Thanks so much for coming and attending this session. It's a little bit different and unique session compared to regular AECOM sessions. One of the things I just want to announce that we will give out some special ARCPOD edition memorabilia, and people who are willing to ask us questions, they might get memorabilia. People who show us that they have been subscribing to ARCPOD and listening to the program will probably get an interesting gift to take home. But thanks for coming. Awesome. So without further additional time, you're here with us to talk about the new advancements in the field and how PODCAST, the official ARCPOD, which has been launched almost close to about three years, have done its job to introduce new and emerging issues in occupational health. I'm blessed to have Erin Bransford, who co-hosts with me on the PODCAST since the very beginning, and Manny Brangy, who's on the West Coast, sometimes chimes in and co-hosts some of the episodes with us on a regular basis. But it's always a challenge. I'm at the East Coast, she's at the West Coast, and finding time together is always tough. Erin is right in the middle in Chicago, so she can coordinate almost everything. And she's a biscuit almost, editing, putting the episode together, it was such a blast to work with her. So using PODCAST to explore emerging trends in occupational environmental medicine. One of the challenges that, when I was putting these slides together, was we have so many things happening right now in front of us. We have the expertise in the room, as well as in the organization, to look at these emerging events and can become an expert in giving advice to the authorities, to the people on the ground, to the communities, to the workers who have been impacted and affected by these current events. But guess what? We now have a mechanism to take that information, make it a digestible, bite-sized information, and send it out to the community, where news media can pick it up, or community can benefit from it, or experts can chime in and say, yeah, this is what we should do with a situation that's unraveling. And one of the purposes of this talk is to give you an insight of we just did that for the past three years and made it very successful to communicate, in real time almost, the events that's occurring in our field. And we are immensely impacted by it. I work for Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. I have no disclosures for this talk. So does my other co-host. And some of the pictures are my own and what we have used in this presentation. So this is our very well-known enemy for the past three years. We've been through a pandemic of unprecedented times that we have been through. We have made history. And this threat became part of our specialty, part of the work we have done all these three years. And I started this presentation with the virus in mind, which is SARS-CoV-2 virus, which actually allowed me to pitch this idea that why can't we do something called OCCPOD or podcast to really highlight some of the emerging things that's happening in the field, in the field of occupational and environmental medicine. One of the challenges that I initially faced was I was in New York and I have colleagues around the country. But in order to come together and talk about the crisis that's happening, it's a very difficult task for all of us. And having a conversation on a podcast, which takes about 20 minutes, and that's simple bite-sized conversation, really gives me the insight that I needed from the others who have expertise in this area, but working in someplace else not close to me. This is a particular episode which I want to highlight. This is not a COVID episode. It's a tridemic episode, which actually looked at COVID-19, flu emergence, and RSV cases that was growing in the nation at the time. And it was very much a surprise for us because we weren't discussing flu at all. So this is an early slide when New York become an epicenter of SARS-CoV-2. It came from the heritage or the lineage of the virus came from Milan, Italy. I know this because our own Mount Sinai lab identified that link and published it. So the cases that we used to see was the flu cases, that's 2019, 2020, and then right in the March and April timeframe, there's a complete exponential surge of SARS-CoV-2 infection that we saw. And flu was almost non-existent. And so this is a study that one of the virologists have done, which basically collects all the swabs that was done in the hospital systems and then runs in a sequencer and figure out what virus is prevalent right now at this point. So this was the initial surge that we were bracing for, and New York become the epicenter for it. The reason I vividly remember is I was the only person on the train, sometimes with a conductor and a driver, sort of traveling between my home to the hospital every single day and it was long hours. All this in the middle of hospital was converted into an emergency medicine hub. This was the front lobby of the hospital where we pitched ICU tents to take care of patients. And that was not enough. We were running out of hospital beds at a very quick sequential rates, enough that any bed we put in gets filled up in 30, 40 minutes. At times we were thinking that we will not have enough ventilator to support the patients. We will not have enough staff to take care of those patients. And it spilled out to, this is the Central Park, the very famous Central Park. We actually pitched the tents outside with a group came in and built an ICU housing for the patients that need to be