Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Optum's Off The Chart podcast, where we introduce you to Optum's nationwide family of dedicated clinicians by highlighting their human side.
Speaker: I'm your host, Dr. Kenny Poole.
Speaker: I'm a healthcare experience champion, and I'm also a general internal medicine physician.
Speaker: Today's guest is Dr. Caroline DiFilippo, an internist from Caremount in New York.
Speaker: Here's what's on the chart.
Speaker: Dr. DiFilippo completed her undergraduate degree at Harvard University and then pursued graduate studies in Australia as part of a Rotary scholarship.
Speaker: Following a stint in public health, she went on to medical school at Mount Sinai in New York, where she earned an MD and a master's in public health.
Speaker: She's currently Medical Director, Population Health at Caremount and a primary care physician.
Speaker: Dr. DeFilippo, it's a pleasure to meet you.
Speaker: Thank you for joining us.
Speaker: Thank you guys for having me.
Speaker: I'm really excited to get to know all of you today and share a little bit about my background.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: So we'll start with you telling me a little bit about how you grew up, where you grew up and how you grew up and what led you to Harvard.
Speaker: So I actually am lucky enough to live and practice in the same community where I grew up.
Speaker: So I am home.
Speaker: So I grew up just north of New York City in Westchester County, about 40 miles north of New York City.
Speaker: Had the best childhood, went through public schools in a small town.
Speaker: Actually, my best friends are still the people I grew up with in high school and in middle school.
Speaker: I am always and have always been one of those multi-talented people that I like to do a lot of things.
Speaker: And so I am not someone who wound up at Harvard because I am a excellent violin performer or I can speak 15 languages on there because I like to do a lot of things.
Speaker: And I get really excited about multitasking.
Speaker: And I still believe it's luck that got me to Harvard and one of the luckiest moments of my life.
Speaker: But it was a combination of a lot of good things that fell into the right path and a really good background with an amazing community and family here.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: And so from Harvard, you took a somewhat nontraditional route to medical school.
Speaker: Was it through college and your experiences that you had afterwards that led you to be a physician?
Speaker: Or was it something before then where you knew before you even started college, you knew you wanted to be a physician?
Speaker: No, I definitely did not want to be a physician.
Speaker: I was one of those people.
Speaker: So I did something called science research when I was in high school and did a lot of environmental science research on something called zebra mussels, which are mollusks that invaded the U.S. and was super excited about that topic.
Speaker: So I studied environmental science in college and probably would have been a marine biologist.
Speaker: Loved doing environmental science, but thought, oh, I'll keep med school in my back pocket until organic chemistry, which broke me and convinced me that I did not belong in medical school.
Speaker: So sometime during my year in Australia, I started to realize that public health made a lot of sense and was that field that kind of married those passions and you could focus on the environment and communities and didn't necessarily have to pass organic chemistry.
Speaker: While I was working in public health, one of my mentors, basically one week into the job, tapped me on the shoulder and said, you're going to work here for three years, but after that, you need to go to medical school.
Speaker: It's time.
Speaker: You belong as a doctor.
Speaker: And I told her all the reasons I was scared.
Speaker: There were no doctors in my family.
Speaker: I didn't know personally any doctors and I had convinced myself it wasn't for me.
Speaker: If it didn't work at Harvard for me, well, I can't do it.
Speaker: And she basically supported me as I went back to school, finished some credits up, wound up meeting my husband along the way, all these major life changes.
Speaker: And four years after graduating college, I wound up in medical school.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Was it the tie to public health that led you to become an internist?
Speaker: How did you pick internal medicine?
Speaker: Yeah, so primary care was no question to me.
Speaker: Absolutely the tie to public health.
Speaker: For me, it's the tie to relationships with people.
Speaker: I love talking to people.
Speaker: And that's what I was doing at the health department.
Speaker: I was counseling people.
Speaker: I was giving lectures.
Speaker: I was teaching.
Speaker: And what's medicine?
Speaker: What's primary care?
Speaker: It's teaching patients about illness.
Speaker: It's being their partner.
Speaker: It's being
Speaker: And so I was able to combine all of those skills and those things I loved into primary care.
Speaker: So that was always the right path for me.
Speaker: It was just a question of which population I would work with, adults, children, all of them, who knew?
