Empathy, AI & Doctor Burnout: The Orsini Way with Dr. Anthony Orsini DO

Zane Myers (00:00)
be all good.

ANTHONY ORSINI (00:00)
I didn't ask

you, is this audio only or video too?

Zane Myers (00:03)
video and audio. And then as we get through this, I'll make you some shorts at the end of salient things. You can use them on your website or however you want to use them. Put them on your social media or whatever you want to do with them. But I'll put on some nice text on the bottom, kind of go through it. People really enjoy that. So.

ANTHONY ORSINI (00:05)
⁓ OK.

Alright,

well since it's video, you give me two minutes to just freshen up? I'm all disheveled. I hate to be vain, but just give me two minutes. I'll be back. Alright.

Zane Myers (00:30)
Sure, yeah. No, you bet.

Zane Myers (00:36)
So I like to run these. So I'm kind of asking you about your personal life and then I mean your personal experience, how you got to where you are and then about your practice, where you've been and how you've built your business, both your practice, medical practice, as well as your speaking business, which is kind of interesting. And I did some reading a little bit about your background. I'm just curious.

ANTHONY ORSINI (00:44)
Hmm

Mm-hmm.

Zane Myers (01:06)
Orsini is such a famous name. I mean, there's history on it going back to the sixth century, I think it is. There's been more popes from the Orsini family than, are you part of that lineage? mean, it's...

ANTHONY ORSINI (01:10)
Yeah it is.

Yep.

Wow, you really know your stuff.

It's very interesting that I...

It is interesting there. actually followed DidMyAncestry.com and got all the way, my family's from a little town called San Lupo, Italy, near Naples. And I followed all the way back into the early 1700s. And there's one generation missing, but Pope Benedict something was from St. Lupo in the 1600s. So I'm drawing the

pretty safe conclusion that we come from that family. So that's pretty cool.

Zane Myers (02:00)
Yeah, it's just ⁓ remarkable, know, that the history that's, it's so hard to take something back that far, but the history there is so ⁓ deep. it looks like I lost you, or I lost your video for a moment. No problem. The history is so deep and so interesting. The number, like they had five popes come out of the Orsini family and the lineage of all the, you know,

ANTHONY ORSINI (02:16)
Oh, sorry. There you go.

Zane Myers (02:28)
Dukes and Earls and all the rest of that is just kind of, I just did a little bit of background. I want to find out who I'm talking to and that one was just kind of caught my eye is I wanted to dig in a little bit deeper and find out more about that. So you're a board certified intensive care physician, but really you ended up in the neonatal sphere. That's where you put your

ANTHONY ORSINI (02:29)
How did you know all this? This is amazing. I'm impressed.

I'm very impressed.

Zane Myers (02:57)
you're working initially. By the way, ⁓ I read with some interest that you ⁓ absent seizures as a child. And the reason why I bring that up is my grandson also ⁓ has ⁓ absent seizures. And we think he's going to grow out of it. And it's not like it's something that's not manageable, it does cause some

ANTHONY ORSINI (03:09)
Mm-hmm.

Zane Myers (03:27)
concern and I read that in your book about that you're having an effect on your family.

ANTHONY ORSINI (03:29)
Yeah, of course.

Yeah, in fact, yes, I am a board certified neonatologist. ⁓ I say in my biography that I'm intensive care physician just to simplify things because I usually get what's a neonatologist, but I'm a board certified neonatologist and you're right, I run the neonatal intensive care unit. But ⁓ yeah, I had the absinthe seizures. There's a great story of my first seizure on Christmas day that I tell in some of my keynotes.

and how there was somewhere between six inches and four feet of snow on the ground, depending on when my father tells the story. And ⁓ I outgrew them probably, I think I was on meds until I was 13. And thank God I've been off meds since then.

Zane Myers (04:17)
It's fascinating. So now you're at ⁓ Nicholas Children's, ⁓ the system there, and you're in charge of the pediatric neonatal. But as your side gig, you run ⁓ your speaking organization. But that seems like almost a full time. How do you balance that out?

ANTHONY ORSINI (04:39)
Well, it's been something that's been, I've been passionate now for 15 years. I started with the Breaking Bad News program 15 years ago and been building that up slowly. The speaking part of my life has been actually picking up really steadily over the last year or two. I mean, I was spending a lot of time on the roads and balancing my clinical with Nicholas Children's, but.

