The Sim Cafe~ Interview with Brian Levine

Brian Levine is an innovative and accomplished Business and Technology Leader with extensive experience and global perspective in commercial and government contracting and acquisition in simulation, training and gaming with a focus on medical simulation and public safety. He holds three degrees from Stetson University – a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting, and a Master’s in Business Administration.

Mr. Levine has been a contributing member and leader in the local simulation community for the past 15 years while working at SAIC, Presagis, CAE USA, and CAE Healthcare. Although he has had a prominent focus on medical simulation with the goal of improving healthcare and patient safety, Mr. Levine has a broader simulation experience in Land, Air, and Sea.

As a contributing member and leader in the simulation community, Mr. Levine has served a variety of leadership roles in such events and initiatives as the NTSA MS&T Congressional Caucus Committee on Patient Safety, Florida Simulation Summit, I/ITSEC Healthcare Track Planning Committee, Co-chair of the MODSIM Healthcare Track, Co-Founder of the Florida Alliance for Simulation in Healthcare, and speaker at such conferences as the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, I/ITSEC, MODSIM, Florida Simulation Summit, and TSIS.

Mr. Levine has recently joined DLH Corporation as a Director of Business Development in Modeling, Simulation, and Training. He will be helping lead the organization as DLH establishes greater presence in the Modeling, Simulation, and Training community and a greater local presence in Orlando.

Email: Brian.Levie@dlhcorp.com.

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Transcript

Disclaimer: 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Simsolutions or our sponsors.

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Intro: 1:00

Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative SimSolutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber, as she sits down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in, and learn something new from The SIimCafe.

Deb: 1:32

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Today we are truly blessed to have Brian Levine welcome Brian, and I'm going to give you a little bit of information about Brian. Brian is an innovative and accomplished business and technology leader with extensive experience in global perspective and commercial and government contracting and acquisition and simulation training and gaming with a focus on medical simulation and public safety. He holds three degrees from Stetson University, a Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science, a Bachelor's of Business Administration and Accounting, and a Master's in Business Administration. Welcome Brian, and thank you so much for being a guest today. Would you like to tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself?

Brian: 2:20

Yes, and thank you for having me. So I'm kind of unique as I've been listening to some of the other podcasts and that I don't come from a clinical background, but I do come from a healthcare background. I worked at a previous company called SAIC and Healthcare Informatics, and it was during the time of meaningful use, anthrax monkey, prox, sars, everything that was going on in healthcare at the time. And I was working in integrating disparate systems, working with the CDC for the, about 11 years of my career there at SAAC. So I, I kind of come to the simulation space with this informatics type of background, technology background with my degree in computer science. So I've always approached simulation from a slightly different perspective than probably some of your other, uh, guests have.

Deb: 3:08

Great. That's very interesting. I know you had, uh, for a time worked at cia, so you are familiar with the community. Why don't you go ahead and share with your friends your journey into simulation?

