-based, we looked kind of all over the country. But you know, Ohio, it definitely stood out because I remembered growing up, clearly remembered that was our favorite place to live. And so, just coming back to Ohio where there's tons of land, the people are fantastic, everybody is incredibly nice, everybody's very reasonable. And just kind of salt of the earth, reasonable people, and just a beautiful state was definitely a draw.
And at Genesis, it was incredible that their whole entire senior leadership team, it has been here anywhere between I think 18 and 25 years. And when you sit down in a room, they're all there. It's not that they're calling somebody in Michigan or calling somebody in California to report in, it's just them. And then, the facilities are absolutely fantastic. They're more than willing to get whatever, equipment, new equipment, whatever it is. They're always willing to do that.
And then lastly, it's always your team. It's the ICU staff. It's your events, practice, practitioners. It's the whole group of people that you actually use to take care of the people and our staff are just absolutely fantastic and easy to communicate with, easy to work with. You get those three things together and, you know, it's a job that you're going to find very hard to pass up.
Scott Webb: So doctor, a guy like yourself who has so many degrees and so many interests, and you've focused in on cardiac surgery, do you have any professional goals left? Is there anything where you're like, you know, "I need some more letters after my name" or something like that?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Here at Genesis, I'm the Director of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department. So being a leader, being able to lead a department, kind of figure out how to make it work efficiently, you know, the number one priority always, unparalleled patient care, number one. And then, number two is, you know, taking care of your team. I did get a degree in economics and health policy, and I still absolutely love that field of research. And so, I still do publish. I have two papers pending publication now. I had published one just a couple years ago. But, you know, I still intend a hundred percent on adding to the literature in cardiothoracic surgery.
Scott Webb: Yeah, as I sort of prefaced as we got rolling here today, you're incredibly ambitious and I love that. I'll give you an opportunity here at the end to just tell listeners about yourself, if they ever find themselves in the office, or God forbid, they're looking up at you from the table and you're the ones standing over them with the big light on your head and the big lights on the ceiling, what would you want them to know about you, your wife? Do you have pets? What do you do for leisure? You know, what's something they could go, Okay, yeah. So, he's not just the guy who's going to like save my life. He's also into what..." What would that be?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: You know, if you ask my kids or my wife what I do mostly when I get home, it'll sound a little bit boring, but I'm reading and studying about cardiac surgery. Whether it's the STS meetings, whether it's making a PowerPoint, I mean, I'm all in. I also love languages. I speak Spanish. I lived over in Spain for two years. I speak Spanish, but learning Mandarin. My son is learning Mandarin too, so learning that. Learning to play the guitar. I play the violin and a couple of my kids are learning that, so I help them out with the violin and also learn to play the guitar.
I like to try to stay as active and fit as possible. And then other than that, we also just love to hang out as a family. And my wife and I have four kids, and we like to travel. So over the summers, we probably have three or four kind of big trips that we go on as we just kind of spend time together and build memories.
Scott Webb: Yeah, this has been really cool and you hear about everything, your background, your family, all of that. So doctor, thanks so much. You stay well.
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Thanks for having me.
Scott Webb: And for more information, go to genesishcs.org/heartandvascular. And thanks for listening to Sounds of Good Health with Genesis, brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. If you found this podcast to be helpful, please be sure to tell a friend and subscribe, rate and review this podcast. And check out the entire podcast library for additional topics of interest. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well.
Scott Webb: Today on Sounds of Good Health, we're going to meet Dr. Trevor Ellison. He's a cardiothoracic surgeon at Genesis. And in addition to being an MD, he's also a PhD with an MBA who somehow finds time to spend quality time with his family.
This is Sounds of Good Health with Genesis, brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. I'm Scott Webb. Dr. Ellison, thanks so much for joining me today. You are what I would call an ambitious dude. I looked at your credentials, if you will, MD, PhD, MBA. You've got a lot of letters after your name, certainly more than I do. So, this is going to be an interesting conversation to hear about your journey and what you do today and so on. So as we get going, tell us why did you decide to become a doctor?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: My journey to become a doctor, I guess there's kind of several different aspects to it. One is, you know, I grew up with some siblings with some disabilities. And so, a lot of time with doctors and in and out of hospitals, I think that definitely played a part of it, seeing kind of a whole group of whose, you know, whole life's endeavor is just to treat a patient. It's not like you're out shopping for a car or, you know, a nice house or anything like that. You know, you're going to them just for basic, you know, "I need to be healthy. I'm not doing well, I want to do better," really kind of these more vulnerable moments and, you know, a whole profession that's designed just to address that. I found that very attractive. And then, growing up, just science in general and the intricacies of science. From basic science to physiology in a human body, it's always just fascinating. And when I was 12 years old, I had asked for a fetal pig dissection kit for Christmas, so that's what I got for Christmas. And spent some time down there in the basement dissecting that, and it came with a Johns Hopkins poster of the heart. So, way back in the day, kind of had an inkling of which direction I was heading.