It's been more and more difficult to be able to balance that, but it's a good thing because when you're doing something you're passionate about and you love, for instance, tomorrow I'm going to Arkansas to give another keynote down there and do a workshop with a hospital there. And I could say, I'm traveling again, but to be honest with you, I get excited every single time I do it. I just enjoy it. I still love my clinical and still work for Nicholas Children's. I work for their satellite.

⁓ two satellite hospitals for them in the level two. So that gives me a little bit more time than when I did major university NICU. ⁓ But I love balancing it. It's what I do and it's what, you know, they say if you love what you're doing, you're never gonna work. So that's the way I say it. I love every time I get to speak.

Zane Myers (05:54)
How does that work with balancing out family life and that with the travel demands?

ANTHONY ORSINI (06:02)
Well, fortunately, it came at a good time. have three adult children. all out of the house. My last one's graduating law school actually in a couple of weeks. My other two are married. My wife ⁓ is, we live in Florida and she's one of the top realtors in New Jersey from Florida. She runs a whole team. She's very, very busy, very successful. And so we're just both kind of workaholics, but we're also best friends and it's actually hasn't been an issue. It's been great.

Zane Myers (06:32)
That sounds fabulous. ⁓ I also have all my kids out of the house, and that's kind of blessing. So I read some of the, one of the articles, one of the posts you made recently, and I actually commented on it, was talking about artificial intelligence in medicine. And is that going to depersonalize medicine? And it is a risk, but there's also the flip side of that. There's so much diagnostic potential there.

So tell me your thoughts on that.

ANTHONY ORSINI (07:03)
Yeah, you know, I've really dedicated my career to and my message that I'm yelling on the mountaintop to everyone is that there are so many problems with health care right now. ⁓ Patient experience is a problem. Physician burnout is a problem. ⁓ Trust is a real problem with people right now with patients and their doctors. And the solution to all this is this enhanced communication between doctors and patients that bond, that human connection, that

that sometimes we forget about. We become task oriented. We get caught up in the documentation and all the science of the medicine. And we forget that the number one predictor of not only outcomes, but also patient experience and physician experience is the ability to connect with that person on the other side. And so I might even do a keynote called remembering your why that teaches doctors how to avoid burnout.

But I was getting a lot of, oh, last year I was getting a lot of requests and a lot of people call me and say, what's your comment about AI? Is this going to bring doctors further apart from their patients or is it going to bring them closer? And my thought on that and my belief is that it's like anything else. If you use it correctly, it could be used for good. And we as physicians need to make sure that we're using AI.

to help us with diagnostics, to help us with our differential diagnosis, to help us even with our procedures, but that we don't use AI to help to substitute for that human connection. And so we have to be really careful because right now the average doctor is five minutes, 15 minutes with a patient, five minutes is with the patient and 10 minutes is documentation. If AI can document for us and do all that work for us, there's two ways we can go here.

Zane Myers (08:50)
Yes.

ANTHONY ORSINI (08:56)
we can either say, ⁓ you're going to see three times the amount of patients. And so we're no better off than we were, ⁓ which has happened with the electronic medical records, if you look at the history, the physicians can say, mm-hmm. So I think historically, yeah, historically what's happened. So for instance, in the electronic medical records, the doctors really weren't involved in that development. because we didn't, know, physicians,

Zane Myers (09:08)
So how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that?

ANTHONY ORSINI (09:25)
as a whole, we don't like change. That's what we do, right? So, and what happened with electronic medical records, we really didn't get involved with it. And then once it was kind of put into place, like it's coming, whether you like it or not, all of a sudden, now the doctors go, but I don't like this about it. like that. Well, where were you when we were asking you? And so we have to be careful with that AI doesn't do the same thing that we as physicians. And I think hospital executives are getting it to say,

AI is to be used to bring us closer to our patients and not further apart. It is a slippery slope and we have to be really careful, but if you remember your why and you remember what medicine's all about, you can stop from falling down that rabbit hole, I think.

Zane Myers (10:11)
So I loved in your book, ⁓ or I don't know whether it was in your book or in some of your talks, ⁓ the idea that you did ⁓ these role play. ⁓ so I came from originally from a background, many, many decades of ⁓ building sales organizations. And it reminded me so much because when the salesperson,

was able to, so I'm gonna relate this because I have a background in this, and I was in medical devices too, strangely enough. So when the salesman was able to listen very carefully and relate and be interested in ⁓ not as much the questions as it was the responses and think about the responses and respond to them, and role play was such a big part of getting that empathy into.

into being an exceptional salesperson, I took some great interest in that.

