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DISRxUPT is a podcast from the Cedarville University Center for Pharmacy Innovation which explores novel advances in the practice of pharmacy. From nanotechnology to unique public health initiatives, DISRxUPT will highlight stories of pharmacists who are changing the paradigm of patient care.
Tune in for new content once a month detailing how the profession of pharmacy continues to change and how the Center for Pharmacy Innovation is playing a key role in this transformation.
Welcome to DISRxUPT, a podcast of the Cedarville University Center for Pharmacy Innovation. Today on the podcast, our guest is doctor Chris Bland. Chris is a clinical professor at the University of Georgia College of Pharmacy and distinguished pharmacist with extensive experience in critical care and infectious diseases. He is the cofounder of Teach Me Pharm, an innovative educational platform designed to enhance pharmacy education through interactive and engaging content. Chris also leads the UGA Critical Care Collaborative, an initiative aimed at improving patient outcomes through interdisciplinary collaboration.
Justin Cole:Thanks again for listening to DISRxUPT. Today, I am pleased to have Dr. Chris Bland on the podcast. Chris is passionate about innovation in pharmacy and is dedicated to mentoring the next generation of pharmacists. In addition to his academic and clinical roles, Dr. Bland is the co author of InteGREAT, a guidebook for creating great teams in health care, and a book that provides valuable insights into building effective health care teams and improving patient care. His contributions to pharmacy education and practice have earned him numerous accolades and recognition within the health care community. And I'm excited also to learn a bit more about Teach Me Pharm today.
Justin Cole:So, Chris, thank you for joining us on the podcast.
Chris Bland:Justin, it's great to be here. Very excited to be really honored to be a part of this and just get to tell kind of our story. And I love the idea of focusing on innovation. I think that's fantastic.
Justin Cole:Well, think we need to do more of it in the pharmacy academy. So I'm excited to hear about why it's so important to you and the next generation of pharmacists. So Chris, I'd love to just let you tell your story. How did you end up in pharmacy practice and eventually in academia?
Chris Bland:Yeah, I definitely have the most weird route probably to academia of anyone. So I graduated nearly twenty five years ago. In high school, you know, I loved chemistry. You probably hear that a lot from others. And pharmacy was put kind of in my wheelhouse from one of my chemistry teachers.
Chris Bland:She talked to me about it. And really though, you know, I thought, okay, I'll do pharmacy. And then I got into pre pharmacy, and actually one of my organic chemistry teachers was like, Well, you know pharmacists do a lot of different things. And she explained about rounding with physicians and really being the experts in drug dosing and a number of things. I had never actually heard that to that point.
Chris Bland:And that got me even more excited about going into that career. That's how I got into pharmacy itself at the University of South Carolina. So, when I was at the University of South Carolina, graduated, the residency I wanted to do, actually the guy stepped down right before I was going to start applying in my last year. And this was at a time when not everybody was applying, of course, for residency and there weren't nearly as many people going into it. So I started my career actually working for the United States Army.
Chris Bland:I worked as a civilian at Dwight David Eisenhower Army Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia. And I did that job for fourteen and a half years. It was a great clinical job. In the Army, we joke when they come to you and say, We have an opportunity for you to excel, That means you're about to get volunteered to do something. So I a little bit of everything from infectious disease and critical care, of course, which I do a lot now.
Chris Bland:But then I started a bariatric surgery follow-up clinic, talk about innovation. That was still to this day one of my favorite things I've been able to do. Our surgeons came to me and said, look, we don't really do med dosing and med titration, so we need some help. So I was very willing to do that, did anticoagulation. But then in 2015, when I was in Augusta, I had done some adjunct faculty work for the University of Georgia.
Chris Bland:So UGA has essentially a two by two campus model, where there's the main campus in Athens, but then there's extended campuses in Augusta and Albany. And then in 2015, they said we're starting one in Savannah. And so I really love the idea of academia. I love teaching and mentoring. I'd done a lot of that for medical residents while I was working for the Army and teaching them and training them.
Chris Bland:That will lead to my discussion on Teach Me Pharm here in a minute. But with that, in 2015, I made the very difficult decision to move my family and start a new journey with academia. And this is my tenth year working for UGA, and it's been incredible, to be honest with you. It's a lot better than even I thought it would be. I I really do feel like I've got one of the best jobs in the world because of the flexibility and the ability to just do what do different things that you normally do.
Chris Bland:So it's been a great experience for me overall kind of reflecting on it. I was reflecting on it a lot, actually, as I was reading and preparing for this interview.