Scott Webb: Yeah, it's really interesting. And again, in reading about you, we saw that your family was involved in the steel industry, which kind of piqued my interest because my grandfather worked in the steel industry and I know this podcast is for Genesis and they're in Ohio, and I grew up a Steelers fan, which may bring some sadness to some listeners out there, but many of my family members are Browns fans and some are Bengals fans. And so just frame through the steel industry, and when we think about your journey, it's an opportunity here to discuss your education, your training, and what it means to someone who came from a family, you know, of steel people, if you will, to receive scholarships and to get those educational opportunities.
Dr. Trevor Ellison: So first, just with this steel industry, I was born in Pittsburgh. You know, we lived there for the first few years of my life. So, there's pictures of my two other brothers and I all in our car seats, all in Steeler's gear. So, in Pittsburgh, my dad was one of three brothers as well, and he was the only one to go to college. But he ended up going to MIT in Boston and swam there and did some work there, and then came back to help kind of run the family business, a contracting company in the steel industry. And two other brothers, union workers, you know, doing plumbing and electricity and the whole deal.
So, you know, growing up my parents provided me with tons of different opportunities and a sense that anything that interested you or you were passionate about or you thought might be interesting was something that you could pursue. And my parents, you know, were gracious enough to provide me the ability to pursue lots of different avenues. And medicine was always the kind of driver, like I said, since at least age 12.
And when I got to medical school, my first goal was I wanted to be a congenital cardiac surgeon. But medical school, there's four years there, there's five years of general surgery. So anyway, as you see things and as you kind of develop, your interests kind of change back and forth. And I remember after I had finished my research years and some time overseas, I'd come back as a fourth year, four out of five. And I was sitting in one of the call rooms in one of our satellite hospitals, and it was like one in the morning. And we got another call from the ED about, I think it was appendicitis or diverticulitis, all important stuff. But I'm sitting there on the bed at one or two in the morning and I was like, "I can't get up at one or two in the morning and kind of get really excited about appendicitis or diverticulitis," as important as they are for the individuals who have them. So at that point I said, "You know what? I got to go back to cardiac," because it's so unbelievably exciting and interesting every step of the way, that if you get called at one or two in the morning about some heart disease, I'm going to be awake and I'm going to be interested and I'm going to be fully engaged and ready to go. So, you know, at that time, I switched back to cardiac surgery. And, yeah, just finished off my training from there.
Scott Webb: Well, tell us more about that. The heart is a very complicated thing. And even for an expert like yourself with lots of letters after your name. Obviously, there's some specific training and a lot of work goes into becoming an expert in the field. So, why'd you really choose, besides that aha moment, why cardiothoracic surgery and what does that mean exactly?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Surgery is fascinating and endlessly interesting. You have the medicine side, and then we also have the ability to do the surgery. And, you know, if you look at the end of the road, the last kind of fashion of being able to help somebody, it ends up being in the operating room. If there's something mechanically wrong that needs to be fixed, the last place, the last stop is in the operating room. And there's something, you know, definitely exciting and intriguing about that.
And, you know, I think one of my favorite images of cardiac surgery is that, in most surgical ORs, they have a back table. In cardiac surgery, there's actually two or three and they're up high because they need to be hanging over the patient. The scrub tech can't really, you know, go back and forth between the table behind them and hand instruments, they need to be right next to you. And so, they have these tables that are high up. There's about three of them with a ton of different instruments on them.
And when you look in a room, you'll see two people operating. It's the surgeon and their first assistant or another resident or fellow. You have these two or three big lights on the ceiling aimed down. You have one, maybe even two of the surgeons with these extra high-powered lights on their head. Both people will be wearing loops, which magnifies the field, about two and a half to three and a half depending on your loop size. And they're sitting with their heads really close together. And the surgeons as they're operating together, you know, don't even need to do anything more than a whisper to communicate. They're so close, their heads are practically touching. And so, all these people are staring at this tiny little spot with such interest and fascination and importance. It's one of those things you walk by and you're like, "I want to be a part of that."
