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Melanie Cole (Host):  UAB MedCast is an ongoing medical education podcast.  The UAB Division of Continuing Education designates that each episode of this enduring material is worth a maximum of 0.25 AMA PRA Category One credit.  To collect credit, please visit uabmedicine.org/medcast and complete the episode’s posttest.

Melanie Cole (Host):  Welcome.  In this podcast today, we’re discussing podcasts as a resource to enlighten the medical community and keep other providers abreast of the latest advances in medicine taking place at UAB Medicine.  Joining me is Dr. Panayotis Vardas.  He’s a cardiac surgeon and assistant professor at UAB.  Dr. Vardas, it’s such a pleasure to have you join us today.  I’d like you to start by telling us what you did with the Thoracic Surgery Resident’s Association as far as podcasts and how that all came about. 

Panayotis Vardas, MD (Guest): Thank you for having me.  It’s a pleasure to be here.  So, we had actually with the Thoracic Surgery Resident’s Association, we have produced a very successful—probably one of the most successful projects we produced in the last, I would say, five years maybe—and all this started from a previous project of the Thoracic Surgery Resident’s Association, which is the National Association of Cardiothoracic Surgeons, and what training could become cardiothoracic surgery residents, essentially, and trainees.  The first project was a book which is [the] traditional way to learn and teach.  It was a book which was focused on preparing the residents for the American Thoracic Surgery Boards.  That means there were topics that they will go through—clinical scenarios, high-yield topics— and review common, important clinical scenarios that actually will encounter every cardiothoracic surgeon at some point in his practice.  So, when we came out with this project that had a huge success among the residents, but the common comment and concern we heard often from the large body of residents because they didn’t have a lot of time to study—they didn’t have time with a book.  It takes time to sit down and go through all these chapters.  So, we thought, “How can we do this better” and this is how the idea of the TSRA Clinical Scenarios Podcasts started.  So, we decided to do essentially a similar project, but in audio format, that the residents can use at their free time or during time that they are doing other activities like driving, going to the gym, exercising, cooking, and absorb some of this information.  

Obviously, we have to encounter different standards to go ahead with this project and one of the most important standards was quality.  How can we make a podcast to have good scientific background and significant quality that can be sponsored by our association and be blessed to be released to the public, and to do this, we discussed that the foremost would be first for a useful format in terms of time should be 20 minutes or less.  So, all the trainees can have—can listen to this while we’re doing something else, and the next thing was—we have to follow some guidelines how to do this podcast—means to go through a clinical scenario ask for specific questions for preoperative planning, did first during the operation, what kind of operation, and postoperative course.  So, it was very standardized, and then third and most important thing, which I think gave an enormous success to our project, was to find the people to ask those questions and to produce the podcast and these people they are, of course—they’re not anybody else than really prominent authorities in our specialty that they have established themselves in traditional ways of academic prestige and academic productivity through books and publications or clinical practice in specific topics.  

So, for example, in our specialty we have a surgery for an arrhythmia.  We call it the Cox-Maze operation.  That surgery was invented by Dr. James Cox.  Guess what?  We did a podcast on arrhythmia surgery and then a professor who developed the podcast and to answer all our questions was Dr. James Cox, who invented the operation.  What is better than this?  So, the ultimate outcome was actually a series of podcasts that have enormous success.  Actually, the project was adapted by the official body of education for our specialty the Thoracic Surgery Director’s Association.  It was incorporated [in] the national curriculum for our trainees, and we had also enormous success because of the format of this educational resource, and outside [the] United States, we can track down through the platform where these podcasts are listened and actually they are listened everywhere you can imagine [in the] world.  You can see how popular they are –which are the podcasts that are more popular, which they listen more or how often—and this is how our project is still carrying, on and we’re still producing podcasts.  Actually, recently one of the last podcasts we produced for TSRA was through our division here, the Cardiothoracic Surgery Division, where Dr. Clifton Lewis talked about robotic cardiac surgery. 