treated at the time. So think about this moment in time where I am struggling to find new knowledge, new information about SARS-CoV-2 to help my coworkers and staff to bring them back to work, to take care of this chaos that's unfolding in real time. How do I get help? How do I get people to talk to me quickly, early on and share experience in real time? Podcasts became that vehicle that allowed me to have a conversation over and over again. And we talked about this on every single thing. My experiences and the experiences of what they were facing across the country helped me meet that challenge. The challenge of SARS-CoV-2 continued to evolve. And I want to highlight, this is an interesting image. If somebody follows variants of SARS-CoV-2, right now we are in XBB 1.11. That's the latest alphabet soup that we are seeing right now in Omicron resurgence. We don't think that it will become the main driver, but the change that was occurring in the variants was very profound. Sitting in New York, I was at the front and center of this change. And we were able to communicate that in real time to the rest of the country. Again, podcast was an interesting vehicle to do that. When we saw the change from Delta to Omicron, the surge was significant to a point that I realized that something has changed. And we were able to figure out that this is a new variant that is highly transmissible that became known as Omicron virus for SARS-CoV-2. So now I have told you that we started those conversations. So we actually published early on on BA5, which is basically the strain that has been used in bivalent strain of SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations. But our knowledge of building a bivalent vaccine as an occupational medicine physician is pretty limited. So it was an interesting episode for both me and the others to listen in and figure out why B5 or B4 Omicron variants was used with the original virus to build a bivalent vaccines. Again, there were so many episodes on COVID-19. I just want to highlight the changing times that we saw, how the information was changing and how we can use podcasts to really build consensus or bring experts together to talk about things that's happening in real time. I'm going to shift gear here and not talk about SARS-CoV-2 or pandemic or COVID-19 because I know you've heard it all along. But that was certainly a way that we went forward with building OCCPOD. Our next frontier was, has always been, and I've been keenly involved for many years in terms of the next frontier that will change our, it's an existential threat, as far as I'm concerned, to society, humanity, to workers all around the world. We are facing climate change at a level that we have never seen before. But my interest has always been how it impacts workers. We have seen, as the COVID pandemic started to recede, you have seen a huge economic activity that has taken on in the U.S. And there's a lot of jobs that's outside, particularly housing, home building, that started to come. And there are workers involved. They're involved in building the house and putting it together. We have 5G installation from telecommunication that came around that requires a lot of antennas being put outside in a very highly dense urban areas. So all these individuals are directly involved in outside work, which requires you to be outside for many hours. And guess what? The climate's changing, and we're seeing an increase in temperature. But how it affects, I can see that, you can see that, how it affects my patients. Is anybody else out there is doing something about it or talking about it? So that brought us to a conversation we had with one of our own colleague from San Francisco, Dr. Harrison, Rob Harrison. And he talks about the wildfires and the amount of heat that they generate, and especially talks about the workers involved in these wildfires. And these fires were not isolated to California. It was all over the place. It was surging throughout the nation. So I had a front-end look at how he's dealing with it. And one of the things that I want to share with you is podcast is not about slide presentation or presenting something. It's about conversations. And what he did was he told me a story of his son-in-law, who is a firefighter, and he's called Hotshot. Anybody knows what hotshots are? They are the Marines for firefighters. They are the Marines. They are the ones who go in and take care of wildfires, which has been burning. And they are one of the most aggressive fires there is. Just to highlight a problem of wildfires, which is part of climate change, this is a 2022 slide from New York Times, and you can see an exponential increase of wildfires across the country. Think about it for a moment. We haven't even started summer yet. We're heading towards it. We're seeing this play out again and again and again. By 2023, we might see a surge in wildfires again. And every year, we anticipate that with little less thing in our arsenal to help these workers. And I want to highlight their stories in terms of if people have not seen this, only the brave, they are graying out mountain hotshots. They all perished except for one person who was sitting on the top. They all died fighting the fires. They're fascinating stories to know. And we are fortunate enough as an occupational medicine experts to understand their efforts and how we can minimize the tragedies that occurred at that time. All of these individuals went out to fight the fires, and the fires took a strong turn and they all perished. The one person who survived was asked