Justin Cole:Yeah, I think we have a few things in common in that. Maybe it's fair to say we're both accidental academics, right? This wasn't maybe in our career path at the very beginning of starting in pharmacy. But I couldn't agree with you more that the flexibility and the opportunity to really invest and innovate is there in the academic life. And that's really what I want to learn a bit more about from you today and how that's a part of what you do.
Justin Cole:So that leads me to this question, which is: Why do you believe innovation is crucial for us as pharmacy academicians, and how can we foster that culture of innovation within our institutions?
Chris Bland:Yeah. So what I would say when I talk to my students, and especially whenever I'm, you know, having a meeting with them, maybe it's a you know, and as as we've talked about previously, I teach infectious disease. And infectious diseases is one of the more harder specialties for students to learn because there's a huge component of just getting the knowledge base of what drugs cover what bugs and then applying that. But I think the thing that I tell them a lot is, why is this so difficult, but why is it so important? And that's because I'm not just teaching you a subject.
Chris Bland:You're going to take this information and apply it to a real live patient at the time when they need this information the most. So there's already an amount of difficulty within the field. But then the question is, how do you apply that to a patient? This is patient care. These are real live patients that depend upon getting good therapy and keeping it as safe as possible.
Chris Bland:And the first thing we talk about is do no harm. And so doing no harm medication therapy are fraught with great benefits, but also some potential adverse effects. So why is it so important? Because as we innovate, the whole point of this is to do things differently to what? Get better outcomes.
Chris Bland:And so within the academia world, one of the things I hope no one ever says about me is, Man, that guy is stuck two decades ago. He's teaching drugs that don't even exist anymore. And so from my standpoint is, okay, how can we stay on the cutting edge? How can we motivate our students to really want to be those innovators? Ideally, I think part of our job in academia is, yes, we want to innovate, but also we want to motivate.
Chris Bland:Motivate those students to be those innovators and go out and do those innovative practices. One of the things I try to tell students is, yeah, I'm teaching you. We have core things we have to teach, but I always tell them what is missing? When you go to a rotation, what do you see that you could maybe change or improve or get better? Or what what in practice do you wish was there?
Chris Bland:And to be thinking that way, not to be a cog in a wheel and just continue to do the same thing over and over again because as we know and we're seeing right now, things are changing a lot. How do we and I think the second part of your question was essentially how do we foster that? When I think about why do I do things, obviously there are lot of reasons, but one major reason is incentivization. Another I word. Doing a lot of I words here, Justin, today. So incentivizing people. So you incentivize people with, number one, at UGA at least, part of our strategic plan. One of our goals within our strategic plan is how do we innovate better? And so that's something that is always at the top of our minds as far as what is our goals for the next five, ten years. And then just incentivizing as well with awards, with notifications, you know, rewarding people, but not necessarily financially, but just, you know, hey, you're doing great work here.
Chris Bland:And I think sharing those ideas is really important as well among faculty. Because I feel like they're like, one of my favorite books I've read is a book called Range. And it talks about why generalists thrive in a specialist world. And there's a lot I can learn from a pediatric you you love peds. There's a lot I can learn in peds that might help me with an ID or critical care or ambulatory care or a number of different specialty areas.
Chris Bland:And so I think the more that we're sharing together within our various fields, sometimes we can get siloed off pretty quickly. And that can lead to more innovation across a number of fields within pharmacy. So I think incentivization and sharing those ideas and really just motivating our students to see those ideas and go forward, because they're going to be the ones that do a lot of the innovating, hopefully, once they graduate.
Justin Cole:Yeah, all these I words, innovation, ideas, inspiration, incentives. I love it. I'm a big nerd for alliteration. So thanks for taking us there. Yeah.
Justin Cole:You know, a couple of things that you said really, really resonate with me. And even going back to the first question, in academia, we actually have flexibility to help push the profession in the directions it needs to go. And I think we, who are teachers, need to embrace that teacher scholar mindset, but also the innovator mindset, right, where we can help make the profession better.
Justin Cole:But even more importantly, I think one of the things that's most exciting about being a faculty member is the impact that we can have on our students is multiplied for the patients they serve. Because if we're able to help them to learn to be creative problem solvers and not just pharmacists who follow guidelines and recipes, wow, they are ready to go out and make a massive difference. So for me, it sounds like same for you. That's what gets me out of bed every day and makes me excited to come to work. Right?
