What happens when you mix a top-tier surgeon, a NASA innovator, and a Detroit-born tinkerer with big dreams? You get Dr. Scott Dulchavsky - CEO of the Henry Ford Innovation Institute and a true original. From solving the medical challenges astronauts might encounter while in outer space, to building cutting-edge simulation centers right here on Earth, Scott's work is helping to redefine what’s possible in medicine. In this episode of The BOBcast, Bob Riney sits down with the doctor who’s part innovator, part astronaut whisperer, and all Detroit hustle. They talk breakthroughs, big ideas, and why this city keeps producing world-changing talent. Don’t miss this ride! It's Detroit grit meets space-age science - and the future is looking stellar.
What happens when you mix a top-tier surgeon, a NASA innovator, and a Detroit-born tinkerer with big dreams? You get Dr. Scott Dulchavsky - CEO of the Henry Ford Innovation Institute and a true original. From solving the medical challenges astronauts might encounter while in outer space, to building cutting-edge simulation centers right here on Earth, Scott's work is helping to redefine what’s possible in medicine. In this episode of The BOBcast, Bob Riney sits down with the doctor who’s part innovator, part astronaut whisperer, and all Detroit hustle. They talk breakthroughs, big ideas, and why this city keeps producing world-changing talent. Don’t miss this ride! It's Detroit grit meets space-age science - and the future is looking stellar.
:00- Introduction
:43- Bob Riney introduces Dr. Scott Dulchavsky, highlighting his roles as Surgeon in Chief for Henry Ford Health and CEO of the Innovation Institute
1:43- Scott shares his background, mentioning his father's role at General Motors and his own interest in problem-solving from a young age
2:17-Scott describes himself as a "mechanic at large," influenced by his grandfather's tinkering
2:33- Bob Riney notes Scott's diverse interests, including teaching, inventing medical equipment, and working with NASA
2:51- Scott discusses his focus on impact, mentioning the development of a Simulation Center at Henry Ford Health
3:33- He emphasizes the importance of training young people and the logarithmic scale of impact through education
3:54- Bob Riney appreciates how the Simulation Center breaks traditional perceptions of healthcare by integrating high-tech and digital solutions
4:24- Scott highlights the importance of training in difficult conversations, especially in diverse cultural contexts
5:13- Scott recounts his relationship with NASA, starting with a classmate's dream of becoming an astronaut
Scott describes his role in developing medical equipment for space, including a portable ultrasound device.
5:53- Scott shares his experience with NASA's training methods and the importance of scalability in medical innovations
6:32- Scott discusses the impact of these innovations on healthcare on Earth, particularly in remote and underserved areas
8:07- Bob Riney asks Scott about his desire to be an astronaut and his near-miss with the Space Shuttle Columbia
8:21- Scott recounts the tragic events of the Columbia disaster and the impact on his friends at NASA
9:17- Bob Riney asks Scott about his vision for the future of healthcare, particularly in AI, digital solutions, and autonomous transportation
9:45- Scott emphasizes the importance of an open-minded approach to innovation and collaboration with diverse teams
10:48- Scott highlights the role of AI in making healthcare more accessible and efficient, with a focus on patient-centered care
11:44- Bob inquires about Scott's approach to embracing change and providing advice for others who may feel overwhelmed
12:00- Scott stresses the importance of thoughtful and mindful change, especially in high-stakes environments like medicine
13:04- Bob asks Scott about the evolution of surgery and his vision for the next decade
13:12- Scott describes the shift from invasive surgeries to less invasive procedures and the role of new technologies
13:50- Bob Riney shares his experience with legislators and the challenge of communicating the value of research
14:50- Scott discusses the need for effective storytelling to make research relevant to everyday citizens
15:31- Scott highlights the importance of science communication and the role of storytelling in making research accessible
15:53- Bob asks Scott about his experiences teaching the next generation of healthcare professionals
16:07- Scott expresses excitement about the younger generation's immersion in technology and their potential to drive innovation
16:20- Scott emphasizes the importance of diverse careers in healthcare, beyond clinical roles
16:40- Bob thanks Scott for his contributions and reflects on their relationship as colleagues
16:57- Bob reflects on the episode and his gratitude of his collegial relationship with his colleagues, how employees can be entrepreneurs and innovators no matter what their role is, and the importance of self-awareness and effective communication in the scientific community
Bob Riney 00:00
As much as there's been several times that I've wanted to send you in space. Forthe record, I did want you to return. Welcome back to the BOBcast. I'm your host, Bob Riney, President and CEO of Henry Ford Health, and I'm thrilled to have you joining us today. The BOBcast is where Detroit's future comes into view, it is where you'll hear the big ideas, bold voices and crucial conversations shaping our city, our region, and beyond. Real and unapologetically focused on creating a stronger, more vibrant future. With grit and grace, this podcast introduces you to the relentless visionaries who are driving change and tackling some of the biggest challenges we face today. Today's guest, Dr. Scott Dulchavsky really fits that bill perfectly. Scott is a unique mix of a clinician's clinician a doctor's doctor. He is not only the surgeon in chief for Henry Ford Health, but he's the CEO of the Innovation Institute, looking to go outside the boundaries and really push the industry and the organization to better and bigger things, teaches the next generation of workforce, and as a side he invents medical equipment that is used in the space stations today. It's a wild combination of wickedly fun and interesting things, and it is so great to have you here, Scott.