to go back to report on their progress. That's how he survived. And he regrets it to this day. Only the brave is a movie that's made for and in honor of those individuals who served. And these are the hotshots that we take care of. So knowing through the podcast, listening to an expert who deals with hotshots was something that puts me on a front seat watching this movie, understanding their plight. So this is what we're doing, right? Podcasts gives you a front end seat. Even though you're working in urban environments, you're not looking at forest fires, but gives you a perspective that you never had. I'm going to shift gear again. Another topic very dear, near and dear to me was hurricanes. I have a colleague, Brett Perkinson. I don't know if he's here, but we have a session after this session. We talk about the work we're doing for after Hurricane Harvey. So he was in the middle of Hurricane Harvey. This huge hurricane came through and destroyed Houston and neighboring towns, intense devastation. One of the second costliest hurricane in history in the U.S. But before I go into Hurricane Harvey, I want to bring back some very recent events. February 3rd, we have some sessions on that event. There's an Ohio train derailment that occurred. A catastrophic 38 train cars were derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. And one of the things that I struggled with was what should I do as an occupational medicine expert? I understand exposures. I work for a 9-11 program, so I've been following these cohorts for the past 20 years. And I've seen that exposure can develop into a disease and then subsequently can cause huge morbidity in these populations. But what do we know about Ohio? What do we know about the train derailment that occurred? So we searched long and hard, and I basically looked through the community pages of AECOM to find a right expert to talk about the event. And we were lucky. Paul Brandt-Rauf, who is the chief editor of Journal of Occupational Environmental Medicine, has spent his whole life in understanding vinyl chloride. And he understands it at the molecular level. He understands that that angiosarcoma that develops in the liver, it has a signature basically. So if somebody is developing angiosarcoma, so just to give you in context of what I'm talking about, vinyl chloride was the initial release, chemical release that we saw in the event in Ohio train derailment. It spread through wildfires and then they let it burn continuously for a long period of time. So this is the route of the train that went through East Palestine and derailed there. There was no casualties, but the extent of ecological damage was, I don't think we can calculate the damage that was done. The consequence of the streams, communities getting polluted by the chemicals was something that we have not seen before. Or have seen before but never been reported on. This is a, if I can run the video, but this is a video shot of the train that's been delayed and now it was burning and vinyl chloride was contaminating both the water, air, soil, and everything else. This is an explosion that occurred after, and the firefighters and the emergency responders actually evacuated people outside from the homes and let the train to burn out the chemicals that we were seeing. But here's a question, like I always ask myself, and I asked the question multiple times too, when I look at 9-11 exposure. We don't have one agent that, vinyl chloride was not the only agent on the train. So there's always a mixture of chemicals that are responsible for the ill effects on human health. And we don't, we have the expertise to do that, but we don't have the expertise to look at mixture of chemicals and understand their effects on health. Think about the advancement we need to make in our specialty to understand exposure, mixture exposures that has impact on human health. Some more images from the site. This is the fire has been contained, but people were not going and removing the burned area because there were still toxic levels and fumes that were noted. This is an interesting slide. So when the burning occurred, vinyl chloride actually burns into phosgene gas, which is actually, if you remember, one of the board question is, it's a World War I chemical agent. So burning does not eliminate the threat. Actually, burning changes it to something even more sinister, which is phosgene. And most of the people reported like sort of a burning and sort of metallic taste, some upper respiratory symptoms. These are early symptoms that we are seeing in the population. But what is the long-term impact of this disaster is anybody's guess, anybody's guess. There was vinyl chloride contamination in both the water, air, and soil. So butylene, benzene, ethylene, monobacterial, ether, or other different chemicals that was a soup of chemicals that were actually released. So I asked Paul during the podcast, and if some people have listened to the podcast, it's a very good exercise to understand where the expertise really shines of an occupational medicine physician who have worked in the area for decades. One of the challenges we have with vinyl chloride is we don't have a safe limit or safe level of the chemical. So until unless you develop the angiosarcoma in the liver, you've been exposed to that chemical, and you will be continuously exposed to that chemical since you've been living in this area for a long time. So how do you counsel those workers, those populations who have been exposed continuously to this chemical? That's a challenge by itself. And we