Chris Bland:Absolutely. I mean, I was actually having this discussion yesterday with someone, you know, what are the top skills that a student can have upon graduation? Problem solving, like you said, has to be in like the top three, right? Absolutely. What problem you think about innovation and business.
Chris Bland:Like what problem are you know, if you listen to any of these books or they always come back to what problem are you solving? Because if you can solve problems, you're going to be very employed. I was actually having that discussion with a former student yesterday who is he's going into a field where it's very minimal people are in it. But I'm telling him how I'm excited for him because that's going to make him very employable long term, and people are gonna know, he'll enjoy becoming an expert in that craft.
Justin Cole:Yeah, absolutely. So I'd love to hear a bit more about some of the innovative things that you've done. So I'd love to just give you the opportunity to provide an example of how you've been able to be an innovator or start something new in your career.
Chris Bland:Yeah, so I'll go back to what I briefly mentioned in the intro about bariatric surgery. So at the time this is 2010 or so, maybe even a little bit earlier I had been approached by a surgeon that I was working with in the ICU. And he was our chief bariatric surgeon. What was solving a problem? So what was the problem?
Chris Bland:The problem was most of the time they would just send these patients to their primary care physicians to have their medications evaluated. But the problem was we were in the middle of the Iraq War. And so they were many of them deployed. And so they could not get them in in a reasonable time frame to be able to be seen. So, Justin, I'm not I gotta be truthful here.
Chris Bland:When he came to me and said, Hey, I got a really big project for you. It's gonna be a lot of work. But again, I need help with this. I went to my boss and I'm like, I don't think I can do this. I was like, Because I gotta do this on top of everything else.
Chris Bland:And to his credit, his name is David Bookstaver. He's retired now. David looked at me and he's like, no, Chris, you have to do this. This is innovative. No one's doing anything like this.
Chris Bland:And I said, that's part of my fear. There's a fear with that, right? That comes like, I started looking at the literature. How do you adjust medications around bariatric surgery? Nothing.
Chris Bland:Everybody talks about, Okay, if you have bariatric surgery, you'll come off of your diabetes meds, your hypertension meds, XYZ meds. But nobody really logistically watched the sausage make, right? They didn't tell you how to come off of it, how to do it safely. So, started from scratch and started seeing I realized I needed to see patients before their surgery. Don't wait till after their surgery.
Chris Bland:And what we were able to do really has been amazing. We were able to design a clinic. They gave me space in their general surgery clinic. I would see these patients both before and after at the same time. I mean, it was amazing what we were able to accomplish and I was able to show that really, and now with all the obesity pharmacotherapy options that are out there, now this is part of that, is we were able to really prevent a lot of harm because what triggered this, the problem was they didn't have anybody to see them.
Chris Bland:And number two, they were all presenting to the ER. So they were coming in hypovolemic, hypotensive, hypoglycemic. And so we cut that down nearly ninety percent just by dropping back on the meds prior to surgery. And patients were happy, right? Who wants to come to clinic, right?
Chris Bland:But these patients, they love to come see me, Justin. Why? Because they had been talking to their buddies and they knew that they were going to come off medications. And so, patients were really getting excited about that to be able to come off their medications in a safe manner. So, that's probably the most innovative thing I've ever done.
Chris Bland:I still to this day, now with obesity pharmacotherapy, I'm able to come in and provide the well, have you thought about surgery? Because that is another option. But that's in a situation where when you're doing innovative things, it's scary because no one's ever done some of this before and you feel like you're going to fail. Guess what? I failed multiple times.
Chris Bland:I had a guy, he was like, do you know what you're doing? And it's because I didn't know that the surgeons were putting them on full liquid diets two weeks prior to their surgery. So he was crashing hypoglycemia on his seventythirty insulin over and over again, well, you learn and then you move on. So I started evaluating everybody two weeks prior to their surgery, cutting their insulin in half or 75%, and that actually alleviated a lot of those issues. But that's part of it, right?
Chris Bland:Failure is kind of the goal in a gym, but it's a little bit difficult in patients because you really don't want to hurt somebody. But at the same time now, we've been able to publish a lot of that data and help a lot of people that are trying to do this in their own geographical areas across the country.
Justin Cole:Yeah. So many great lessons, even from that simple example there. And I love that you've gone the extra step to share the successes and also the things that you've learned so that others can learn from it and create new clinics. I mean, that's one of those things, Chris, that just having a problem solving innovator mindset can impact those locally right around you. But when we share and learn from those experiences, who knows how many more pharmacists were able to jump into clinics just because you shared those experiences. Right? We we may never know the impact.