ANTHONY ORSINI (11:10)
Yeah, so if we go back to when I first started the Breaking Bad News program that really sparked my interest on communication and medicine, once I did that 10 years of research of looking into is there a right way and a wrong way to deliver tragic news to a patient and a family and determined that there was indeed a right way and we interviewed maybe 100 families and

Once I did that, I said, okay, how could we teach this? And traditionally medicine now, medical schools are getting into a little bit of role playing with, they call them simulated patients or OSCEs, where the doctor does a history of physical and these simulated patients or actors ⁓ have a script. We tried doing that with simulated patients and had scripts and it didn't work. And the reason why it didn't work for a couple of reasons. One is that,

For doctors to really get into that this is real scenario, the acting has to be really top notch. And it also has to be improvisational because what I tell the doctors when we're doing improvisational role play is the way of a family member or a patient reacts to what you're saying is not random. We'd like to think it is, but it's not. Their reaction, especially when you're dealing with difficult news.

Their reaction is largely due, if not entirely due, by how you made them feel. our research shows this both in the short term and in the long term. And so our actors, when we do the improvisation role-play, these are specially trained actors in improv. We don't give them scripts. We give them the background, as you know, we give them a background of what they do for a living, what their relationship is. But I want them and they do a really good job at it. And I'll tell the doctor that we're training, listen.

If you make them mad, they're going to yell at you. And if you make them want to hug you, they're going to hug you. And they're going to react. And we'll play. We've done thousands of these. And sometimes we'll use the same actors, depending on what region we're in. But we'll use the same actors. And I'll never see it played the same way. And I think that's what we really need, the improvisation role playing. But I'll tell the doctor, this is the whole point of this exercise, is that you need to understand that the patient acts mad.

It's because of something that you said or did, and many times it's non-verbal. It's not, and that's what we really stress a lot about non-verbal communication.

Zane Myers (13:50)
So traditionally I've always heard from the medical community, I mean this goes back decades, but it was don't get too involved with your patients. You know, we want to keep a certain distance from the patients and I never really did understand that. I did understand that as a protective mechanism for the doctor, but for the patient it definitely, how much of that do you battle? That thought process, you know, with the doctors protecting themselves sort of.

ANTHONY ORSINI (14:16)
So here's the really interesting,

this is really interesting Zayn, I'm glad you asked me about this. So traditionally that's what doctors were told. And they were always told, don't feel, don't get too connected. Right now physician burnout is an all time high. In fact, physicians now have the highest rate of suicide of any other profession. Last year alone, 365, 365 doctors killed themselves last year alone. And about,

Zane Myers (14:38)
Really?

ANTHONY ORSINI (14:46)
60 % of physicians have at least one symptom of what we call burnout. And when you really look at it, we have actually been given this wrong narrative for a long time. It turns out that this is not burnout. It's not working hard. It's not hours. Although people still like to say that it attributes to it, and maybe it does a little bit. But it turns out that burnout is probably not the right name for it. It's actually something called moral injury.

And moral injury occurs when people are forced to act contrary to their common beliefs and thoughts. And so what's happening is that physicians, if you really get down to it, what happens is that physicians are told not to feel, not to get close to their patients, not to get compassionate. Well, when they do that, that's not why they went into medicine in the first place. And it's not how they were raised.

and they're acting contrary to their core beliefs and values. And so it actually causes more moral injury. And ⁓ studies have shown that the part of your brain that shows compassion actually grows with the more compassionate empathy that you have. And so the narrative we've been told for over 100 years to not feel is actually damaging us too. So ⁓ not only do patients...

really value a doctor who cares and a doctor who's empathetic and a doctor who puts his hand on his shoulder. ⁓ I tell physicians all the time, you're not only doing it for your patients, you're doing it for yourself. So it's actually the opposite of what we've been told all these times.

Zane Myers (16:22)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. So I did like your comment about ⁓ medicine becoming task-oriented instead of ⁓ patient-oriented. So can you tell me a little bit about any sort of specific success story where you've had kind of a turnaround? I'm talking not as much about the patient side, ⁓ where you were able to reach somebody and get them to kind of convert.

