In May 2002, I was about a year into my first job as an attending pulmonary critical care physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center when I woke up with a very strange sensation inside my abdomen. After giving my first ever “Medical Grand Rounds” talk on an unrelated subject, I ended up mentioning my symptoms to a few colleagues. At their insistence, I finally ended up going to the emergency room across campus. When the head of gastrointestinal radiology came in after I had an abdominal CT scan and said I needed to stay overnight, I knew I was in trouble. The scan showed large lymph nodes and that my spleen had ruptured spontaneously. Lo and behold, that’s how I found out I had stage four non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which, at that time, had a five-year survival rate of only about 40%.

Eventually, I had a splenectomy and got six cycles of chemotherapy which included a then-novel drug called rituximab (also known as Rituxan). Now over 20 years later, I can look back and recognize that I was very fortunate to have the benefit of that new medication. The fact that it was available likely played a big role in my recovery. 

While I survived thanks to that and other medications, I now see that there was more to it. Rituximab was available to me because of the concerted efforts of people in both the academic and industry spaces, involving everything from basic science research, clinical research, clinical trials, regulatory processes, research studies on safety and outcomes, and more. Because of that partnership between academic research and for-profit pharmaceutical and biotech research, I am alive today. 

My experience as a catalyst for a new approach to teaching clinicians

When I came back to work in late 2003, my colleagues would often ask me what it was like to be a patient. I realized that doctors — despite interacting with thousands, or even tens of thousands, of patients — have very little sense of the experience of being sick. I recognized an opportunity to teach doctors and medical trainees about the patient experience. Through an intensive medical education fellowship, I learned how to teach clinicians about being a patient and have shared these lessons in a range of formats over the last two decades. 

Bringing collaborative innovation to a wider audience

Over time, I became more and more immersed in all aspects of medical education, eventually participating in discussions about how to bring innovative educational programs from Harvard Medical School (HMS) to the broader world. My role as dean for external education is barely a decade old, and I’m fortunate to lead a team at HMS of amazing staff and faculty bringing the best of medical knowledge and the advances in medical science to a wide range of learners and clients across the world. In addition to clinicians and the lay public, we wanted to help leaders in the health care and life sciences industries understand both the lives of patients and the challenges that clinicians face. It dawned on me — executive education shouldn’t just be informational; it must be transformational.  Stories like mine and of others experiencing illness are at once riveting and moving and highlight the many challenges of health care and how strong collaboration between industry and academic medicine can yield truly remarkable results.

As an educator, I had seen my colleagues at Harvard Business School provide hands-on learning through case studies and site-visit experiences at factories and businesses. At HMS, we realized we could create similarly engaging and profound learning opportunities. We brought executives to meet people who are struggling with real-life health care issues and provided novel opportunities to learn about health care in new ways, for example, watching live surgeries via tele-feed. We brought in perspectives from people across the ecosystem in real time to show why innovation was so important. 

The unique learning experiences Harvard Medical School offers non-medical professionals

The Office for External Education offers learning opportunities that enable industry-based learners to better understand the importance of the work they do.  One of our HMX course participants who worked in biotech marketing shared that our fully asynchronous online immunology course blew her away — finally, she understood the purpose of her company and felt truly connected to her company’s mission. Think about how this benefited her organization and the people it served—it’s powerful and empowering.

At HMS, we can convene stakeholders across the entire health care ecosystem — an ecosystem that is remarkably complex, always changing, and, at times, incredibly inefficient. We have the opportunity to bring people together and change the way that companies do and think about their work. One of my former professors at HMS, Dr. Dan Federman, used to describe this as the “delicious alchemy” of HMS — we bring together talented people and faculty, present them with complex, challenging problems, and are in awe of the amazing ideas that result. That shows the immense value of us all — academics and people in the health care and life sciences industries — coming together and learning from each other. Corporate learners are a vital part of the delicious alchemy at HMS that leads to lifesaving ideas like the ones that saved my life.

David Roberts, MD, is the dean for External Education at Harvard Medical School. 

Learn how corporate learning programs at HMS can help your organization better understand the patient experience and succeed in the highly complex and competitive health care industry.