Chris Bland:No. For sure. But, you know, I have gotten emails before, and it's just like, wow. Amazing. And I I joke with my students, Justin.
Chris Bland:I tell them, our project doesn't end at the poster. It always ends at the publication. Right? And then I think it's for academicians, it's very important for us to be able to help others in the profession with that.
Justin Cole:Absolutely. Yeah. So I'd love to pivot to a more recent thing you've been working on. It's been a few years now, but tell me about Teach Me Farm.
Chris Bland:Oh, man. I love Teach Me Farm. So students, they will speed me up. When they're listening to my lectures at Georgia, they will speed me up because I they tell me I sound like Matthew McConaughey recorded, which I wish I looked like him, but I do sound like him apparently a little bit. But they said, Man, we're listening to these lectures and they're two hours long and they're an hour and a half.
Chris Bland:And they're just so much. And you know, like, the biggest thing we're fighting is TikTok and social media where it's just everybody has, like, a ten second attention span. Several years ago, Teach Me Pharm actually was, founded without me initially. It was two guys, my two cofounders, Mike Keryeski and Matt Kauflin. And they're both actually in Ohio.
Chris Bland:They know. Yeah. Your neck of the woods. And so I had known Matt through many years of consulting for a number of different ways. And he and I, there was another guy we would get together with and we would talk for like four hours, you know, because we just love pharmacy, we love teaching, we love teaching students, residents, you name it.
Chris Bland:So they came to me and said, look, we're getting going with this. So our idea is, how do we apply what students, residents, practitioners need to know in a quick fashion that also focuses on the practical aspects of drug therapy. And so our idea was, Mike, our co founder, he's very good with websites, website development, recording. So that's the big friction point is a lot of us can do content development. But as far as the website, that is totally out of my wheelhouse.
Chris Bland:So I had to trust Matt and say, Matt, I've never met this guy, but you're wanting us to be partners? And he's like, You can trust him. And I was like, I trust Matt with my life. So I was like, Okay, I'm going into this. I finally did meet Mike like six months ago.
Chris Bland:It was funny. I had met him before, except on Zoom or whatever. But our goal is how can we make learning pharmacology and drug therapy fun? Like how can you make it fun, exciting, passionate? We were talking before this started.
Chris Bland:Just like everything. I did. I was that student that, hey, I did an internal med rotation. I liked it. I did ID.
Chris Bland:I liked it. And so I want to motivate and students. And you go outside even a pharmacy and most healthcare nursing my two daughters are in nursing school. Okay? They tell me, they're like, Dad, nurses are petrified of drug therapy. They don't like it. They think it's their hardest thing. So our idea was how can we make this digestible, but not like we still want the highest quality videos on drug therapy out there. So I can talk about how we've kind of changed over the years and kind of how we've worked through that. But that was our passion.
Chris Bland:It was how do we take our passion for condensing things into a usable format, like listening to it online or watching a video or listening to it on your phone? No matter where you are with your life, if you're in the gym, walking, you can listen to this in ten to fifteen minutes for most of these and get a lot of benefit.
Justin Cole:Yeah. I love the idea behind Teach Me Pharm. So, yeah, maybe talk about some of those challenges and how they've caused you to pivot and change things and get better.
Chris Bland:Yeah. So initially, you're like, so excited. You're you're fired up. You're like, let's do this. Right?
Chris Bland:And then the reality hits that I have a full time job. And, you know, I've got a full time job at the college. I'm married. I have three kids. Life is busy, right?
Chris Bland:And so, the reality is and Matt and Mike also have full time jobs. So, we're doing this as our passion project, so to speak. So, the challenges are: A) we already have full time jobs B, we will not sacrifice quality. Ever. And that was something we talked about at the very beginning.
Chris Bland:We're not just going to put videos out to make videos. So if we do it, it's going to be the highest quality. So with that, the creation process, the development process, the recording process, it's just a time crunch with our full time jobs. We always text with each other like this time of year, oh yeah, we're about to get two weeks off. We're going put out a lot of videos.
Chris Bland:And we will do that. The other part of it is we kind of said, Okay, at first we were talking about drug class videos. Like we're going to talk about angiotensin receptor blockers or ACE inhibitors. And we would do that. And it was great.