Scott Webb: So, you mentioned being born in Pittsburgh and traveling abroad. So, what brought you to Genesis and, you know, that desire to serve the Genesis community?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: So, I graduated from my training in 2018, and we moved here to Ohio. So, we had moved around quite a few times, growing up in about six or seven different places. And one of the places we lived was actually in Dublin, Ohio. And out of all the places we lived, it was the shortest place we lived, but it was actually our favorite place to live.
So, you know, looking back, when I was applying for different positions, we looked academic, we looked private, we looked hospital-based, we looked kind of all over the country. But you know, Ohio, it definitely stood out because I remembered growing up, clearly remembered that was our favorite place to live. And so, just coming back to Ohio where there's tons of land, the people are fantastic, everybody is incredibly nice, everybody's very reasonable. And just kind of salt of the earth, reasonable people, and just a beautiful state was definitely a draw.
And at Genesis, it was incredible that their whole entire senior leadership team, it has been here anywhere between I think 18 and 25 years. And when you sit down in a room, they're all there. It's not that they're calling somebody in Michigan or calling somebody in California to report in, it's just them. And then, the facilities are absolutely fantastic. They're more than willing to get whatever, equipment, new equipment, whatever it is. They're always willing to do that.
And then lastly, it's always your team. It's the ICU staff. It's your events, practice, practitioners. It's the whole group of people that you actually use to take care of the people and our staff are just absolutely fantastic and easy to communicate with, easy to work with. You get those three things together and, you know, it's a job that you're going to find very hard to pass up.
Scott Webb: So doctor, a guy like yourself who has so many degrees and so many interests, and you've focused in on cardiac surgery, do you have any professional goals left? Is there anything where you're like, you know, "I need some more letters after my name" or something like that?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Here at Genesis, I'm the Director of the Cardiothoracic Surgery Department. So being a leader, being able to lead a department, kind of figure out how to make it work efficiently, you know, the number one priority always, unparalleled patient care, number one. And then, number two is, you know, taking care of your team. I did get a degree in economics and health policy, and I still absolutely love that field of research. And so, I still do publish. I have two papers pending publication now. I had published one just a couple years ago. But, you know, I still intend a hundred percent on adding to the literature in cardiothoracic surgery.
Scott Webb: Yeah, as I sort of prefaced as we got rolling here today, you're incredibly ambitious and I love that. I'll give you an opportunity here at the end to just tell listeners about yourself, if they ever find themselves in the office, or God forbid, they're looking up at you from the table and you're the ones standing over them with the big light on your head and the big lights on the ceiling, what would you want them to know about you, your wife? Do you have pets? What do you do for leisure? You know, what's something they could go, Okay, yeah. So, he's not just the guy who's going to like save my life. He's also into what..." What would that be?
Dr. Trevor Ellison: You know, if you ask my kids or my wife what I do mostly when I get home, it'll sound a little bit boring, but I'm reading and studying about cardiac surgery. Whether it's the STS meetings, whether it's making a PowerPoint, I mean, I'm all in. I also love languages. I speak Spanish. I lived over in Spain for two years. I speak Spanish, but learning Mandarin. My son is learning Mandarin too, so learning that. Learning to play the guitar. I play the violin and a couple of my kids are learning that, so I help them out with the violin and also learn to play the guitar.
I like to try to stay as active and fit as possible. And then other than that, we also just love to hang out as a family. And my wife and I have four kids, and we like to travel. So over the summers, we probably have three or four kind of big trips that we go on as we just kind of spend time together and build memories.
Scott Webb: Yeah, this has been really cool and you hear about everything, your background, your family, all of that. So doctor, thanks so much. You stay well.
Dr. Trevor Ellison: Thanks for having me.
Scott Webb: And for more information, go to genesishcs.org/heartandvascular. And thanks for listening to Sounds of Good Health with Genesis, brought to you by Genesis Healthcare System. If you found this podcast to be helpful, please be sure to tell a friend and subscribe, rate and review this podcast. And check out the entire podcast library for additional topics of interest. I'm Scott Webb. Stay well.