The Emergency Mind Podcast

Dr. Derek Donegan, orthopedic trauma surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania, on what it takes to perform when the patient, the team, and the problem are all unpredictable.

Organizational network analysis reveals how work really gets done: hidden influence, brokers, bottlenecks, leadership feedback loops, and the informal structures that shape performance under pressure.

Sarah Gebauer is a physician and founder of Validara Health who works at the intersection of clinical AI evaluation and governance. We cover what it actually means to evaluate an AI product for clinical safety, how physicians can draw on skills they already have to work effectively with these systems, and where those analogies break down. The core tension running through the conversation is that we are layering systems with unknown failure modes on top of systems with known ones, and hoping the combination is better, but that's a hypothesis, not a guarantee.

In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, I’m joined by Elvina Hewitt and Mena Ramos for a wide-ranging conversation about emergency medicine, healthcare innovation, AI, entrepreneurship, and what it means to build better systems from inside the reality of clinical work. All three of us came through Brown, spent time working in emergency care, and have since moved into different but overlapping worlds of healthcare technology, startups, education, and systems change. The conversation moves from the emergency department as society’s safety net, to the personalities drawn to chaos and uncertainty, to the tension between visionary innovation and the constraints that shape real healthcare work.

Psychologist, performance coach, and yoga teacher Diane Malaspina shares a strengths-based approach to stress, resilience, and optimal performance for high-pressure professions.

In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan Dworkis speaks with Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social scientist at RAND Corporation, whose work spans disaster response, risk governance, and organizational performance under extreme conditions. Drawing on experience as a wildland firefighter, disaster recovery volunteer after Hurricane Katrina, and applied policy researcher, Aaron explores why some systems adapt and learn after crisis while others repeatedly fail. The conversation moves across medicine, wildfire response, infrastructure, and emerging technology to examine how risk actually behaves in the real world.

In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan Dworkis sits down with emergency physician and medical educator Joshua Feblowitz to examine how clinicians are trained to make decisions under pressure, and where traditional medical education struggles to prepare people for real-world uncertainty. The conversation spans experiential learning, simulation, metacognition, and the everyday tradeoffs between speed, accuracy, and risk that define emergency care.

In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan Dworkis sits down with Patrick Pollock, the world’s first Professor of Veterinary Surgery and Remote & Rural Medicine, to explore what really happens when humans, animals, and complex systems collide.

ECMO does not succeed because of a single clinician, team, or device. It succeeds because of systems. In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan talks with Christine Stead, CEO of ELSO, about how innovation in ECMO emerges from networks of people, data, organizations, and shared purpose. From the early days of ECMO development to the global response during COVID-19, they explore how systems enable high-risk, high-complexity care to evolve under pressure.

What do theater, crisis response, military service, and social work have in common? In this episode of The Emergency Mind Podcast, Dan Dworkis sits down with Adam Milano to explore a powerful idea: high-performance teamwork under pressure looks a lot like ensemble art.