Chris Bland:But what we realized is every student, but really this is not just for students or residents, this is for practitioners. And so we started broadening out to say, Okay, what is a learning need across the continuum? For some people, it's an individual drug. Like we started recording top 200 drug videos. So you can go on Pip tazo.
Chris Bland:At our school, a lot of schools, they do drug cards, right? And they're like, oh man, drug cards. It's like P1 year, you barely know what you're doing. So what we've done is we take a ten minute video on pip tazo, Zosyn. And we'll talk about the core aspects of the drug, but then we bring in those things that you learn on rotation that are like key principles or what I would say clinical pearls.
Chris Bland:So, in ten minutes, if you listen to that, you're going to know how to dose it. You're to know what it covers. You're going to know its clinical pearls. You're going to know a lot in ten minutes. The other thing we do is sometimes I'll have great cases.
Chris Bland:And so, I'll have a great case. I had one. There's one that's probably my favorite. I think I call it when trying to remember the exact title, but it's something like when summer flu becomes drug hypersensitivity or something like that. And what it was, I had a patient that told me they had the flu, but it was July.
Chris Bland:It wasn't the flu. They were having, what appeared to be Stevens Johnson syndrome from lamotrigine. And so I teach in that video that twenty to thirty percent of Steven Johnson syndrome, or TEN, will actually start out with a flu like illness a week ahead of time. And so in school, a lot of times you learn about the rash, you don't necessarily learn about the flu like illness before. So we've kind of broadened out our videos to like top 200 cases, and we still do our disease states and our drug classes.
Chris Bland:But the other thing we're doing that's kind of exciting, and I don't know about Cedarville, but students down here, they love games. Oh, same here. Yeah, they love games. So we're designing games. They're not live yet, but we're going to have these live in the beginning of the year that are going to be novel ways to learn drug therapy.
Chris Bland:For example, we have an idea where we have four drugs that are listed, but they don't look related at all, Justin. So it'd be like bleomycin, amiodarone, and, nitrofurantoin. You're like, what in the world is going on here? But the common thread, right, is they all cause pulmonary toxicity. Right?
Chris Bland:So the idea is that you're learning things a little bit differently. And then we're also going to have a different game where we might have more answers and you've got to pick the one that's not right. And I've run this by a number of different students across the country and they love it. So we're trying to do whatever we can to make drug therapy learning easier for not only pharmacists, but also nurses, physicians, PAs, NPs, you name it, because we know a lot of med errors occur every day in hospitals and clinics across the country. So we're trying to keep people safe.
Justin Cole:Oh, I love that. You're now the second person in the month. Our previous guest also was focused on innovation and education. And there's just so much opportunity there. So keep up the great work.
Justin Cole:We could keep talking about Teach Me Pharm all day, I also want to get to a bunch of other things that you do as well. So Chris, could you also tell me a bit more about the UGA Critical Care Collaborative?
Chris Bland:Yeah, these are definitely my best friends in the field. So, these are five faculty, five of us across the state of Georgia, all at the University of Georgia. And the way this happened was in 2017, we already had three faculty, Trisha Branan, Anthony Hawkins, and myself, that were on faculty that had done a lot of critical care. I rounded with an ICU team for nearly twelve years at my last job. We had two critical hires.
Chris Bland:We hired Susan Smith and Andrea Sikora. And when the five of us it was kind of an interesting dynamic because we had five people kind of in the same area, or at least experience within the area, all at the same college. But we were on four different campuses. And so we realized, man, we have a unique opportunity here because we have five people within the same field. I mean, I know at some schools, you may have one critical care person.
Chris Bland:So it was just interesting how that worked out. So we got together at a retreat in 2017 and we realized very quickly we had something special. We all just sometimes you get in a group of people and we just you talk and talk and talk and it's like you have to stop it because it's so late at night. We realized we took some personality inventories. I'm trying to remember.
Chris Bland:I think it was the Meyers Briggs one. And we were all five different. And I said, this is our team. This is our team. And we have an incredible opportunity.
Chris Bland:And so that's what motivated us to say, well, let's start something official to go forward. And originally, it was going to be called the UGA, it was going to be called CCC. But we went to social media and that was taken. And so that's how it became UGAC3, the UGA Critical Care Collaborative. So our primary goal is initially very simple.
Chris Bland:It's on our website. But essentially we have a mission, right? We want to foster critical care research and education across the state of Georgia. That's how it started in 2017 and, you know, has just gotten better and better each and every year.