can't think of the ways that we can develop a bite-sized communication for the communities that have been impacted by it. There are about, I think, three or 5,000 people were impacted that were living near the train derailment, but it begs the question that what we are doing as occupational medicine physicians who have expertise in toxicology and chemical exposure to understand the situation and respond to it, and respond to it. We don't have to wait for AOHC to happen to understand the phenomenon. We can develop things like podcasts or different ways to communicate the risk to the community, to the workers who are involved in the disaster. I'm gonna shift again and come back to the hurricane part of our work, and as I mentioned, Harvey was a menacing threat. It actually involved many situations and it was disaster-struck. I was able to talk to Brett, who was a worker in the community at the time, and he actually passed out N95 masks. This is right before the pandemic started. And he gave me amazing insight. He was one of the physician who actually worked during Hurricane Katrina and actually helped Katrina victims in a super doom in Houston. And that experience shined really well when he worked with the victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas. That's the power of conversation. He hasn't written books, chapters about it. He hasn't done a scientific paper about it, but just listening to the experience, and that's the quality, that's the amazing part of our specialty that nobody else have can do. I haven't put in different, these are a few examples of the things that we have done. I can tell you that having a conversation, he telling me the story of how he came through the adversities was such moving that you start to think what you can do as an occupational medicine physician to help these individuals. How we are not done, basically. I want to introduce something that we become, again, another epicenter in New York that happened was monkeypox, or mpox, it's called. Monkeypox was a menacing disease. It came with a fierce, it spread fiercely through New York City. And we were one of the most highly impacted cities or state in the country when monkeypox came into being. Monkeypox is a virus which actually is not spread through monkeys. It was a contact spread, but it's been wrongly named monkeypox because it was first identified in Denmark in lab monkeys as well. It's usually spread by rodents, squirrels, Gambian rats. That was the first few exposures that we have. But what was the issue with monkeypox? There was many issues with monkeypox. We had a vaccine. It was not like COVID. We had a vaccine, but it was not available. We had a vaccine called Janus, which was created. It was actually stockpiled in Belgium. It was never shipped on time to US, so we can't give the vaccine to the individuals. So we are at a loss of, we can prevent this disease from happening, but we don't have enough vaccines to do it. Do I have expertise in monkeypox? Of course not. I was learning on the ground, on the field as the things happened. So we called in an expert, and we have an expert. So COGA and others within the organization connected me to an expert on monkeypox. And we sat down and talked about what monkeypox is, how it spreads, and what we can do to deal with it. It was a different virus. It's a huge virus compared to SARS-CoV-2. It's very, very different virus compared to what we have seen in the past. We started with surveillance. Monkeypox initially became a disease of somebody which we have seen in the past with HIV and sexual diseases. So mostly men having sex with men were more frequently impacted by the disease. So the challenge we had early on was how to identify, treat, and isolate those individuals. And in my case, I have to isolate some of the people who have been working long hours, and they never liked the idea that I should isolate them for 21 days or a month. And that was what the guidance was before at the time. But we previously vaccinated individuals. We understood the outbreak was severe. We were in the epicenter. As you can see, New York was significantly hit with limited amount of a vaccine called Jynneos. This is the coverted vaccine that we actually acquired from CDC to only give to healthcare workers. But guess what? The place I work also have lab workers who are actively working with monkeypox protocols. So we divided and conquered. We actually gave vaccines for the healthcare workers, Jynneos vaccine to healthcare workers, which is a non-replicating vaccine finally being shipped from Belgium and given out to all healthcare workers. It didn't cause the scarring. And for the researchers, I had no choice but to give an injectable form of ACAM2000. And what ACAM2000 is, it's a live vaccine that you inject into the skin with the 12 jabs, and it produces a little bit of scarring in the shoulder. And the researchers graciously accepted that change. This happened in just few weeks, few months, and finding out what is the best solution going forward, I was able to connect and communicate with expertise across the country. Again, podcasts brought us together, and we were able to take care of things early on. I'm gonna quickly talk about Manny's side of things. I'm not sure that she's out of a session she is in. One of the things that we talked about is emerging issues. How do we talk about emerging or changing issues that do not have a story to tell? Speak of Manny. Speak of Manny. So one of the challenges of emerging issues is, Manny, you wanna come up to the podium, and is how to talk about