Good morning. Thank you for being here. I have 10 minutes to present some lessons learned from our mission in Ukraine. There are two individuals here that I want everybody to acknowledge. One of them is a Ukrainian colleague, Dr. Vlad Dayev, and Dr. Alexei Pestovital, that he's Belarusian. And I will tell you, you can hear my accent. Of course, I don't look like from Ukraine, but leading the mission required me to have a tremendous openness to have their expertise because they know much better the culture and everything in that region. So I don't have any disclosures. I can tell you that two specific messages in this 10 minutes are as follows. Number one, I think our humanitarian concept of serving and as a SCCM member in that part of the war just went to a different level. And second, I saw a new opportunity from the business line regarding ultrasound. So what happened was, the team started like this. You can see there is that sense of uncertainty. We didn't know what we were going to face. And then within 24 hours now, we're inside the building, and you can see now the smiles, and we're mingling with some of the local leaders. And then probably within three days now, I'm a father of a college student, and you are interacting with individuals that are the same age of your daughter. And I'm seeing tears in their eyes, and they give me this insignia that I'm wearing today and my blazer. So that takes you to a very uncomfortable situation. We say, well, what is real? What is the real life for these people? So you deliver. And this was a unique moment when I have in the audience, I have... Who are anesthesiologists intensivists in this room? I asked them who were anesthesiologists intensivists. I never have been in any meeting where the vast majority of the attendants were people with my background profession. So I'm an anesthesiologist. We are a minority of intensivists in America. So it was a distinct honor after 20 years serving for the SCCM. Then we continue, and you can see here, this delivery, giving them all these textbooks. They are not ultrasound textbooks. FCCS, we were actually launching all our products. We really continue collaborating with those leaders. Then there was something unique with direct relief. And I understood really well how direct relief was giving us some logistics, economical support, but they really rely on the expertise of our members. And that's very important for us because they acknowledge how important the society is for them. And then was the cultural component. And you can see here now we are actually wearing, you know, the chalk. And it was a great moment having the unity there. Now I will tell you, we cannot deliver the mission without the SCCM staff. And then something that I learned was that these SCCM staff were paying attention to every single detail. They have very good awareness regarding the geopolitics, what was going on. So Ken Clark and Colleen McNamara really excel in that. I didn't tell Colleen to do the printing. We're in another country. She has the way to put things that increase that, I would say, that kindness with the locals. So she put the yellow and the blue colors there, explaining them the schedule. And you can see even here some corrections in real time because they needed to have, let's say, more time for break, et cetera. So that was really crucial. You can see that this is one of my favorite pictures. This is the, you know, first Deputy Minister of Health in Ukraine. Look at his smile. I love Colleen. It was a really, really good experience for me. And then for the second trip, this is my daughter's suitcase, and I brought some items, you know, for the hospital. But guess what? The suitcase got lost. And that actually disturbed me mentally. But I didn't know until I went back to Houston that they created this group, the Jose's Angels. I didn't know. But somehow, they were able to retrieve the suitcase, deliver the suitcase with the items to the hospital. This is all SCCN staff, guys. So this is my quote. It's really when I different all these different geopolitics and healthcare processes, for me, it was crucial to have the SCCN staff. And Teresa Woelki was here 2 a.m., 3 a.m. U.S. time. And then we were in Ukraine, and she was responsive 100% of the time. So more importantly here, you have this individual in the front line sharing with me how he's applying the concepts that he learned during the two-day course in Ukraine. So this is what we want as, you know, trainers. But then there was in the second, when we came back, I was thinking about it. This guy became a real extended family. This is my desk and my workplace. And I have them. I have them close to me and been thinking about it. So when the second mission occurred in September, there was something else. It's how we can really move forward. We have a great product, but we need to think differently. And there was an aha moment. The aha moment was actually this was the first day. You can see here new team members, John Click. And then there was a moment where one of the most insightful ultrasound colleagues I have in the society really challenged me to say, we're not doing this all the way up. And that was my second month in an MBA program. I talked to one of my professors there, and like, hey, you know, we need to be thinking different about this. So I was actually over a module of digital transformation. And so what I did was, and I was going to be showing some slides that actually are not on my property or the property of Case Western University, but I was trying to adapt the concepts to ultrasound. So first of all, we shouldn't be just having ultrasound courses that we are selling and we have buyers. We should be thinking differently. We have users. There is a value in the use. Every single experience that these users have would be very important. It would be more relation-centric, and it will be a recurring process. So I started as a novice, but later on I might be, yeah, I want to be an expert. So here you have the digital value loop, and these are the components of the value loop. So you think about it this way. If we are able to deliver more, let's say, portable devices to those places, and then now through discovery and all, you know, experts we have in the society, we are able to really have more analytics and even, you know, develop some algorithms. One, everybody's using the ultrasound device, and we are able to help them to navigate things. There's another way to do it. So imagine you have an app. Imagine that we don't have all of us been traveling to these war zones, but actually empowering them through these wearable devices. So the most important thing here is that who is that user. That completeness of the loop is very important, and how we can monitor that. So imagine the coalition we can build with the ultrasound companies. Imagine that we have our own. SCCM owns the product. We have the app. We are able to put the content there, and then now we can be more universal. And as Miles Laspa said, this is not about being with one side with the enemy or not the enemy. This is about really helping people that are injured or are critically ill, and I will hold myself accountable to see what we can do in that regard. But this part, how we can monitor those actions, we really need to go to the next level in terms of the digital transformation. There are specific effects, not only the learning, but the network. So now if there are crises in Gaza, how it comes that the users in Gaza cannot benefit from the experience of the users that were in Ukraine last year. What about we can have the simulators company incorporating this co-created network? So we can really have a much better impact. So it's a definitely transformational effect. And of course, this is my last slide just to show you that this was when I was two years of age, and my family, since the beginning, believed that I needed to be a doctor. I don't know why, but anyways. And then this is my current workplace, but over the last 20 years, I wouldn't be who I am in front of you without this society. Thank you so much for allowing me to be a leader in this society.

humanitarian mission

ultrasound technology

cultural exchange

digital transformation

global network