Pediatrician and Bush Fellow Benson Hsu, MD
Sioux Falls pediatrician and Chief Medical Analytics Officer Benson Hsu, MD, of Sanford Health, is one of 24 people chosen from a pool of 751 applicants to receive a 2018 Bush Fellowship. The Bush Fellowship provides up to $100,000 over 12 to 24 months to support fellows in developing “leadership skills and attributes”. MED caught up with Dr. Hsu to find out how he plans to use this special opportunity.
MED: What drew you to apply for the Bush Fellowship?
BH: In the pediatric ICU, I’m fortunate to be able to care for some extremely ill children. But I always have this lingering thought in my mind: Is there something we could have done to keep this child from needing care in the first place? Mind mind goes to immunization, nutrition, seatbelts, etc. And I wondered, are there better ways to identify at-risk kids earlier?
MED: Your original intent was to pursue more education with this money, but you’ve changed your mind. Why?
BH: When I was selected as a finalist, I spoke with a Bush Foundation member who said, ‘You have had a lot of schooling. What else could you do to grow as a leader?’ I realized that I needed to take myself out of my comfort zone. I decided instead to reach out to cohorts of leaders and community activists and begin collecting and combining multiple data sets. I hope to demonstrate the benefits of combining population health data and encourage more sharing of this data as a prevention strategy.
MED: How does your recent article in the Harvard Business Review relate to the fellowship?
BH: I was asked to lead enterprise data analytics at Sanford. They wanted a central place to hold the data and one language for managing it. We want to figure out how sharing that data in a protected way might be able to optimize the health of the community. This is where the seeds of my idea for the Bush Fellowship came from.
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Learn more about eligibility for the Bush Fellowship