Justin Cole:Well, over the last seven years, you guys have accomplished a lot. So what is maybe one of the success stories or accomplishments that you're most proud of coming out of UGAC3?
Chris Bland:Yeah, you know, we're all in academia, right? So I think, you know, what's interesting is we're all different. As I told you, all our personality inventories are different. Big thing with Susan and Trisha or Susan and Andrea, they're finishers. So like, we were super happy to get them because me and Trisha and Anthony, we could come up with 100 ideas but never finish them.
Chris Bland:And so they helped us with that. But really, when I and I you know, this question I really thought about for a long time. And it's like, okay. Success story. For me, and I think for us, is that we are the the unique common line among all of us is we want to mentor and make our students and residents successful.
Chris Bland:And so a lot of these principles that we have, done through mentorship have been integrated into our students. And so the success story for us is we have mentored in a project in some form or fashion, nearly 100 UGA trainees. And so how does that impact practice? Well, now all of these former students are now in practice all over the country. And so they're taking those principles that we have devoted into them, shared into them, and really just that is going to change practice much better than just the five of us could by ourselves.
Chris Bland:And so now we get emails or texts, or we see them at mid year and they're doing great things. They're winning preceptor of the year. They're starting a new practice. They're doing some innovation in their own practice area. And so that's been very, very exciting.
Chris Bland:So I would say just that common thread of all of our former students impacting practice in some way. And a number of them have gone into critical care, but a number of them go into other things. And we just want them to really change practice wherever they're at.
Justin Cole:Impact multiplied. Such a great outcome there. So Chris, my understanding is that there's also been relatively new project that's also spawned out of the UGAC3 Collaborative, and that's a book entitled InteGREAT that you and your team wrote. So what inspired you and your team to write the book? And what are some of the key messages you want readers to take away?
Chris Bland:Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that was definitely one of the hardest things I've ever done and definitely one of the most fun afterwards. So our team, as I mentioned earlier, our major focus was on the state of Georgia. We wanted to focus in on Georgia, education, research in Georgia. But then we had kind of done that, felt like we'd done a good job.
Chris Bland:But then we started to dream a little bit. And Andrea Sikora, one of our members, had written a book on mentorship. And so we knew she experience, had gone through it, that gave us a little confidence because I was kind of scared. I've never done this before. When I see an author on stage, I'm like, wow, they're so amazing.
Chris Bland:And they are. But with that, we made a decision like, how can we take our experiences and kind of like what you talked about, multiply that? How can we multiply this for others that are in academia or any healthcare team that's out there. ICU, of course, is our wheelhouse because we've all worked very closely with nurses, multidisciplinary physicians, PAs, and NPs within an ICU setting. But this can really be applied anywhere.
Chris Bland:We actually went, did a retreat. We went to the North Georgia Mountains and sat in an Airbnb with a beautiful view of the changing leaves. And we kind of locked ourselves in there and rode it for two days. So, we rode about 75% of it really in that two day period. We were all in the same room.
Chris Bland:And so we were making sure we had our chapters set up and make sure we weren't overlapping at all. But the idea behind the book is most people you hear a book and you think like, oh man, War and Peace, 1,200 pages, whatever. But this is 150 pages and every chapter is pretty short. It's usually three or four pages and then there'll be three or four assessment questions after each chapter to really so that even if you had ten minutes, fifteen minutes, you could get a lot done with one chapter. And so the idea behind that is short chapters, quick hitters, get something done, accomplish, think on an aspect of integrating your team, whether that's forming your team, growing your team, or kind of renewing your team and sharpening them, like iron sharpens iron, right?
Chris Bland:So that's the idea behind the book. And so the other thing too is what we've done is we designed the book so that if we wanted to go to a school and run a workshop, we can do it because those run very easily with those chapters. So it's been a very exciting process, but we're hoping, you know, a lot of teams can really benefit from reading this and taking that information and applying. It's kind like a budget. If you even think about the aspect of a budget, you tend to save money.
Chris Bland:With this, it's more, okay, let's think about how our team's operating, how can we improve things, and here's some tools to be able to do that.
Justin Cole:Chris, I have a copy of that book, and I've been able to work through some of the chapters. And there are a few takeaways. At first, kudos to you and your team. I think you accomplished your goal. But another thing that you've already talked about with Teach Me Pharm that I think seemed to be an inspiration for how you approach this work is that, as you mentioned, everything's in bite sized chunks, right?