⁓ over to the empathetic ⁓ physician from where they were previously.

ANTHONY ORSINI (17:01)
So yeah, multiple times. First, I'll say that, you know, we've done about 5,000 doctors on one-on-one over the last 15 years, training them in the breaking bad news part of the communication training. And we found that there's about 15 % of them, when we put them through the improvisational role-playing, who just knock it out of the park. They're naturally empathetic. They're great communicators. Sadly, there's about 15 % that...

I could train them every day and they're just never going to get that whole compassionate part of it. But 70 % of them, and we've looked at this, 70 % of them want to be good communicators, want to be empathetic, want to help their patients, but we're just never taught. And the amount of appreciation that we get from these doctors after we give them this one hour of training is overwhelming. I mean, they can't stop thinking. Some of them have practiced in fields like

hematology and oncology and for 20 years and said, I've never, you you've, you've shown me the light. The, the other ⁓ thing that we do a lot is we get referred doctors from healthcare attorneys, doctors who are in trouble with the board of medical examiners, doctors who are about to lose their license because they've had so many complaints from patients. And we do coaching and remote improvisational role playing ⁓ and help them out. But I'll tell you one.

Zane Myers (18:19)
Mm-hmm.

ANTHONY ORSINI (18:30)
really great story. So we were doing ⁓ training some residents in a hospital maybe about five years ago and I get a call from the chief surgeon and he says to me, Tony, do you have any room for this surgeon? I've just about had it with him. I'm tired of getting complaints from him and I told him if he doesn't do your role playing session, he's done.

So I said, yeah, we'll fit him in. So he comes in and I typically teach with instructors, not just me, we have lay people, we have other doctors that do it. And we decided to give him ⁓ a particularly case of a medical error. And his job was to go in and tell the patient that a sponge was left into her. He went, it's a difficult one, right?

Zane Myers (19:17)
That's a difficult one.

ANTHONY ORSINI (19:20)
⁓ He had an attitude when he came in, of course, he didn't want to be there. He told he had to be there He told me he didn't think he had an issue And I said well, let's you know, let's just try so he went in ⁓ And he really made I told you the actors do improv, right? He made the actors Very angry, right? It did not go well So after we do the videotape recording of that we bring them in and we watch the videotape and the other instructor said to me Tony

This guy's making me so angry. I can't even say a word to him. I can't even look at him. That's how much of a jerk he is. I said, all right, well, let's just see what he says. And I said, how'd go? he said, I thought, went fine, went fine. So I said, OK, let's just play your video. Zane, we got about a minute and 30 to two minutes into the videotape. And he looked at me and he said, I never realized I was such an ass.

I mean, with total sincerity. And I said, you think? You know, I'm trying to be nice. And he watched the whole thing. And he said to me, can I stay the rest of the day to learn more? And he stayed the whole day. And do know he is now an instructor for our residents to teach them empathy? I mean, how about that? ⁓ I mean, that is an exceptional story. Yeah, really great.

Zane Myers (20:37)
That's amazing. That's quite a turnaround.

Yeah, that's an exceptional story. can I talk to you a little bit about the business side of running both of these things? So do you work at the hospital as an employee or is that a separate business?

ANTHONY ORSINI (21:00)
⁓ No, ⁓ I'm employed by Nicholas Children's and I have to say always my views are not that of Nicholas Children's and I don't represent them at this during this time. So even though I'm mentioning their name, I want to make sure that that's clear to make the attorneys happy. ⁓ But that's my one life.

Zane Myers (21:05)
Okay.

Hahaha.

Shakespeare said it best,

the first thing we do is kill all of the lawyers.

ANTHONY ORSINI (21:22)
Yeah, that's right. So making

them happy, my views are my own. have nothing to do with Nicholas Children's. ⁓ I only and I run my D'Orsini way during my free time. ⁓ But ⁓ but it's rewarding because I get to do two things and my D'Orsini way originally started out 15 years ago as a little 501 C3.

Zane Myers (21:29)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

ANTHONY ORSINI (21:48)
And when that didn't work out for a variety of reasons, we turned it into an LLC. And it actually has, you know, until recently lost money every year. But things are, things are really picking up and my speaking opportunities are much better. And I've invested in the, in the business and I've invested in myself in learning and getting coached and becoming a better me and a better speaker. So.