the emerging issues. For example, I was just coming out of the informatics session meeting, and we have some breakthroughs from NIOSH and CDC, and we are actually gonna be able to ask occupational health histories in electronic health records. Manny, you're all here. How do we talk about it without the slide sets in the form of a story or a podcast? Manny? So apologies for being late. I was just at the health informatics pharma luncheon. We had a really great turnout, really exciting to see everyone interested in innovation and how do we move forward as a college. So thank you for bearing with me. Really my job today is just to present what's happening with respect to up and coming topics in occupational and environmental medicine. Ismail has done a fabulous job keeping this podcast running for the last few years, and I feel that we have so much more potential in terms of reaching not only experts in their respective fields, but hopefully trying to incorporate more technological concepts into these podcasts. Clearly informatics is something that I realize and many of us realize in this room that we have to really get up to speed with respect to what's happening, especially with all the technological advancements coming through the pipeline. So hopefully with all of you involved, we can continue to provide great content via these podcasts. I'm really happy to see all the enthusiasm the last couple of days. Hopefully we can gain some more traction when it comes to occupational and environmental health topics. So please keep them coming and feel free to reach out to me anytime. Thanks. I'm just gonna invite Aaron to come up and sort of wrap things up. This is more of a technical stuff always, and I'm blessed in terms of the partnership I have with Aaron. She does the groundwork. I get to sign off on things, but amazing job of putting experts together. Thanks, Dr. Nabeel. This is a little bit more of the technical considerations and kind of the nuts and bolts and behind the scenes, and if you're looking to start a podcast. So a few considerations for starting a podcast. Who are you targeting? Who is this podcast for? What kind of message are you looking to convey? What type of format do you want? There's a lot of different formats of podcasts. If you've listened to podcasts, you know that some are scripted, some are non-scripted. Some are solo or monologue and just have a single host. Some are conversational. Ockpod is a conversational podcast. We try to stay away from having a didactic lecture-based podcast, and we strive on having conversations where we can ask questions and interact with each other. It's also partially interview, but it's more conversational, but interview a new guest. Each episode is another type of podcast. Panel a round table with multiple guests, a documentary style, or storytelling, either fiction or nonfiction. So some things to think about if you're looking to start your own podcast. What's your budget? I mean, equipment can cost anything from less than $100 to thousands of dollars. Do you want to have dedicated recording space? Or can you have dedicated recording space? Are you going to outsource your editing and your production? How frequently do you plan to record or publish a podcast? Some technical considerations. You need to pick the right equipment. We are fortunate at our AECOM offices to have a dedicated space for our podcast, but do you really need a foam-covered recording studio with the latest iMac, Cloudlifter preamp, and $500 mics on booms? You don't, but it's kind of nice. So there are necessities for starting a podcast. You need a set of headphones. On-ear or over-ear are the best. An external wired microphone. There's basically two types. There's a USB microphone, which plugs directly into your computer, or an XLR microphone, which requires an audio mixer. A computer. It can be a desktop, it can be a laptop, with a decent amount of RAM and sufficient hard drive space. A quiet room is ideal, with soft surfaces to absorb sound. You don't really need foam up on your wall, although if you're in an otherwise hard and cold area, it's helpful. Carpet is good. Avoid big, large, open rooms and hard surfaces, because the sound just bounces everywhere, and that records. You need some sort of recording software and some sort of editing software. Again, there's a wide variety of options there. There's several free options available, and you need a hosting platform. For Ockpod, well, we'll get to that. Let's see. So the picture on the left is when we first started to do Ockpod. This was pre-pandemic. We had our guests live in person in our recording studio in the AECOM headquarters, and then the pandemic hit, and that wasn't a possibility anymore. So we went to a program called Zencaster, which is an online remote audio capture program. So this is Dr. Nabeel and me in our respective homes with our coffee early in the morning one day doing a podcast. So, you know, virtual's a new black. You don't have to be in the same room or even in the same state to record a podcast. There's a lot of platforms to record high-quality audio remotely. We use a program called Zencaster. It's very affordable. It, basically, you have a conversation. You can connect with video so you can see each other when you're talking, and it records a high-quality audio file on your local computer, and then it uploads it to the cloud, and then you or your editor can download those files and edit them. A few quick pointers on recording etiquette. Having a quality microphone and headphones are key. You want to make sure