Scott Dulchavsky 01:29
I think you've covered everything.
Bob Riney 01:32
Fasten your seat belt, buddy. You have had an extraordinary career, and you continue to have just great energy and passion about pushing the boundaries and making change was that part of you at a young age?
Scott Dulchavsky 01:46
I guess if you ask my parents, I had the title of disruptor in chief. And I guess that continues in that I've always been a "why do you do it that way? Can we not do it a different way?" My father was the engineer at General Motors for his entire career. He developed MIG welding, for those in the audience that know about that, in his laboratory. And I guess he was always a guy that appreciated a problem and tried to grab 'em both ways. And my grandfather was a tinkerer, and I spent countless hours in his garage trying to figure out how to make broken things less broken. I guess that's what I am. A mechanic at large.
Bob Riney 02:25
Many people that go to medical school, their goal is to just be a great physician.And for some it's to be a great physician leader. For you, it's been those things, but also to be involved with the science program, to be an innovator, to be an economic force. How do you go about coming up with how you're going to spend your time and how you're going to have impact?
Scott Dulchavsky 02:50
Impact is the perfect word Bob in that you're blessed as a physician, and maybeyou treat 100 or 1000 or maybe 10,000 patients over the course of your life. What I've really appreciated about being at Henry Ford is those dreams did not just remain dreams. You may recall years ago when we wanted to develop a Simulation Center, and I brought that forward in somewhat of an aggressive way. We had the space and no funding. But how do you impact 10s and hundreds of 1000s of people? We've developed that now. It's one of the biggest in the country. And I, I love that we can take care of our own people, but I love more is that we bring young people from our community in to see what is in fact, possible. And so it's, it's almost like a paying it forward. It is a logarithmic scale. If I train one, and they train 10, and then those 10 train 100 pretty soon you get some serious numbers. And so I guess that's been a theme across my career.
Bob Riney 03:53
What I love about introducing young people to the Simulation Center is it also breaks any old definition they have of healthcare, and they really see that healthcare is very high tech and integrates AI and integrates digital solutions, really in a way that is more advanced than many other industries, even though that's not the first impression.
Scott Dulchavsky 04:17
It's the highest tech and the lowest tech. One of my favorite things that occurs in that very fancy Simulation Center is, how do you have a difficult conversation? So I learned on the job, I would have to go out and tell a family that their young loved one was killed in a car crash or a trauma or things like that, and I had no training. Now we have people come in. We partner with universities, Wayne and Michigan State and others to force those critical conversations. How do you talk when you are an African American male with a Muslamic family? How do you understand the cultural things of that? While low tech, that's really high impact.
Bob Riney 05:03
You have an interesting relationship with NASA. How did that get started? And what's been your most memorable moment?
Scott Dulchavsky 05:13
One of my classmates in med school, Jerry Leonard, your local East Detroiter, said, "You know, I want to be an astronaut when I finish" and we all looked at him and rolled our eyes, and he actually ultimately became an astronaut. He flew a couple of times. He had the misfortune of being on a Russian space station MIR when it caught on fire.
News announcer 05:32
Cosmonauts were able to put out the fire quickly, using an extinguisher, but they were forced into breathing masks as smoke filled the space station.