Brian: 3:22

Sure. So it's a, it's a kind of funny one because, uh, I was working in a very, very kind of niche space in, in this whole informatic surveillance, bio surveillance and laboratory information, everything about, uh, data of healthcare. And I was traveling back and forth for about 10 years to Atlanta from Orlando, Florida. And, uh, my first son was born Logan. And my wife said, maybe you can dial back the, the travel a little bit. And I said, no, you know, my work is at the cdc and CDC is in Atlanta. So a couple days later, the new in the newspaper, and we, we still read newspapers at that time. There was an article about how SAIC was one of the top places to work in Orlando. She said, wait a minute. There's 250 people in Orlando, and you're traveling back and forth to Atlanta. So I said, well, they do like defense contracting and they do simulation. I I work for public health. It's not the same thing right there. There's no way I can take what I'm doing in, in public health and, and apply it to, you know, this world of defense simulation. But she encouraged me and, and I, I went ahead and, and made my move and made my play to kind of be a resource that was on loan to the simulation division from the healthcare division of s a a. So I helped to start not only in SAIC, but also in some of the Orlando community, this, this sort of unique community of defense modeling simulation in healthcare. So the community had already exists in research park with all of the work that was being done with the Army and the Air Force and the Navy, but it was primarily around air, land, and sea. A little bit of public safety. But given my, my background in, in healthcare informatics and where I felt most comfortable, I really pushed the envelope in, in having us explore medical simulation. Now, you mentioned medi and cae. Those companies existed, but they weren't as prevalent in the US government at the time. This was before even the mystics, the medical simulation training centers. This was before half mass near the Air Force medical modeling, simulation, training centers. It was at the very beginning, but I had my eyes on the dummies, the robots, the puppets, the simulators, you know, the mannequins, whatever you wanna call them. So I started this kind of journey in an area I felt comfortable with, which was software. So I'm a software guy, a computer scientist, not really a hardware guy. So although, although I admire the mannequins from afar, I immediately found a niche niche in the digital world, which is kind of funny because we almost come full circle a decade and a half later with the way simulation is going. But I was sort of at the forefront of that. So I, I helped with an acquisition of a company called forterra. They had a product called Olive, the online interactive virtual environment. Now that I know enough about the Metaverse, I will tell you, this is Metaverse version 1.0. Right. We were building something very similar to Second Life that allowed people to be something other than themselves in a virtual environment for training, but also for a lot of other kind of noble causes. So, um, as part of that acquisition, I helped integrate them into the SAIC, uh, company and started to expand upon what the platform could do. So working with organizations like Patrick of the US Army, the telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center, to build some physiology into the platform, working with Humo at a University of Mississippi to integrate their physiology model into that platform, working with, uh, FEMA and the national level exercise to create a response to hurricanes and earthquakes. This was coming like right after Katrina. So I had this kind of nice area that I felt comfortable in and really excelled in. And we were doing work for everyone, Tripler Army Base. We were doing work with the VA and a project with the virtual medical center. So I was basically living this virtual world and, uh, then my boss and mentor at SAIC goes to work for CAE, I would say about, uh, six months after the announcement that Medi was acquired by CAE. So it, it was one of those things that, oh, I know my next path. I need to go work for CAE and go work with the mannequins. However, it was my experience in the services world and the government contracting world, that was really the lore, um, from a perspective of me being recruited to CAE. So, although I thought I would just jump into the healthcare space, since that's what I knew, I was actually put in a variety of other kind of adjacencies, anything but healthcare. So I, I worked a little bit in aviation, a little bit in, in Naval bridge simulation, a little bit in weather simulation and energy simulation. And, and I had a lot of exposure to a different types of simulation. And finally I found myself back to where I truly belonged, which was in the, the healthcare space. And I, I began to help the CAE Healthcare, which had been predominantly a product based company, really expand into a services company, a solutions company, and a company doing work with, uh, the US government and other governments. So by the time I ended my, my journey with cae, I was traveling the world. I had been to countries that I probably didn't even know existed prior to, to joining, but certainly I got to see Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Malaysia, Brunai, um, Thailand, you know, the, the list goes on Canada, A lot of places that I just hadn't visited before, helping to develop training centers. So I went from developing software to kind of chasing that mannequin dream, to doing services, to helping to build training centers throughout the world. So that kind of brought me upright until the, I, like say the end of covid, but towards the, if we believe that we're at the end of covid. So towards the end of covid, during the great resignation and everything going on, and I was ready for change, I was, or, or ready to go back to kind of early days of heavy government contracting. So I joined a company called dlh, defense Logistics Health as a business development director in the modeling simulation space, being there a healthcare company predominantly looking at, uh, growth in the healthcare market. But given my background in kind of the adjacency areas, I'm gonna be looking at public safety and, and some of the other adjacent areas to healthcare.

Deb: 10:23

I love that story. Great. Thank you. Way to get into simulation, and I'm just fascinated by all the things that you did. I'm gonna go ahead and ask my next question.

Brian: 10:33

Sure.

Deb: 10:35

And if you have this, do you have a favorite or most impactful simulation story that you'd like to share with our guests?