Justin Cole:So with today's attention span, especially of younger learners just being different than generations before, I think you've accomplished the goal of making this very digestible, as I think you used the word for Teach Me Farm earlier for anyone that's using it. So you can buy it on Amazon, guys. I'll do a commercial myself for InteGREAT. It's a really helpful book for looking at how multi disciplinary teams can gel and work together in various care environments. So go and check it out.
Justin Cole:So Chris, maybe as a preview for our listeners, is there a particular chapter or concept from the book that you believe is especially relevant to today's health care environment?
Chris Bland:Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you, Justin, for saying that about our book. That means a lot from us, and we're hoping, as we said, this can help a lot of people. There's two chapters to me that stand out, and they're totally different. One is essentially and the exact title of the chapter is something very bland for my name, but it's essentially establishing infrastructure.
Chris Bland:And you're like, wow, this sounds amazing. I really want to read this book. But what we found is that really when you those are the things that people want to know about, like how do you store your data? What kind of website are you going to have? Who's going to lead this thing?
Chris Bland:So it's all those operational aspects of a team that are really important to settle because otherwise your team will not go forward. So it's all the logistics of who's going to be in our team, how should we form our team, how often should we meet, how are we going to meet, and what sort of storage are we going to use. It's all those things that like nobody really is excited about, but you got to do them in order to have an effective team. And then my other chapter I really like towards the end of the book, and it's because I think about all the memories of my UGAC3 folks is breaking bread. All of us are critical care folks by history or currently.
Chris Bland:And COVID was really hard for a lot of reasons. And the critical care aspect of COVID was probably the hardest among other health care professionals. You think about the first year of the pandemic, there was a lot of ICUs were full, patients were dying on a daily basis, there was no vaccine, all of that. Breaking bread is so important for any team because that's where you build those relationships in the lighter moments that then when the hard moments come, like a code or a very sick patient or the death of a patient, even in ambulatory care setting. That's a really hard thing.
Chris Bland:We were actually talking about that here yesterday at UGA, one of my faculty, is a lot of our students have never seen a patient die until they get on a rotation. And so by breaking bread, sharing a meal with one another, we know the power in that. And that allows us to really build those bonds, learn about each other, learn about each other's history, our personalities. That when you get into a work environment, it's gonna make you a much more effective team. Because there you've built those bonds, built those relationships so that when the patient is in front of you and they need your best, you're able to give it to them as a team.
Justin Cole:A lot of great things that can come from that. Again, go check out the book if you're interested in it. So I want to transition to a more personal topic here at the end of our podcast, Chris, because you've mentioned that, of course, as an academic, you have a lot of different hats that you wear. There's a lot going on. But also, you've got a family and your wife that you love dearly and responsibilities there that you take seriously.
Justin Cole:So how do you balance all of your professional responsibilities in these innovation things that you like to do with your personal life? And what are some strategies you found that are effective for maintaining this balance of being an academic and innovator, but also a family guy?
Chris Bland:Oh, man. Not well many times. How do you balance it? It's it's it's incredibly difficult. I do not like to tell people no. Like, if you ask me to do something, I want to do it. I want to help people. I want to serve. I want to do these things. But my wife said it best yesterday when I told her I was preparing for this.
Chris Bland:She goes, Well, remember, for everything you say yes to, you got to say no to something else. And she's been very patient with me. My children have been very patient with me because I am busy. I am trying to you know, do a great job. And so there's this always I feel like there's this tension between excellence and not being lazy, but then also taking time to do the things that are really going to be eternal and important.
Chris Bland:And so that is something I did very poorly my first ten years of my career. I've gotten a lot better the last five years. And I think a big part of that is I have a wife and a family. We have a very open discussion on things. And so we're able to communicate very clearly like, Hey, dad, you've been working a ton lately.
Chris Bland:Hey, we're doing this thing this night and this is what we're going to do. So, I think the biggest thing that I've found helpful is setting boundaries, like firm boundaries. I wish I could tell you I've never worked when I got home. That's not the case. I have.
Chris Bland:But there are certain things that are not negotiable with that setting boundaries. Students, they don't understand this at times. Had a student one time that said, oh, I can meet with you Saturday morning or Friday at four And I'm like, neither one of those times will work, you know? But I do tell students early on, especially in the classes I teach, that, hey, I rarely will look at my email on the weekends, so if you email me, I'm not going to get back to you until Monday. And telling them that ahead of time, it actually has been great.