Scott Dulchavsky 05:40
And Jerry told me now, 20 some years ago, "Hey, Scott, there's a job down here at NASA, and it requires somebody that has real world skills in acute care." I was a trauma surgeon before I came to Henry Ford, "and yet has the flexibility to be able to do those things in a really tough environment, off the planet, tiny, little place, constrained, difficult conversations." And I go, "Yeah, that sounds sort of interesting." I knew nothing about it, and I went down, and I was lucky enough to be chosen for that job that I've now had for a long time. And at that time, it wasduring shuttle era, and it was getting ready for "we're going to build a space station. What would you pack to be off the planet for a half a year or longer?" And so I'd go, "oh, well, I'd put this, well, you can't have that, huh?" Okay, how doI do something without this or that or the other? And so ultrasound, which I've built another career on, it's this little gadget. It's the size of a tablet. Your audience probably knows it because they heard, "congratulations, it's going to be a boy, or got gallstone" stuff like that. But NASA was asking, "Hey, can you diagnose a collapsed lung? Because we worry about that when we're in a spaceship" and I said "I don't know." So we tried an experiment and it worked pretty well. Then the next thing they pose is, "well, okay, they're not doctors flying. And how do you treat medical problems when you don't have a doctor, they're 250 miles below you on the planet going by you at 18,000 miles an hour.Okay, how do I train a Russian cosmonaut how to do an X, Y or Z in a weird environment with just a couple of tools?" So we got some training methodologies of just real quick point of care, figure it out and get through the eye of the needle. Seemed to work okay. National Institutes of Health said, "so that's sort of neat. Is it scalable in that?" So we work with the World Health Organization, the Millennium Development Project. Now you can use that in the field across the planet to see whether a woman can have their baby in the field, or whether they gotta get on a donkey for three days to get to a higher level of care. It's that scalability that really moves me. Not taking care of six people off the planet. Yeah, it's cool, and you get to go to fun places and see big things explode. But the stuff that really moves me is this is something that helps the planet?
Bob Riney 07:59
As much as there's been several times that I've wanted to send you in space. Forthe record, I did want you to return. In all seriousness, have you wanted to be in one of the spaceships, and how close did you come?
Scott Dulchavsky 08:15
I did have a path to flight, and have undergone the majority of the training for that. One of my sadder times at NASA was the flight that I would have ultimately been scheduled for, was Columbia.
News announcer 08:28
And liftoff at Space Shuttle Columbia with a multitude of national and international space research experiments. Houston, now controlling the flight of Columbia...
Scott Dulchavsky 08:38
A number of my very close friends were on that. That was a dark day.
Mission Control 08:42
We've also lost the nose gear down talk back, and the right main gear down, talk back. Columbia, Houston com, check. Columbia, Houston, UHF com check.No tracking reported again of Columbia since about 8am Central time as it was descending toward Florida above Central Texas.
Bob Riney 09:08
Fate's a funny thing, isn't it?
Scott Dulchavsky 09:09
Yeah.
Bob Riney 09:12
Let's switch to the future of healthcare. One of the things that I've always just had a lot of respect for you is you're constantly encouraging us to push the boundaries. You have been a go to source for, what bets do we place when it comes to AI, when it comes to digital, when it comes to autonomous transportation, things like that. What's your thoughts on what healthcare will look like in the next five to 10 years?
Scott Dulchavsky 09:45
I think you have to be in an organization where the first answer is not no and it'smaybe. So you have to be clever at where you're going to put people, resources,finances. I really appreciate appreciate getting divergent people together. I always have. I'm sort of a collector of people. That's why I really like these university partnerships that we have, particularly Michigan State University, because we don't have all the answers. I certainly don't, but I have a heck of a lot of clever people. When you get engineers and you put them in a healthcare environment, they think differently than I do. We have so much information about biology in a separate bucket. We have so much data from everyday things from your watch to how you interact. You know, Walgreens can tell you when you're pregnant before your doctor can, because they know what you're buying and when you smash both of those together with really clever people, it won't be me, but maybe I'll create the environment to help that bioconvergence occur. That's where the magic is going to happen. The second thing, this buzzword of AI. You're using AI today. If you go on Amazon, there's a boatload of AI that's putting products in front of your nose, and everybody's got an AI strategy, and it makes your life a little bit easier, but we are on the brink ofit making a little bit easier to boy do I need to go to the doctor for this or boy, that mole looks weird on me. Is that something to be concerned about, or not? You can, with very high fidelity, figure out immediately, no worries, or you might want to make an appointment. We now have enough data that we can begin toscale that. So I'm thinking in the next five or 10 years, that is going to be something that enables me and others to be a top of license, so I have only the appropriate information I need, thoughtfully monitored and regulated so I can make the best decision for you, and you can be participant in that because you can trust but verify.
Bob Riney 11:44
How have you learned to lean in to change versus be fearful of it? And what advice do you have for others that say things are moving too fast? I'm not comfortable?