Brian: 10:41

Yes, I do. So, my favorite one, it was the one that was the least related to modeling, simulation and training, but yet using the same technology. So when I was at S A I C, working with the online interactive virtual environment, we were looking at how we can apply that virtual reality role playing type of environment to something other than just training. And I started working with some really great folks in mental health, Dr. Walter Greenleaf, uh, Dr. Josh Patalnick, uh, Skip Rizzo and several others. In applying this virtual reality type of technology to mental health, to ptsd, TBI phobias and things like that, we had developed a number of research projects to take that technology and allow people to be something other than who they are in real life, and use the environment to portray the behaviors that they wanna portray in real life. So, think about autism and think about other disabilities. There was even a project with, uh, people in prison, right, that were able to imagine themselves outta prison. There was a project around, around drug abuse and addiction and being able to get rewards in the system. So the time I spent with those, those folks leading up to a, a project that we had proposed to DARPA and got awarded to do with DARPA, to use the, the technology to help, you know, veterans deal with a variety of different things between PTSD and TBI and, and and various others. So that was probably, for me, the most impactful because as, as Nobles training is, and as much of an impact we make in patient safety, there's still something about actually affecting people's lives, you know, direct to the people you're trying to help. So for me, in my career, that was probably the most impactful because I got to see the, the end result as opposed to trying to improve the middle man. I was working directly, you know, with, with sort of that, that end consumer of, of the technology.

Deb: 12:59

Thank you for your contributions, cuz it is such an important area. I think, you know, mental health is just, it's so important and we need to destigmatize it and we need to help people that need help.

Brian: 13:13

Right. And, and what this allowed, you know, talking about the de-stigmatize is that in an environment like a metaverse, you could be you, but you could also be not you, right? So if there was any stigma or anything you were worried about, you could join your peers and create this virtual version of an Alcoholics Anonymous or of a, of a, of any sort of addiction group or, or group of cancer survivors, whatever the group is, and be who you wanna be. And, and the work we had done with the same platform and the virtual medical center, what was really about that, it was creating a virtual version of a medical treatment facility or of a VA hospital that a patient could go to and participating groups without getting in the car and driving, you know, a hundred miles or without exposing who they are because maybe they're just not ready to talk about it yet. Uh, but in this environment, in a metaverse type environment, you really could be whoever you wanna be.

Deb: 14:17

Very interesting. Can you share with our listeners where you were and what you did during the Covid Pandemic and if there was any lessons learned?

Brian: 14:27

Yes. So leading up to the, the pandemic, I was on the road 24 7, right? Uh, when you're traveling to different countries, it pretty much takes up, uh, you know, an entire month or entire weeks at a time. So I was nonstop traveling. I, I believe, what was IMSH in San Diego at the time? I know it was in California, right? So I remember coming from there, I left and flew to Arab Health in Dubai, and I actually got really sick. So I kicked off the, the pandemic by ending up in the, in the hospital with almost pneumonia and, uh, recovering in my hospital room for a couple weeks before returning to the us. Now whether that was covid or not, I, I don't know. But once I, I got back, I didn't know what to do with myself because all I do is pack, drive to the airport, the airport, see, see the world. Now, now I did get to experience, I made a point if I was going to Egypt, I was gonna see the pyramids. If I was going to Saudi Arabia, I don't know what I would see there, but, uh, you know, if I was going to Dubai, I was gonna see the Burj Khalifa, you know, so I, I made a point of wherever I went when I was Australia, I held a koala. And when I was in South Africa, I, I went on a safari. So I did get to see various different things. So all of a sudden I find myself at home, right? With nowhere to go, nothing to pack for or anything else like that. So one of the probably hobbies that, that I ended up picking up is I, I was always a, a cook, but never really a baker. And my sons and I, primarily my youngest Asher, we just started cooking and baking and then posting online and Instagram and everything else like that, and then offering food to all of the neighbors. And, and we'd go around delivering food on bikes or by foot and stuff like that. Cupcakes and, and flan, I mean, you name it, cheesecake, it didn't matter. We, every week we were, we would cook two or three, you know, different recipes. That was really good. We probably put on a little weight from all the, uh, the baking that we were doing. But it was a fun experience. What I had to do though, kind of professionally was, you know, redefine how I interacted with clients and things like that. You know, that the height of c my primary objective was to help build training centers. And now training centers are closed, construction is faulted. You know, we, we wanted to go, you know, visit and see sites and look at architecture. That, that was part of our, our process. We called it a training needs analysis. But what we really did is we got to understand the culture of where we were building a training center and the mission of the training and the objectives and everything else like that. It was so hard to do remotely, but you know what, we figured it out. We, we didn't get the same experience, but we got different experiences. So when we go visit a site, it's very hard to coordinate with everyone who's a stakeholder, right? You kind of get the people who are there that day, or the most important people, and you try to cram everything into one or two days so that you're, you're not in a hotel for longer and stuff like that. And now with virtual and teams, we had the ability to work remotely in a organized and efficient way. So if the team from, you know, the nurses are available on Monday, but the physician team wasn't available till Thursday and another team, you know, we were able to actually plan that out and, and revisit and come back and, and have a recording of everything we did. So we actually found from that point forward that we could gather a lot and just maybe send later, you know, an architect and, and a designer and things like that to really appreciate the, the more localness of what we're trying to build. From an architecture perspective,