Chris Bland:Like, they understand it like, oh, he's not gonna look at it on the weekend. But they know Monday morning first thing, I'll I'll be the first one to get back to them. So I think it's it is a balance, you know, to carry that out. I've not done it well at times, but I think firm boundaries are very good.
Justin Cole:Yeah, that's great advice. So, Chris, you've already dropped a few words and language that I think many of our listeners will pick up on that demonstrate faith is an important aspect of your life as well. So what role does your faith play in balancing the demands of work and other aspects of life?
Chris Bland:Yeah. So so definitely as a Christian, you know, born again believer in Jesus, he's everything. And so like I took this job not really just for the job. I mean, the job's great, you know, but they can hire anybody here. You know, they can hire anybody at Cedarville.
Chris Bland:It's truly a calling, right? So the idea is that everything I do. I read a book by Tim Keller a few years ago. I need to think of the name of the book, but it's about work and it's about being a believer in a workplace. And, you know, I should be the most excellent worker here.
Chris Bland:Right? I should have the best attitude. I should help the students the most. I should do the most work. I should not.
Chris Bland:Everything is that worldview, that lens, by the way that I see what I do on a daily basis. And so understanding that I do have different roles. I am a teacher. I am a researcher. I am a father. I am a husband. I'm a friend. And so a lot of times what I've been realized is I need to not have my schedule so jam packed that I don't have time for a student who's going through a tough time. I mean, the stuff that I've heard you know? And and when you do that, Justin, you know this, when you do that, the students know you're different.
Chris Bland:And they know they can trust you and come tell you things. I mean, I've had things told to me, you know, student tells me their dad just got diagnosed with cancer, or their parents just divorced, or, you know, one of their parents is struggling with substance abuse. I lost my mom. Excuse me. It's been kind of tough to talk about.
Chris Bland:I lost my mom when she was 50 to alcoholism. And so with that, I'm very sensitive to those issues for our students. So how does this help me? I have to realize that God has me here for a reason. Many reasons. And I don't necessarily know what they are immediately, but retrospectively. Right? Retrospective study. I'll figure it out. But it's it's been awesome.
Chris Bland:I mean, to really be able to pour it into to students and my family life. I've been blessed. My oldest daughter just got engaged, like, two weeks ago, so we're planning a wedding. And it's just been great. I mean, I I've been blessed so much, and that word gets overused a lot.
Chris Bland:But I've had hard times and good times here. We've been short staffed here, and that that's tough. But, man, just the what's what's the eternity? What does this look like in eternity? That's really the question. Like, that's the goal. Like Paul talks about continuing to run the race no matter what. So it's it's been awesome.
Justin Cole:We appreciate you sharing that. And it's a unique opportunity to be investing in the lives of young people who are training to be the future professionals in a profession that we love, too. And hopefully, we make that eternal impact beyond just the physical impact we make on the health of those that we serve. So thanks for sharing that. Well, Chris, do you have any last minute advice you'd love to share with health care professionals about innovation?
Justin Cole:And maybe more specifically, why it's so important to us who are in the pharmacy academy?
Chris Bland:Yeah, I think for innovation, never like, my eye what I talked about earlier, like, be looking for solutions. Be a problem solver. Don't accept things how they how they are. I mean, imagine if we were still riding around in a horse and buggy doing dial up Internet, right? That's kind of an interesting thought in my mind.
Chris Bland:But with that is we want patients to have physical health, right? We want them to be as healthy as possible. And what a great service that we have the opportunity to do. And it's only gonna get better through innovating. And innovation can be a process.
Chris Bland:It can be an idea. It can really be anything novel. And even if an idea sounds a little crazy, it might actually be perfect. So don't dismiss that. And people surround yourself with people that are innovators that will encourage you throughout the process.
Chris Bland:I think that's really important too.
Justin Cole:Well, Chris, it's been an absolute blessing and privilege to hear from you and just hear about some of the really cool things that you've gotten to do over your career and there at UGA. Keep up the great work and all the best as you continue to make a difference being a problem solver and teaching the next generation of pharmacists.
Chris Bland:Thanks, Justin. Really appreciate the opportunity to spend a lot of fun and stay warm up there in Ohio gets a little cold up there from time to time.
Chris Bland:It does. Yeah. We're we're dealing with that right now. So, yeah, we'll do our best.
Chris Bland:Yeah. Thank you for what you do. This is great.
Justin Cole:You have been listening to DISRxUPT, a podcast from the Cedarville University Center for Pharmacy Innovation. If you enjoyed listening today, please subscribe and share this podcast with others. Thanks for listening.