Speaker: So that's what I had to figure out while I was in medical.
Speaker: Gotcha.
Speaker: So usually I'll ask people, you know, what was their second choice or if they had to pick another specialty, what would it be?
Speaker: So for you, I'm going to say, well, then what was your third choice?
Speaker: Because your second choice was, you know, again, internal medicine, primary care again.
Speaker: But was there anything else that you were interested in outside of that or anything that piqued your interest outside of primary care if you were to switch specialties?
Speaker: Yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker: So all medical subspecialties, but I would have either done palliative care or infectious disease, both of which sort of interplay do every day.
Speaker: Palliative care to me is an extension of primary care.
Speaker: And I wish all internists were palliatively trained and did that just their normal job.
Speaker: So that would have been an ideal world.
Speaker: And infectious disease, I just find it fascinating.
Speaker: Somewhere way back in my brain, I would have worked for the CDC and been a disease hunter during one of my career daydreams way back when.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So now, you know, again, we'll move a little bit out outside of medicine.
Speaker: You talked about meeting your husband along the route before you started medical school.
Speaker: Is he a physician or in health care?
Speaker: Tell me about your family.
Speaker: So that's a definitive no.
Speaker: He is not a physician.
Speaker: Although when you get married three weeks before medical school starts, we joke that he earned half of my medical degree.
Speaker: So he can take the M or the D depending on the day.
Speaker: No, so he's not in healthcare.
Speaker: He actually works in telecommunications and he grew up locally.
Speaker: We actually met online when it was scandalous and nobody met online then.
Speaker: It was really scary back in the day.
Speaker: But we've been married for a long time now and we actually have three kids.
Speaker: And having him not be in medicine has actually been a really big gift for me because a lot of the challenges that two healthcare families, healthful families,
Speaker: face, we don't face in those ways.
Speaker: And so in many ways, we're non-traditional in that my spouse is not in medicine and I'm the female in medicine, but it works so well for us.
Speaker: It's really, really well.
Speaker: And then you have, you have three children.
Speaker: Are they small children?
Speaker: Are they teenagers?
Speaker: Are they somewhere in the middle?
Speaker: Somewhere in the middle.
Speaker: So we've got a five-year-old son, an eight-year-old daughter, and an 11-year-old daughter.
Speaker: And I'd probably say I'm most proud of the fact that my 11-year-old daughter was my intern baby.
Speaker: So I got married before med school and I managed to have a baby during residency to major accomplishment.
Speaker: So that's that that's that multitasking, multiple talents that you spoke of in the beginning that you can do all these different things.
Speaker: So so speaking of that, and as a segue outside of medicine, outside of family, what do you like to do personally?
Speaker: What are some of your hobbies?
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: That's a laughable question to most working parents who have kids these age.
Speaker: I really do enjoy being outside, though.
Speaker: So I am an outdoors person.
Speaker: So coming back to that love of the environment, I love hiking.
Speaker: I love kayaking.
Speaker: I really enjoy trail running, things that just kind of get me back to nature.
Speaker: And photography has been something I've always toyed with.
Speaker: And I'm starting to really understand as
Speaker: As my body doesn't cooperate with extreme sports as much anymore, I can be still and really enjoy photography to capture the beauty around me.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: So describe your perfect day off.
Speaker: You get a day off where you can unplug.
Speaker: You don't have to go into work.
Speaker: You don't have to check your inbox to see patients.
Speaker: What do you do?
Speaker: Well, we go for a hike.
Speaker: We go for a hike somewhere, you know, maybe locally, maybe not locally.
Speaker: We, you know, break a sweat, get to get up early, enjoy the stillness of the morning as well.
Speaker: perfect hour of the day when the sun's just coming up and it's nice and quiet and you watch the world wake up.
Speaker: And by the world, I don't mean the people, I mean nature, all the animals around you.
Speaker: Come back, you know, maybe relax by a body of water, go for a kayak ride if we can, and then enjoy a nice meal, nice home-cooked meal.
Speaker: And all that's with my family.
Speaker: I really, a perfect day includes my family in doing that and just being together and being outside.
Speaker: Love it.
Speaker: It's simple.
Speaker: It's actually really simple when you break it all down.
Speaker: It's not complicated.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: And I hear you.
