Recap
In March’s Public Health+ Season 2 webinar, our very own Meaghan Kennedy, Founder of OSB and epidemiologist by training, sat down with Dr. Michael Mina, the Chief Science Officer at eMed Digital Healthcare to discuss the intersections of public health and clinical medicine.
Dr. Mina comes from an incredibly diverse background with cross-sectoral experiences that positions him to work at the crossroads of public health and clinical medicine.
He began his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth University’s School of Engineering, Dr. Mina took a pivotal career shift, opting to practice Buddhism as a monk in the mountains of Sri Lanka. During that time a tsunami caused Dr. Mina to evacuate to a refugee camp. There he recognized his experience in engineering with his interests in public health and medicine could come together.
He returned to pursue an MD and Ph.D. at Emory University, where he studied bacterial co-infections and live attenuated vaccines. The culmination of his studies led him to a professorship at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and School of Medicine. When the pandemic struck, Dr. Mina had a unique opportunity to use his experience as a physician, epidemiologist, and immunologist in the midst of a public health crisis. He decided to leave academia once again, but this time to join eMed, a pioneering digital health company. eMed offers telehealth services and at-home test kits that empower people with affordable and convenient access to healthcare.
He joined eMed to “break down barriers to keeping people healthy” and join their mission to democratize healthcare, because he believes that “if there’s any human right that we should have, it should be knowing what’s going on inside our own bodies, on our own terms.”
Dr. Mina spoke greatly on the failures and successes of public health and medicine. It had been made very clear during the pandemic that medicine and public health are “not always in sync with each other” and the decisions made are a “reflection of the erosion of public health and medicine and being able to bring them together in a constructive way.”
He believes that “public health thinking and medicine [need to be brought] together in a constructive way.” In order to produce the problem-solvers that transcend disciplines, we need to transform educational systems to avoid being too dogmatic in thinking that their training is the only “right way.” In the meantime, Dr. Mina hopes to continue to build sustained public health initiatives that combine all his cross-disciplinary training to build momentum to accelerate applied public health solutions.
Reflection
Dr. Mina gave us a breadth of information to think about, but there were two takeaways we wanted to focus our attention on:
1. Public Health and Clinical Medicine are not in sync with each other.
As Dr. Mina stated, the poorly defined roles of both these disciplines have led to poor decision-making and confusing messaging for the general public. An example given in the webinar is the recommendation of quarantining someone (i.e. isolation).
“That is absolutely not a medical practice, that is purely a public health practice. I have never met a doctor who has prescribed isolation for [the patient’s] own benefit. It gives [their] family a benefit and it gives the people around [them] the benefit that [the patient doesn’t] infect them.”
That’s where there has been tension. The role of medicine is focused on the individual, the patient sitting in your exam room, whereas public health is looking broadly at the entire community. “Medicine comes in when public health has failed.” The two disciplines are undoubtedly intertwined in that they both are working to achieve the same thing: to keep people and communities alive and healthy.
The problem is there needs to be a better way to work together and the pandemic was not the ideal time to figure that out. As Dr. Mina says, “A pandemic is not a time to be tunnel visioned, it’s not a time to keep silos up, it needs people being able to talk across the table to each other, it needs economists, public health people, physicians to all carry equal weight.”
2. Cross-disciplinary thinking is the way forward.
As students and professionals, we find ourselves isolated in the thinking and teachings of our respective majors, departments, or fields. We hold our new knowledge as convention and the only “right” way of doing something. Dr. Mina claims that:
“The most important challenges are going to be solved today and in the future by bringing disciplines together… We've done a lot of fundamental research over decades and centuries and millennia to really understand pieces. But the real change that has happened in society has come when disciplines are woven together.“
It’s important to remember that each discipline and field only offers a single perspective or framework for problem-solving. So imagine how much more powerful the solutions can be when these disciplines are brought together. To put it simply, we need more team players who are committed to life-long learning and are willing to go against what we are traditionally taught and trained to do.
Rather than this webinar just being about how public health and clinical medicine intersect, it is a wake-up call for all of us to examine in our own lives and professions how to break down silos and better work together to accelerate impact.
Writing By:
Emily Zheng, Public Health Innovation Analyst
Emily is a Master of Public Health student at Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. She is part of the Behavioral, Social, Health Education Sciences department and is also pursuing a certificate in Social Determinants of Health.
Liris Stephanie Berra, Public Health Innovation Analyst
Liris is a Master of Public Health student at Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. She is part of the Global Health department, pursuing a concentration in Community Health Development and a certificate in the Social Determinants of Health.