Scott Dulchavsky 11:56
One ut-oh takes care of 100 atta boys. So you have to be really thoughtful about leaning in appropriately. We have to be really thoughtful and mindful andcareful, especially when the stakes are as high as they are in medicine, that you're not too cowboy-ish, that you're appropriately looking at alternatives to things that we had always assumed were going to be the same, whether it is going from a big incision to a no incision surgery, or whether it is looking at, wow, we used to do that big operation all the time. Is it necessary? Can we do a smaller one? And then what does the patient want out of this? I know what I think your best outcome is. It may not be what you're after. And then looking at the science of the communication. So I just told you, you have cancer, we're going to do this or that, and the other, you stop listening as soon as you heard cancer. How do I get back to you to go, "I need you to get on the same wavelength with me on that." So you as a patient are as informed as I, as your treater, are for that, that's science.
Bob Riney 13:04
Give us a vision of a surgery today versus what you think it might look like 10 years from now,
Scott Dulchavsky 13:12
Five years ago to now, "I'm sorry, Mr. Riney, we're gonna have to replace your heart valve. That means I am going to split your sternum open, stop your heart. You're going to be the hospital if you do really well, at least a week." Now, "whatare you planning for dinner tonight at home?" Then the new gadgets and devices and things like that, they continue to get less invasive, more durable. Used to be, "okay, we're going to do your hip. We'll plan to redo in a decade." Now we're like, "Here you go. What color you want? We'll never see you again." It's gonna be much more consumer friendly process.
Bob Riney 13:50
Wanna move just to two more topics, and one is really swirling around in my head because of a visit I made to the Hill in Washington, D.C. I spent the day meeting with various members of the House of Representatives and Senators onproviding some perspective on some of the proposed cuts and changes in the healthcare industry. And I don't want to get into a political discussion right now, but particularly when I talked about NIH funding, the research component, I hadlegislators say "you're going to have a hard time getting consumers worked up about cuts in that area, because they don't really understand research and they don't see it as relating to them. They just think of it as something that's done in a lab but doesn't really impact their lives." What do we need to do to help research be something that is viewed as value added to the everyday citizen?
Scott Dulchavsky 14:50
It's all about being an effective storyteller. I could take my story and go, "Okay, Ihave policies and procedures that keep the astronaut crews healthy when they're on the International Space Station and soon to be lunar base, and then going to Mars." And there will be a subset of science geeks, "wow, that's amazing. There'll be others that go, "what the hell are you talking about? You're spending 10s of millions of dollars to keep six people in some project off the planet healthy. Can't you use those more effectively?" Alternatively, go, "you know, the International Space Station is a really interesting test lab to come up with techniques and technologies that can help Grandma, and let me give you acouple examples." The NIH and science in general are now starting to realize that we have told our story poorly. They don't care about it's Gene 32, they care about Johnny's little brother. Science is now starting to go, there's a science in communication. We need it too, because not everybody's Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Bob Riney 15:52
You spend a lot of time teaching the next generation of physicians and caregivers what excites you about this next generation of talent based on you're seeing. Is there anything that concerns you?
Scott Dulchavsky 16:05
The newer learners have been immersed in technology forever. It is connected to them. It is how they do business. So we need to get smarter. How do we get people to be thinking about careers in health? Not everybody needs to be a neurosurgeon. You have 50,000 employees. The overwhelming majority of them ain't neurosurgeons. They are in marketing, in business, in their food service. I have a cool cadre of people that help me do an operation that are necessary for everybody. That's what excites me.
Bob Riney 16:39
Scott, thanks for joining me on the BOBcast, and really, most importantly, thanks for all you do to make us a better version of ourselves.
Scott Dulchavsky 16:49
Appreciate your partnership, Bob, thanks for having me here today.
Bob Riney 16:56
You know, as I reflect on my conversation with Dr. Dulchavsky, one thing I'm always grateful for is that as a CEO, I can actually have the kind of relationship with our clinical leaders where we can joke back and forth. We can not take each other too seriously. We can jab each other a little bit, but at the end of the day, we do it because we actually respect each other. The other thing I really like about Scott is that in an organization like ours, you can be an entrepreneur, you can have jobs where there's very specific requirements, very specific things that you're accountable for, like surgeon in chief, but then also be an innovator and have that creative side of you come out. His self awareness that the scientific community has not done a great job in making that translation known and understandable. I thought was a terrific Aha, and I think there's nothing but upside that's going to come from that. If you enjoyed this episode, please click follow so you will never miss a future episode. Share us with your friends and leave us a five star rating and review, which will help others find us. If you have suggestions for a topic or a guest, email us at bobcast@hfhs.org. Remember, every action we take today is a step towards the future we're building together. Let's keep striving, keep believing and keep moving forward. Let's use positive momentum to carry us through an era that's filled with troubling questions. Until next time, take care and keep making a difference.