#PharmacyFutureLeaders

Today we’re speaking to Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD is an Associate Professor of Medicine at New York University School of Medicine but her clinical home is at Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country. She is a founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. 

Her newest book is “What Patients Say; What Doctors Hear,” an exploration of doctor-patient communication and how refocusing the conversation between doctors and patients can improve health outcomes.

Everyone’s leadership road is a little different, how did you become a leader in the Patient / Doctor relations space?

As a bestselling author, many think that your life is perfect, what was your most difficult moment as an author that might help others understand the struggle to get to where you are?

We’ll talk about your other books in a little while, but tell me about this newest book, it in some ways seems like a culmination of some of what you’ve learned in other works.

You are the author of four other books about life in medicine, can you tell me how these work together as either a journey or cohesive whole?

• What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine.
• Medicine in Translation
• Incidental Findings
• Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue

Danielle was also editor of a medical textbook—The Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine—which won a Best Medical Textbook award.

Danielle Ofri writes regularly for the New York Times about medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. Her essays have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Slate, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet, CNN and on National Public Radio.

How do you get a review from Lancet and other high end publications like these?

How do you balance literary writing and popular writing? Very few people move into both.

Her essays have been selected twice for Best American Essays and also for Best American Science Writing. She is the recipient of the McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers Association for “preeminent contributions to medical communication.”

She has given TED talks on Deconstructing Perfection and Fear: A Necessary Emotion for Doctors, and has also performed stories for the Moth. She is featured in the upcoming documentary: “Why Doctors Write.”