Brian McGowan

A week after I graduated from college my new doctoral advisor looked toward my belt and said, 'good you already have a pager.'

Over the next 4.5 years I was on call 24/7 and I spent more than 473 separate evenings and nights in the Cardiac OR at Temple University Hospital. As a doctoral student and lead on the cardiovasular research team I reviewed the medical charts for patients undergoing LVAD placement or heart transplants. And on 473 separate occasions I walked across North Broad street with human heart tissue under my arm - this tissue was used for a myriad of studies: tissue-level, cellular, subcellular, and genetic.

On about 15 occasions I was able to join the organ harvest teams in the collection of a 'normal' heart. These organs failed to meet the minimal criteria for transplantation - this 'normal' tissue served as control in the myriad of studies described above. The days we received a call for a 'normal harvest' were some of the most exciting and most stressful of my training.

By day I studied the remodeling of the heart, spending 1000's of hours developing and perfecting surgical models of cardiac overload. These models and techniques were shared with colleagues at Stanford, Wyoming, MUSC, and Thomas Jefferson University. In the second year of my doctoral training I was invited to join the faculty at Arcadia University as Course Director for a graduate course in Medical Physiology. For eight years the course evolved and nearly 200 students entered the classroom with a vague interest in both science and patient care and left the classroom with a hunger to integrate their knowledge of medical physiology into the care they provided to each and every patient they encountered during their clinical rotations.

This combination of experience as a medical scientist and educator lead me to a career and a passion for medical education and healthcare improvement. And this passion continues to this day.

Over the past 5 months I have written the book on social learning in healthcare: "#SocialQI: Simple Solution for Improving Your Healthcare" is scheduled to be released in the summer of 2012. It is my goal that this book will empower patients, support physicians, and drive innovative discoveries in medicine. If you are interested in my ideas, or want to discuss ideas that you feel could drive change in healthcare, please connect with me through twitter: @briansmcgowan