that you adjust the mic gain appropriately. Make sure you're not too close or too far away from the microphone. You want to be consistent in your directionality. You can't hear me very well if I talk over here, or if I talk over here, or if I'm going here. You want to make sure that you're consistently in front of your microphone. Again, you want to find a quiet recording space. Make sure that you turn off and have your guests turn off all of their cell phone and computer notifications. Avoid typing and clicking with pens and fidgeting in squeaky chairs. All that picks up when you're recording. If you use paper notes, make sure that you're not picking them up and rustling because paper rustling also picks up on a microphone. And you want to drink water or hot tea or something in advance to avoid a dry throat or throat clearing when you're doing the recording. After you record, you can download the individual audio tracks and you can edit away or don't. Some podcasts are just raw. This is the conversation. You get what you get. We do, we edit our podcasts. We record them. They are not done live. I used to edit them, but now we outsource them because that's time consuming. So we get rid of ums and ahs and pauses, repeated thoughts, things to cut down for time. So sometimes we record for 30, 40 minutes and it's edited down to 20 or 25 minutes. Then you export the file to either a WAV file, which is higher quality, or an MP3 file, which is a compressed audio file. You can add your theme music, your audio signature. You can create your own or you can purchase royalty free music. The theme song that we have for Ockpod was actually created by ACOM's former CEO, Bill Bruce. But it's an opportunity to make your podcast recognizable. You don't need to be, they don't need to be long. They pretty much just need to be a few seconds long to introduce your show. Then distributing your podcast. You can do this as simply as recording an MP3 and putting it on your website. Either if your component does it or your section or even you on your own wanted to do a podcast. The simplest thing to do is to put it up on your website as an audio file. Now this means that if you only do that, you won't be able to get it on Apple Podcasts or something. But you can submit your podcast to popular podcasts, platforms like Spotify or Apple or Google or Amazon Music or any of those. There are different rules and steps that you need to take, but none of it really costs any money to do that. We use a distribution platform, I guess, called Anchor. Once we upload our podcast audio file to Anchor, it then is connected to Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts and all of that. We upload it in one spot and then it's distributed to all of the popular main podcast platforms. You want to promote your podcast, so how are you going to let people know that your podcast even exists? Well, this obviously will depend on your audience. You want to make sure that you have good keywords and a title in your podcast app. People will just search in their podcast app for a trending topic, something that they're interested in to see what's available. You want to promote it on your own social media channels or any partner social media channels to check out the podcast. You can promote it in email blasts, newsletters, blogs, community posts. I mean, of course, you can publicize a podcast in any traditional paper-based format as well. Webinars, courses are other great ways to promote your podcast, and you can also promote your podcast in other podcasts. There are opportunities to monetize your podcast with sponsors. Podcasts are designed to be free for listeners, and this is something that's kind of an open access to all audiences where they can come in and listen to your podcast, but it is possible to make money. We don't make money yet on our podcast for Ockpod, but the point of it wasn't necessarily to make money. It was to convey late-breaking information or information to OEM providers and audiences that are interested in the content, but podcasts can be sponsored. You can get referral sponsorships. You can use it to sell a product or a service. You can use it to request donations. In summary, if you are looking to start a podcast, pick your theme, pick your purpose, pick your format, purchase equipment that's appropriate for your budget. Again, you can get a microphone that costs $30. You can get a microphone that costs $600. They will both record audio, depending on what you're able to afford. Some will sound better than others, but if you're looking to just get started, stick your feet in the water, see if you like podcasting, order a microphone on Amazon. Record your audio, edit your audio, produce your podcast, or find someone to help you produce your podcast. There's some programs online that are all wrapped up in one that have some editing and production built into it. Promote your podcast to get subscribers, and maybe you can eventually get some sponsors and monetize your podcast, and really, most importantly, have fun. It's a fun way to get information out there. Again, it's more conversational. When we were doing primarily COVID podcasts, we made sure that they were date-stamped because the information was very rapidly evolving, and I don't even want to go back and listen to the first several that we did, but we did that on purpose. We were trying to get out information as quickly as possible. It's obviously not a peer-reviewed journal. You're not going to have that when we have emerging issues like a pandemic where we don't know answers. We're