Zane Myers (21:58)
Right.

ANTHONY ORSINI (22:18)
we're very optimistic about the future.

Zane Myers (22:21)
Tell me about that, becoming a better speaker. That's kind of an offshoot. I know that when you're talking, there's so many different things that you need to think about in the beginning and then hopefully over a period of time that they become natural. How did the evolution of you as a speaker?

ANTHONY ORSINI (22:41)
You know, I had a message and I had some natural speaking abilities. and I thought that was enough and it was, I was doing okay. I was asked to speak frequently. I'm getting a lot of accolades, but I ran into somebody, ⁓ who was involved in a, in really a company that, ⁓ is made up of, of really four or more really powerful keynote speakers, the top guys in the business. And,

And they ⁓ do kind of conferences and coaching, et cetera. And they teach the business of speaking. The name of their company is called Impact 11. And run by a bunch of wonderful people who taught me that even the people who are top in their business can always get better. There's every, to analyze every word that I say, to analyze how I deliver that message.

and to hone in on what my message is. And they also taught me that it's a business like anything else and how you run that business. That professional people think that those who professionally speak are just naturally good at it. They practice at it just as much as a baseball player or a football player. And so I have to thank them for that. And I think that's why I'm really taking off lately.

Zane Myers (24:02)
because of your practice, your dedication to your speaking craft, you mean.

ANTHONY ORSINI (24:07)
And honing my message and Impact 11 has helped me do that to make sure. And I have several different keynotes, but they're all related to communication and really mastering the art of verbal and nonverbal communication and how to build relationships. And whether that's with patients or, I mean, I've even spoken to some HR departments on how to have difficult conversations in HR.

It's all about communication and really, as you know, with your sales background, right? Communication is really the linchpin for success.

Zane Myers (24:45)
So your dad was a beat cup, so I'm jumping all over the place. How does that impact you as an adult? Or does it? It was in SWOT.

ANTHONY ORSINI (24:50)
Yeah. My dad was in SWAT. He was even in SWAT.

So yeah, he was a badass and he is still alive. Thank God he's doing great. Yeah, you know, my dad was a great role model. He, you know, didn't go to college. He worked himself all the way up and was very strict, but always showed love. And I'm still close to my dad, but...

Yeah, not many people can say that their father was in swat. So that was kind of, you you didn't mess with him, that's for sure. But he always showed us he loved us.

Zane Myers (25:18)
Yeah.

Yeah, do you have a bunch of siblings?

ANTHONY ORSINI (25:24)
I have a younger brother who is also a police officer. Ironically, just as a side, everyone in my family are cops except for me. I just come from a big family of cops, uncles, cousins, father, brother, everyone.

Zane Myers (25:37)
Wow, so I saw that your ⁓ cousin was on your podcast and he works for an organization that's ⁓ part of the Gary V ⁓ group of companies. I thought that was kind of interesting. Do you have a, really? So that's interesting. I was gonna ask you if you have, I imagine that is helpful in your, you know.

ANTHONY ORSINI (25:45)
Hmm.

And my daughter works for them too.

Yeah, she's doing really well there. Yeah.

Zane Myers (26:04)
speaking engagement or I don't know if that does help you at all or if you have any.

ANTHONY ORSINI (26:11)
No, mean, James and I grew up together. We were like brothers and we're still pretty close. But, you know, he kind of does his thing. I do my thing. I'll call him for advice every now and then. He will ask me for some advice, but ⁓ medical advice. But I don't know if that relationship has really done anything. I had Claude Silver on. She was my daughter's boss and she's from VaynerMedia too. So there's a little bit of a connection there, but really that's about it.

Zane Myers (26:40)
So do you have anything you want to plug? You've got your podcast going on. You've got the ⁓ Orsini way. You can't really plug the hospital, but it's almost like you're having fun with everything that you're doing.

ANTHONY ORSINI (26:58)
Yes, and the latest project that we're taking on that's really been very, very popular, the CMS, Committee for Medicare and Medicaid Services, has ⁓ recently, within the last year, really put out some very strong recommendations on how to disclose medical errors. Medical errors are very common in medicine and traditionally.

Physicians have kind of stayed away from disclosing that. And we've now known from some very good programs that disclosing that medical error when it occurs and doing it correctly not only helps the patient, but also helps the physician after the medical error. And so now that the recommendation is that physicians are actually the one who reveal that medical error. What happens is no longer attorneys or risk managers.