Melanie:  Well, that is amazing and as somebody who does podcasts for a living, Dr. Vardas, I commend you on them, and yes, I agree with everything that you said, and it is very cool that Dr. Cox was able to be on the podcast when he invented that Cox-Maze surgery.  So now tell us—because UAB does these and they do them for continuing medical education credits—so what would you like people to know about the accessibility of these podcasts and why they’re important to hear directly from the experts at UAB because these podcasts are specific from the UAB docs, but they can be heard all over the world for anyone that wants to know about the latest research and medical advancements that you’re doing there at UAB?

Dr. Vardas:  I think it’s a great project, done by a great institution like UAB. The mark of a really high quality podcast are discussing the interests of the person being interviewed, clearly indentifiing who the author and why is the author of this specific podcast clear distinction of between podcasts opinions and it's very true and very important for science. I create information and accessibility and I think all these things are part of the UAB series of podcasts which are directed two different levels of audience. One level of audience are the general population patient, so you can show to them  what UAB offers in terms of healthcare and the second audience is targeted to healthcare professionals and are a little bit more technical podcast and more scientific with more technical language that can give the opportunity to healthcare professionals and this is extermely important for big institutions like UAB because through those podcasts what really UAB offers is our point of view in terms of medical innovations not only robotics but other technologies, latest clinical trials, research studies that we're doing here and development of new procedures and different treatment approaches. It's important to offer to healthcare professionals the latest and best practices with updates on the currents policies and guildlines specialty care from specialty physicians and also it's another opportunity to offer outcomes based on initiatives that we do here for quality and improvement and based on all this the healthcare professionals, they have the opportunity to listen to our podcasts in a very easy, like we discussed, way that it's part of their everyday life and their professional credits and learn through them. 

Melanie:  So, before we wrap up, what do you see happening in the future, and what do you feel is the most important aspect of these?  Is it the convenience factor?  Is it that it’s a way to educate people where they don’t have to necessarily watch a video, and you have to be in front of the camera and that as your said, you can do it while you’re in your car or driving or cooking or any of those things, and what are you hoping will happen with these as we go because students, Dr. Vardas, and residents and other providers and other professionals can learn so much.  You’re exactly right.  So, what would you like us to know, kind of give us a great summary about podcasts as a resource for the medical community?

Dr. Vardas:  I think we follow the trends.  Currently, medicine will see a trend in audiovisual resources.  We have books that we have in our computer system ourselves, and we have podcasts.  We have videos.  We have Twitter that we actually many times discuss a case about a patient without obviously identifiers and then the indication for the specific patient, but we discuss across the country.  This [is] happening right now.  So, I think it’s here and is going to stay here.  The big challenge, I will say, is how to make this promising media and adjunct traditional training methodologies?  How can we make it to be objective, guideline directed, and if it’s truly impact clinical practice, and we don’t have any research currently that shows that podcasts can impact behavior in clinical practice, and we need obviously research which should be statistically significant and which would make the comparison between what is traditional training and traditional teaching versus the new trend in teaching.  So, I think it’s here to stay, but we need quality, and we need metrics to make this a valid way of teaching and perpetuat[ing] knowledge.   

Melanie:  Well said, Dr. Vardas, and certainly so true, and we look forward to having you again on this podcast to discuss cardiac surgery and some of the fascinating procedures that you’re doing at UAB Medicine.  Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise and really interesting information on podcasts as a resource, and a community physician can refer a patient to UAB Medicine by calling the MIST Line at 1-800-UAB-MIST.  That concludes this episode of the UAB MedCast.  It’s a podcast for physicians.  For more information on resources available at UAB Medicine head on over to our website at uabmedicine.org/physician.  If you as a provider found this podcast informative, please share on your social media and be sure not to miss all the other interesting podcasts in our library.  I’m Melanie Cole.