Katrina Firlik Speaker Biography
Dr. Katrina Firlik made history as the first woman admitted to the neurosurgery residency program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, one of the largest and most prestigious programs in the country. She then spent six years as a neurosurgeon in private practice in Greenwich, Connecticut and served on the clinical faculty at Yale University School of Medicine.Katrina currently focuses on medical innovation as an entrepreneur. She is co-founder and chief medical officer of HealthPrize Technologies. HealthPrize has developed a novel solution to the problem of poor compliance with prescription medications, a problem that leads to poor outcomes and an estimated $290 billion in preventable medical spending per year in the US.
Her first book, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, draws on her rare combination of wit, humor, and medical insight to create a neurosurgeon’s Kitchen Confidential – a unique insider’s memoir of a fascinating profession. Dr. Firlik recounts how her background as a surgeon’s daughter with a strong stomach and a keen interest in the brain led her to this rarefied specialty, and she describes her challenging, atypical trek from medical student to fully qualified surgeon.
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe was selected as part of the 78th Annual Exhibition of Books for the Teen Age at the New York Public Library. The Library Journal selected Another Day in the Frontal Lobe as one of their Best Sci-Tech Books of 2006, and it was also ranked as #3 on the Science Bestseller list in the August edition of Discover Magazine. Another Day in the Frontal Lobe has been published internationally in the UK, China, and Taiwan, with translations soon to arrive in Brazil and Korea.
Dr. Firlik has been interviewed numerous times on NPR and has been featured on Fox News, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, CNN with Lou Dobbs Tonight, and PBS Latenight. Excerpts of her book and serials have been included in publications such as The Chicago Tribune and Scientific American Mind.
Motivating Healthy Behaviors: How Compliance Improves Medical Outcomes & Decreases Healthcare Costs
In this keynote, Firlik will discuss how creative marketing techniques and behavioral economics can be brought into healthcare to motivate medication compliance and other healthy behaviors. She will explore a novel Internet-based approach that leverages consumer-friendly education and financial incentives. By treating people like consumers and not like patients, and by avoiding the traditional look and feel of healthcare, medical outcomes can be improved, with a resulting decrease in cost. Better compliance with medication is a win-win for every stakeholder in medicine: the patient, employer, insurer, pharmacy, pharmaceutical company, and doctor.
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe
Dr. Firlik’s talk, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe, explores how a surgeon thinks about the brain on a day-to-day basis, a perspective quite different than that of other brain specialists, like neurologists and neuroscientists.
