Ingram's October 2022

18

ELIZABETH LONG Olathe Health

DWARAK SOUNDARRAJ Liberty Hospital

Sibling rivalries date back to Cain and Abel, so it was perfectly natural for Elizabeth Long to engage in a bit of competition with her twin brother growing up in Prairie Village. But extending that into medical school? Not many doctors have lived that. “Both of us, at the age of 17, decided independently to go to med school,” Long recalls. “We end ed up going together at KU, and it was really good. We had a healthy competition, and we helped each other, but each of us wanted to be better than the other.” The family com ponent, then, has always been a part of her career track— especially with a great grandfather who was a small-town doctor, a cousin who’s a physician, and several dentists. During medical school, she pondered emergency medicine,

The medical influences in Dwarak Soundarraj’s life came early, while he was growing up in southern India. Two of his uncles were doctors; one a general practitioner, one a pediatrician. “After high school, when I had to decide be tween engineering and medicine as career choices—the top two choices of most Indian kids of my era—I had sudden ly realized that there was no choice to make,” Soundarraj

says. “I wanted to be just like them, taking care of people and making a difference, one patient at a time.” Cardiology came to him like a revelation after reading a paper on elec trocardiography by a South Af rican physician. “Working in a public hospital with very limit ed resources and no access to echocardiography or any im aging other than X-ray, I was amazed by how much I can tell about someone’s heart with

but after experiencing it on her rotations, “let’s just say I didn’t care for it,” Long says. “I was immediately thinking about all these loans I’d taken out for school, oh my goodness, but the next rotation was surgery, and I just knew I was home.” She recalls an early observa tion of an operation and think ing, “I want to be that person, doing all that. I pretty much never looked back at all. It just clicked in my head and heart,

my stethoscope and an EKG,” Soundarraj says. “There was no dearth of clinical material ranging from rheumatic heart disease to complex congenital conditions at our hospital. An unsuccessful CPR attempt on another uncle who col lapsed in our house and a few successful resuscitations in the cardiac care unit solidified my desire to be a cardiolo gist.” After medical school, he came to Michigan for resi dency and Chicago for his fellowship. That’s where the Mid western appeal set in. “Kansas City is truly a hidden gem, not on most people’s radars when they are looking for a job,” he says, and for the past 10 years, he’s cast his lot with Liberty Hospital. “The strengths of the American health care system in certain areas are undeniable,” Soundarraj says. “Excellent facilities, talented workforce, cutting-edge research, and better outcomes for certain conditions. How ever, we cannot improve the overall health of our popula tion and stem the fall in life expectancy through the work of doctors in clinics and hospitals alone.” Free primary care and preventive care for all will be a start, he says, as will investments in nutrition and social services. Better care will also come from the removal of unnecessary regulations, improved price transparency for consumers and a more market-oriented approach to promote competition and re duce prices, he believes. Coming out of a global pandemic, Soundarraj says that COVID “made me realize that medicine will always remain an art, albeit an art that is deeply root ed in science. The more technologically advanced medicine becomes, the more imperative the need for empathic physi cians to make thoughtful decisions for each patient’s unique circumstances. And it again reminded us that health care is teamwork and caring for each other in the team is important to be able to care for our patients.”

fit my personality. I like to “greet, treat and street” them, identify the problem, solve and move on.” What she learned through her medical career is that no two specialties are exactly alike. “There’s a branch of medicine that fits every personality,” she says. “It wouldn’t excite me to treat diabet ics throughout their lives, for example.” Surgery then was a big-time save. “There was no backup plan. I really had no other career path,” Long says. “I would have been in big trouble if things didn’t work out!” She does double duty as chief medical officer for Olathe Health, a role that has given her additional insights into the impact of COVID-19 on the profession. “The biggest impact was the significant migra tion away from health care, their careers, for the staff,” she says. That has meant a lot of short-term use of traveling nurses and other staff, which fills a need but presents other issues. “A lot of new and traveler positions don’t really know our system as a provider, so we really had to up our game to ensure that the T’s are getting crossed, and I’s dotted,” Long says. She’s also concerned that treatments delayed by patients, especially during the first pandemic year, are now presenting as much more advanced and aggressive illnesses. “The complexity level is so much higher because they did wait,” she says. But all of it, from staffing shortages to supply-chain issues, has created an urgency and a new emphasis on problem-solving. “We have definitely learned,” Long says, “to be more flexible and more creative.”

50

I n g r a m ’ s

October 2022

Ingrams.com