Speaker: So kind of, you know, to kind of close things out, I got a couple of questions around your work.
Speaker: So tell me the best part about being a physician to you.
Speaker: People.
Speaker: People.
Speaker: I get to be a part of relationships with people and a part of their lives during their most vulnerable life.
Speaker: periods of time and I'm a member of that team.
Speaker: And suddenly, you know, I'm a stranger to them before they walk in the room and suddenly I'm a part of their family.
Speaker: And I take that part so seriously to me.
Speaker: Every patient I treat like their family, every patient is a VIP to me.
Speaker: I feel it.
Speaker: And the depth of those relationships and what it means to me personally is huge.
Speaker: I am a physician who does not hide the fact about who I am as a person.
Speaker: So my patients know when I've had kids, they know when people in my life have been sick, they know when I'm having a hard time and we share those struggles together.
Speaker: So very selfishly, the best part of being a doctor is how my patients help me as much as I help them.
Speaker: It's a very symbiotic relationship.
Speaker: With you, with you practicing close to home, um,
Speaker: Are there people that you take care of that you knew through the, you know, through the community before you even went to college, like as you were growing up, that you take care of now?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it still cracks me up to this day.
Speaker: So, so many of them come in and say, I remember you on the soccer field, or I knew you when you were walking in the neighborhood.
Speaker: The greatest compliment to me is that they knew me then and they chose to come see
Speaker: I imagine that would be awkward and uncomfortable.
Speaker: Like you knew me when I was five and you want me to care for your health?
Speaker: That seems a little weird, but they love it and they keep coming back.
Speaker: And it's just, it's such a blessing to know this community and know the people in the community.
Speaker: That's a really unique opportunity and makes you feel like kind of an old school doc, right?
Speaker: I'm not an anonymous person.
Speaker: I'm a known entity in this community.
Speaker: That's the problem.
Speaker: Yeah, I like that.
Speaker: I like that a lot.
Speaker: So the last question I got is,
Speaker: If you were to be given a magic wand and you can change one thing about the practice of medicine to make it work better, what would it be?
Speaker: Million dollar question.
Speaker: So it's hard because you asked me earlier what I love about being a doctor.
Speaker: And what I love about it is the relationship and how knowing people allows me to care for them better.
Speaker: And so if I could wave that wand, I would...
Speaker: eliminate the barriers that are in place that prevent me from getting that depth of relationship with people.
Speaker: So I'll give you an example.
Speaker: So you get patients who have anxiety about health.
Speaker: Some of them come in and they complain about everything that exists.
Speaker: Some of them complain, come in and barely come in and barely will talk to you about anything because their anxiety makes them so scared or so over utilizing medicine.
Speaker: Unless I understand that about you, when you come in and say, I have a headache,
Speaker: I don't know which person I'm talking to.
Speaker: How do I know how to treat a triage case?
Speaker: But I only know that if I've had the opportunity to really develop that relationship with you.
Speaker: And right now, so much of medicine is about other things that get in the way of developing that relationship.
Speaker: And so I think the wand would say, automate away, make everything that can get a piece of paper off her desk, off her desk and, you know, farm it out to those people who can make medicine more.
Speaker: But do not do that in a way that sacrifices
Speaker: the interpersonal relationship that is critical to medicine.
Speaker: Medicine's an art.
Speaker: We never said it was anything other, but I can't practice my art if I'm so caught up in all this other stuff getting in the way.
Speaker: So I would say bring back the people and the humanness to medicine, the humanness to who we are too, right?
Speaker: Allow docs to fail, allow docs to take a break in, you know, cry, use the bathroom, take a sick day, right?
Speaker: All that makes us better.
Speaker: So when I can really hear them.
Speaker: and listen to their story, right?
Speaker: I mean, so much of what medicine is based on is those foundations that go way back to the history of medicine and Hippocrates, talking to patients, listening, observing, not clicking, not typing, not authorization.
Speaker: So magic wand would make healthcare really, really simple and make it about the person and the provider.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: That's great.
Speaker: I think that's a perfect way to end our discussion.
Speaker: Doctor, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast.
Speaker: I really appreciate it.
Speaker: And to all, thanks for listening.
Speaker: That's it for this episode of Optums Off the Chart.