trying to distribute information in as timely of a fashion as possible. We found that podcast was a good and efficient way to do that. We are happy to answer any questions you have, and thank you so much for your time. Aaron, we need to announce. This is the only session that you will get a swag memorabilia called OggPod, but there's a catch. There's a small thing that you guys need to answer. I have stickers, too. Yeah. How many people have subscribed to the podcast? Oh, my God. Wow. People who have not subscribed to the podcast, there's a reason behind it. Wow. Why? The first question, and I'm hoping that somebody's going to win this beautiful mug. Can anybody tell me what was the last episode that was recently posted? What was the name of the episode? The Topic. The Topic. The last episode of podcast that was recently came online. Oh, we have, yes, please. Sorry. That was not the right answer. That was second to last. Anybody else? Military Burnham? Yes. Oh, my God. Awesome. That was incredible. My second question. If you just look it up, you'll never know. No. My second question, and I encourage you to, and that's another way to win the swag, OggPod Mugs, with the logo on, that you can take it home and show it to kids and family members and everybody else, is to ask questions. If you have questions, please step up to the mic. Thank you for the talk, very informative. I dabble in online marketing outside of OCMIT. One of the things about podcasts is if you're going to interview somebody, offer them a copy of the recording if they're like, I'm not sure I want to do this, hey, you can have a copy that they can then put on their site, promote themselves, which I've used successfully to get people to do interviews. That's an option that you have. No, absolutely. Definitely. Go ahead. Hi. My name is Christina Peterson. My question is, if you have a topic that we would like for you guys to delve a little bit into, I'm a federal PA, but I'm also a military member PA, and there's a lot of things that we see on the advancement of the military side that may not have gone back to the United States yet, right? We're sometimes at the forefront of what we do in our mission. How do we introduce a topic to you guys, or how do we reach out to see, hey, is this something that you can look into? This is a favorite topic, Erin's favorite topic, and by the way, I do want to highlight some of the interesting quirks about, good quirks, from Erin. She's an audiophile. She will listen if you're tapping on the computer, or typing, or kids crying outside. Not your own kids. She'll point it out. By the way, Erin has created some of the fabulous JWT form that you can put in your query, and you can connect with us directly. It's online available, and you can give us topics. Yeah, ACOM.org slash OCPOD is kind of the homepage on ACOM's website, and there is a link there to submit a topic, or you can email me. My email's pretty easy, Erin at ACOM.org, with suggestions. I wanted to comment on the first question, in terms of review, the most recent podcast that we had was on burn pits, and it is a hot topic and emerging, but because our guests were from the DOD and the VA, there was a lot of approval and red tape that that had to go through, so that went through a long editing process, longer than a typical editing process. Usually we record, we get it edited and posted within a week. This one was more like a month, and we sent the final product to them to review before we posted it, but I think that's atypical, and it's because it involved the Department of Defense. Thank you, Erin. Before the next question, I do want to pose another question to win the special mug. Can anybody tell me how many themes that we have in OCPOD, how many conversations we had in OCPOD? Can you name a few? Anybody? Climate conversations. Climate conversations, yes. You won the mug, and you can ask the questions, too. Please, go ahead. Hi, I'm Debbie Cherry, I'm an Occupational Environmental Medicine Residency Director at the University of Washington in Seattle, and I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoy the podcast and let you know that I'm using it in teaching in the School of Public Health, and particularly Dr. Perkinson's lecture. We do modules that have a core academic section, so we're doing global environmental health, and then OEM applications of those concepts, and so we got Dr. Perkinson to come give the special talk in the class, and if it hadn't been for the podcast, I would have known about his work in that field. Fantastic. So, I love the podcast, keep them coming, and having that, if you can tie the topics to competencies in residency education, that's kind of helpful for someone like me, like for climate conversations, or if it's informatics, AI, or something, having that little tag on it helps bring applied exercises into the classroom. Awesome, thank you. Absolutely. Very good suggestion. Thank you for the question. We have resident conversations, climate conversations, COVID conversations, more to come, right? Yeah, and then some that don't fall under any of those umbrellas, we just call them Ockpod. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Max Blumberg, I'm an Ockmed resident at UC San Francisco. I'm a little embarrassed to say that I did not know about Ockpod until today. That's okay. But I'm curious, I believe with podcasts, you usually get some statistics or idea about who is listening to the podcast, so I'm just curious if you have a breakdown of perhaps age of, or that type of information, or geographically about the listeners, or if you have a sense of how many non-OEM physicians are potentially listening, and then kind of related is, have you thought about advertising Ockpod to medical students to try to increase the number of people who could go into OEM? Yeah, several questions there. We do collect some amount of data through Anchor. I know for a fact that we don't have a breakdown of physician versus non-physician, or OEM versus non-OEM audience. We do have number of downloads or plays. I have to double check if we have the demographic information tied to that, so Charlie on my team usually pulls that information for me, I'll pull it up here, but we get total number of plays, number of plays per episode, the length that people play them, all that type of information. We have started resident conversations. We've only done one or maybe two, I think, but our intention was to reach out and talk to residents and get more information. We would be interested, if you're interested, to keep that going, and yeah, absolutely. We're trying to get, everything is, we're a small team, and so our goal is to do about two episodes a month. That happens most months, but sometimes it's only one based on schedules and availability, but yes, we are looking to further develop our resident conversations and market to those, to the residency programs. Thank you. All good questions. It's time for me to ask one more. In order to listen to a podcast, you need a client, right? Which means, can you name a couple of clients that you use to listen to the podcast? That's an easy question. I know. I want to give away the mugs. Okay. Say it again? Apple Podcast. Apple Podcast. Yes. Can you name a few more? Spotify. Spotify. Yes. Some more. Amazon. Amazon. Right. That was the good one. Yes. That's how he listens to podcasts. iHeart. iHeart Radio. iHeart. iHeart. Yes. Yes. There's a lot of ways to listen to the podcast, so open your phone, type in podcast, and you will find the client that you can open it up, and then search the word OCC POD Pod. You'll get that link. You can follow, subscribe, and listen. Another question. One more. What is the sweet spot that we have? I'm not making it more scientific. I'm saying what we think people are interested as far as the length of the podcast. What do you think is the sweet spot? Length of the podcast. And this helps all of you. 20 minutes. Yes. Okay. There you go. Go ahead. I'm going to grab the mic. Oh, you have another question? Yes. I was just on the ACOM website, and it doesn't really tell you how to subscribe. It tells you what the topics are. Oh. So you subscribe within the podcast. I know, but we need to put that on the website, because not everybody's going to know that they need to go to Apple or Stitcher or iHeart. I can do that. We also have it so if people don't have a podcast app on their phone or they're new to podcasts, they're able to just go to our website and click to listen to the audio file online. So we have an episode list on our website, and people can just click and play it directly there. And we do get statistics, I believe, based on direct plays via Anchor, which is the link that we use on our website, and the different podcast platforms. But that's an excellent suggestion, and I will make that change. Thank you. Hi. I'm Rachel. I'm a resident USF. I was just wondering if you have also considered collaborating with other med podcasts such as Cribsiders or Curbsiders or Criogs Over Coffee on topics that are adjacent to OEM as well that bleed into it, because I think one of the things for residents who are preparing for boards, there's a lot of PrEP med. There's also women's health and internal medicine, family medicine, and even sometimes pediatrics that can also interrelate with occupational medicine. Those are fabulous suggestions. And maybe I can get your business card before we leave today, and we can get in touch. So thank you for thinking out of the box, and I think that's where the ideas shine. I presented emerging topics in OEM. We can certainly help residents, students make that connection with OEM. And what better way to do this by 20 minutes having a conversation? One of the challenges I face when I sit down with some of you, not all of you, some of you, was they take out the script, they take out their notes, and they start reading. And they said, oh, where's the PowerPoint slide? I can also scroll that through too. And it's not about reading, not telling me what you have. I know you're an expert, but tell your story, say something, having a conversation. That's what it's all about. And that's what really resonates with all the topics that we do. So thank you so much. More questions to come? So I think we're almost ending the session, so this will be more or less the final, final question. That will be somewhat... So there's a special topic that we dealt with. There's only one episode that's hidden as a nugget in the podcast. It's a somber episode, but it's something that is near and dear to my heart. One episode only. Can you tell me? It has to do with an event. It has to do... You cannot chime in. It's a special episode, and it's 20 years to the day. Come on, guys. What happened 20 years? 9-11. Okay. Good. Yes, this is a special episode of 9-11 that we did on the anniversary of 9-11, a somber moment, but a history-changing moment for all of us. Thank you so much for coming in. I appreciate it.

OC Pod

occupational and environmental medicine

COVID-19 pandemic

climate change

wildfires

chemical exposures

podcasting

equipment recommendations

knowledge sharing