Hosted by Dr. Roger Firestien

This is so important for medicine because we’re in a crisis now as far as health care costs and delivery. We have the opportunity to really capture all the innovations in technology and bring that to the healthcare delivery system, that’s where we need creative thinking, that’s where we need to be innovative.

Meet Dr. Robert Gatewood. Robert is board certified in Cardiovascular Diseases and Internal Medicine, a Clinical Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo; author of more than 50 presentations and co-author of two books. Dr. Gatewood took one of my Creativity courses at the Center for Applied Imagination at SUNY Buffalo State.

I’ve seen some really innovative and creative things done as far as the medicine that we practice. I never would have thought, you know, 20, 30 years ago that we [would] be putting small little tubes in patient’s arteries in the heart. The problem is that we’re not very creative in the way we deliver medicine. We’re still stuck in the fifties and the sixties and in the seventies the way we deliver medicine.

What it was like to be in the class?

It changed the way that we started thinking about things, [it] really opened up our minds, it was almost like there was a beehive there, [and] you got a stick and you stabbed it a couple of times and the bees went flying! And what it was just a ton of ideas that just flew out into the room. And as those ideas were floating around the room you helped us bring those ideas and refocus them into some really cool ideas and a summary of what we can and can’t do.

When we stepped out of the classroom we didn’t stop there, we kept thinking about that, when we got into our cars, when we went to work the next day. It’s not something that stays in the classroom, it’s something that I’m trying to practice every single day and it’s really enriched my life, and it’s enriched the way I think about things.

What were some of the key things that you took from the class?

I’ve learned the importance of connections, and before I would not think about connecting, say, this idea to another idea, but you’ve got me thinking about that even though they seem totally unrelated, you made me think maybe there is a relationship.

Creative thinking is connecting different ideas in a different way than we have traditionally.

I’m Roger Firestien. Thanks for watching.