Memphis has long been a hub for innovators. We live in a time when it’s essential to up our game, whether it’s for better health, a better community, or a better way of life and living. Memphis Magazine has been honoring those people and organizations who have looked not just to the next level but who reach for the stars. Our 2024 Innovation Awards — the 12th annual event — has found those thinkers and doers who have already made the city a better place to live. We had plenty of candidates to choose from, but these five people representing four organizations are working to make tomorrow an amazing time.
This year, we recognize BreAnna Boyd, founder and CEO of FeedWells; Dr. Evan S. Glazer at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center; Eric Mathews, CEO of Start Co.; and Susan Cooper and Megan Williams with Regional One Health.
Please attend the 2025 Innovation Awards Breakfast:
Wednesday, January 15, 2025 | 7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. | 750 Cherry Rd, Memphis, TN 38117
photograph courtesy uthsc
In healthcare, sometimes taking in the big picture and sweating the small stuff go hand-in-hand. At least, that’s where the field is headed, driven by a central paradox: A newly collaborative spirit among medical researchers is being combined with a new approach to clinical care, centered precisely on what makes a patient unique. Such thinking is at the heart of the academic medical center model, which represents a cutting-edge, hybrid rethinking of both research and care, and some notable early adopters of the approach are based in Memphis.
In recent years, a unique collaborative program between the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UTHSC) and Regional One Health has become a paragon of such hybrid research and care, thanks in part to the efforts of Dr. Evan S. Glazer. As an associate professor of surgery and the director of Oncology Clinical Research at UTHSC’s College of Medicine, he knows the halls of academia well, even as he also serves as a practicing surgical oncologist at Regional One. And he sees the latter work as an essential reality check on what he does, focused as it is on one subject: the patient in front of you.
In any given encounter, Glazer says, he might discover that “I learned something new today. That’s fantastic. And we did something better for the patient that we would not have done a year ago.”
As a result, Glazer’s work isn’t always centered on his specialty, per se. “Once you get past your ego,” he says, “it’s about the patient. The patient’s at the center of all this.” Starting from there, one can maintain the focus on each patient’s unique case even as a multitude of other specialists bring their brainpower to bear on that patient’s issues — and therein lies the heart of the new approach.
“Some innovation is as simple as, ‘I have a new idea, a new drug, to treat cancers or people with cancer, to help them live longer, or cure the cancer,’” says Glazer. “But innovations also take the form of how we do things and how those things come together. And I think that’s probably what I’m better at. I’m more about bringing together the clinical side of care for cancer patients with research, with teaching. And it is kind of innovative for the Mid-South and really across the country, though more and more centers are taking an innovative approach to cancer treatment, where the care goes hand in hand with research and other academic pursuits.”
The academic medical center model, Glazer explains, brings a kind of brain trust to bear on any given patient’s case, should they opt in to the approach. All manner of care providers, from students to residents to fellows, are learning how to be doctors, specialists, pediatricians, internal medicine doctors, nurse practitioners, or technologists. Physicians who’ve been through medical school and a general surgical residency, now studying to be surgical oncologists or cancer surgeons, are also involved in formulating treatment strategies for the patient.
“When they have an idea, they go and look it up and bring back some evidence to me. ‘Hey, we saw this patient in clinic. Let’s do A, B, and C.’ And I say, ‘Well, I haven’t really thought about that. Go find me some data about treatment A versus treatment B. Let’s see if we can figure out which is best for this patient.’ And they come back with an answer. The patient wins, I learned something, they learned something. And to be frank, I think they enjoy teaching the teacher something. Being an academic person, I always want to learn something.”
Moreover, the new model enlists every patient that’s involved in ongoing research that serves more long-term goals. “We’re learning more about their cancer biology or their disease or something in their blood,” he says. “And it may not help them directly, but it’s going to help the common good across the country. As we learn more things, we develop new therapies, and then those therapies eventually, hopefully, become a standard treatment. And so you’ve run the full gamut, from an idea to a research study with a number of institutions involved, and you’re one of them. So now the FDA says this worked, and you should do it as standard of care.”
Ultimately, the approach tends to repeatedly have multiple beneficiaries. In any given encounter, Glazer says, he might discover that “I learned something new today. That’s fantastic. And we did something better for the patient that we would not have done a year ago. That’s fantastic. With academic medical centers, that’s what comes from putting patients first.”