And so we've been contacted by several hospital organizations to say, know, okay, can you train our physicians and our risk managers using the Orsini way of communicating on how to disclose those medical errors in the most effective and compassionate manner? And so that has been something we're very excited about. actually are launching very soon a e-learning module to supplement.

the training because you have thousands and thousands of doctors who learn that. So I think that's something really exciting. We know that when you disclose a medical error correctly and with empathy and be transparent about it, not only does it help the family and patient in the short term, but it helps them in the long term and also helps the physician come to grips of what happened. And again, another example of how communication helps both the patient.

and the doctor.

Zane Myers (28:50)
I would think that that would be a tough sale for a lot of physicians because there's so much concern about litigation and so forth that when they feel like, I've been told all my career, don't come clean on, or you gotta, don't expose this. It's a weakness and you're putting yourself up for litigation and how do you get around that? mean, do you think that there's, by disclosing that this

bad thing happened and here's how it happened, here's why it happened and does that reduce the risk of litigation?

ANTHONY ORSINI (29:28)
Actually, it does more than you think. There's some really good work at the University of Michigan that started this whole process. It's been over 10 years now that shows when you have transparency, when the physician is transparent about the medical error, even if it's something bad that happened, you could actually reduce litigation by doing it correctly by over 33%. So most families...

file lawsuits, not because of bad outcomes, but because they feel that you're hiding something and they want answers. And when you're transparent, studies show that actually the families are more understanding about that when you say you're sorry and you're transparent about that. And there's a right and a wrong way to do it. We work with the attorneys to make sure that we say what we're supposed to say and not say what we're not supposed to say, but ⁓ you actually get a significantly reduce. And that's why the committee for Medicare and Medicaid

has said this is something that every doctor needs to learn.

Zane Myers (30:26)
Wow, that's really an incredible opportunity for your organization to make a big impact because that would be kind of a sea change,

ANTHONY ORSINI (30:40)
I think so. And that's why you said, do you want to plug it? I'm so excited about this because not, think there are some programs out there that are helping people with disclosing of medical errors. A lot of them are just simply, you know, learning modules. And even though we do have learning modules, they're used as a supplement. ⁓ and I think coming from a physician, physicians are funny people, right? We, you know, as a physician, when I, when I do programs with other physicians, it'll at least buy me 10 minutes.

You know, I'll give you the courtesy. I'll listen for 10 minutes. And if I don't like what you're saying, I'm out of here. But that's 10 minutes more than a non-position gets. So I think we're in a really good position to help these hospitals. And I'm excited about the future of that. Again, all centered on communication and the Orsini way. But this is just another chapter and another example of by mastering communication, how you can live a happier life and do better for your patients.

Zane Myers (31:10)
Mm-hmm.

So I'm just curious, how are you, what's the mechanisms that you're gonna use to market that?

ANTHONY ORSINI (31:45)
So we're going to finish up the learning module. We're in talks with ⁓ a company for co-branding and we've talked about, ⁓ we've just signed the contract with a company that's going to help us market it through LinkedIn and different social media. But I would say in the past, most of our businesses come from word of mouth and the reputation that we built and perhaps it took way too long if we had done it the right way, but

For instance, the lecture that I'm giving tomorrow is the third keynote that I'm giving from a keynote back in November. And ⁓ it's interesting because I gave that keynote in November, two days before my son got married. And ⁓ my wife said, I'll let you do it, but if you miss the plane, don't come home. So she did not want me to go and.

I did it. I made the wedding. Everything was happy. And from that keynote, I've gotten three other ⁓ workshops. that's our strongest way of marketing ourselves is just doing a good job and having people refer you.

Zane Myers (32:56)
So I want to ask you about your book. It's all in the delivery. I know that that was, you know, what was that, 2020? That you wrote the book? Yeah. So it's, that's been five years. So was that, how long did it take you to write that?

ANTHONY ORSINI (33:04)
I think so, yeah. Yeah, it's been a long time now.

Well, you know, probably about five years because I kept putting it down, starting it again, putting it down, starting again. So it's hard to say. It wasn't five years continuous, but you know, a good year and I had a really good editor and some, some people that I knew through mutual friends that helped me with it. So, ⁓ it was one of the things that I'm really proud of. mean, it was writing a book is just the most arduous thing you could possibly do. And when it's over, you feel like.

Rory McElroy winning the Masters. This is you feel like. Total relief.

Zane Myers (33:44)
Ha ha!

So

was that helpful in your business or was it just helpful to get it all out or both?

ANTHONY ORSINI (33:57)
I had two goals when I wrote it. One is another opportunity to spread my message of communication, but also as an author and using it as a reference and it builds credibility as a speaker. so typically when I speak the hospital or association, I'll buy a bunch of books and hand them out. And so I think it accomplished. wasn't looking to

to write a bestseller, but I wanted a handbook, if you will, for people to be able to buy and read. I didn't want it to be really long. It's nice and short. I think it's readable. ⁓ And it gives all the strong points about what I believe and the message that I'm trying to give.

Zane Myers (34:45)
So they it's kind of kind of like a so we have a ⁓ separate company called credibility books and I'm not selling you on this I just it's kind of us. I'm always interested in people and their books and It seems like a universal It depends somebody who who writes a book to be a bestseller That's a job But someone who writes a book

as their passion and it almost becomes like their calling card. That's something completely different. It's really ⁓ as powerful for them to kind of get it all out there. I think it's easier to talk about the subject matter when you've really written it down, written it down, written down. ⁓ But ⁓ I'm always interested in people's take on that issue. So, because I have a ⁓ horse to...

ANTHONY ORSINI (35:34)
And

when we do when we do coaching, for instance, and we get these doctors who are referred to us to coach them through remediation because the board said that they need to learn how to communicate better. It's a great starting point. We'll say to them, OK, I'm going to send you my book. want you to read it. And then we're going to have a few coaching sessions and then we're going to put you through some improvisational role playing. And then we'll do a debriefing. And so it's a good starting point so that we.

They're kind of understand what we call the Orsini way of communicating before we even get into that first session. it's a nice supplement.

Zane Myers (36:10)
So I want to compliment you. Your book is really well written. I mean, I didn't read the whole thing. I have to fess up. But I did read ⁓ the beginning part of it. And it's emotionally charged. ⁓ It touched me right away. I'm have to go out and buy it because I want to hear the rest of your story because it was exceptionally well written. I don't know why I would be surprised, but I was kind of surprised.

ANTHONY ORSINI (36:32)
Thank you.

Zane Myers (36:39)
But you know that you do all the speaking and you're all about communication. So I guess it would would go to reason that that you'd you'd be a good writer as well.

ANTHONY ORSINI (36:51)
Well, thank you. ⁓ yes, I had a good editor, Fred Garth, who's a friend of mine who's done it before. And he helped with that in the process of getting the book done. And ⁓ you're right. Once, if you're just writing your passion, it flows a lot easier than if you're trying to write a bestseller. And that was never my intent. So I'm perfectly happy with that.

Zane Myers (37:14)
So if somebody wanted to find out more about their latest ⁓ endeavor with ⁓ CMS and ⁓ what do call that? mean, basically you're getting people to take responsibility for their errors kind of or emotional responsibility for the mistakes that they made. ⁓ What's the program called and where would you find out more about it?

ANTHONY ORSINI (37:42)
Well, the name of our website is called theorsiniway.com and you can get all the information there. And there's a link if you're specifically asking for speaking and you just want a keynote, there'll be a link on there to my speaking page, which I keep separate right now. And that's anthonyorsini.com. But the name of the program is called Disclosing Medical Errors. everything's called, it's all in the delivery. That's our brand. So it's all in the delivery of Disclosing Medical Errors.

And that program ⁓ consists of training the risk managers and key physicians at a hospital with multiple in-person lectures by myself. And then we do improvisational role playing with the key champions of this. And so they have now are able to teach the Orsini way of communicating. And then the learning modules will supplement all that, which we feel really

really strong about that you can't just learn from an e-module. So we have to have a combination of it. And we will sell people the e-module, but we're just, it's much better if we can do the role playing. And I love to speak. And so, so it's really a three-part series. It's the role playing, it's the workshops and it's the e-modules.

Zane Myers (39:00)
I think we're about winding up right there. Thank you, Dr. Orsini. I really enjoyed that. We went kind of all over the place with that, but that's the way I like it. So hang on. I'm going to press the stop button here.

ANTHONY ORSINI (39:08)
Well, it was a pleasure. Yeah.