Deb: 18:32

It sounds like provided an opportunity to be more deliberate.

Brian: 18:37

Yes.

Deb: 18:38

Because you would essentially get there, and I can see this, you've got the dog and pony show that all come in, but they're not gonna be the end users. So then right when you leave, you're gonna leave. And maybe they did write the check, but they're not fully engaged in it. And in simulation, I think all of us want simulation to be utilized and in every possible way. Mm-hmm.<affirmative> to, you know, improve healthcare, improve healthcare outcomes, not for only the patients and families, but also for the providers.

Brian: 19:09

Yes.

Deb: 19:10

I'm gonna ask you the next question, which is, can you share with our listeners the biggest thing that you'd like them to know? Something that when you learned it, it really changed the way you practice like a personal aha moment?

Brian: 19:24

Yes. So for me, the aha moment was really understanding the world of insurance payers, providers, and everything else like that. You know, cae heavy in aviation. I came out of this world where everyone just got behind the use of simulation policy and procedure certification. And you didn't have to sell simulation because it benefited everyone because the person who was flying, if they did something wrong, their life was at risk as much as the passengers in the back. And the businesses that were, were financing everything, were at risk because of the cost of fuel, but as well as the cost of losing a, you know, a plane and training or in practice. So everybody's goals were in alignment. And then you get to healthcare and you say, wait a minute, we should all be behind the improved outcomes. We should all be behind improved patient safety. We should all be behind better skilled. But what I found is politics, right? So there were those who didn't wanna be measured by computers. There were those that didn't wanna offer incentives for this type of training. There were hospitals that didn't want to prioritize money spent on training versus money spent on some other efficiency measure. And we fought for a long time and continue to fight, right? And part of the efforts that I work with the NTSS and the Congressional Modeling and Simulation Caucus is how do we change the rules? Because the goals are not an alignment. And I couldn't understand that when I came into healthcare because I, I watched certain things. This, the time 2005, I watched Katrina and I watched, and the, you know, the, um, the airs human kind of report had just come out a couple years earlier and you just sit there and you scratch your head and you go this. But when I realized they each have their own priorities, and the goal is to bring them all together and speak their language, that was my aha moment. That some need the carrot and some need the stick. But if we could get that equation right, you could really make a difference. And you have like the CRICO model where the payer and the provider are the same, and you're able to achieve some of that. But it's gonna be an upheld battle that we continue to have that we hope we, we achieve. But that was definitely for me, my aha moment.

Deb: 21:52

That is really insightful and I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you.

Brian: 21:57

You're welcome.

Deb: 21:59

Brian, I was gonna ask you, we, we got on a little bit earlier. You do a lot of things, you do a lot of charitable things. Why don't you tell us a little bit about some of the charities that you're involved with.

Brian: 22:10

S ure, s ure. I, I've got my like really fun charities. I got my< laugh> my really impactful ones as well. So for fun, uh, I started a parent booster organization, so it's an actual 501-3 C, which I run, uh, b ecause my kids are in the, th e m arching ba nd. And I've always been ki nd o f, if I wasn't in simulation, I'd probably be in food service. I' ve a lways wanted to own a restaurant or a food truck or something along those lines. So I really had the opportunity to start this booster and then really focus on driving revenue from the concessions. And, an d I took a concession that was barely selling chips and soda for a dollar each. And I, we expanded it, added a, a deep fryer, added a grill and everything else like that. And, and now the concessions alone brings in thousands of dollars each game for the band as, as well as for the, th e c olor gu ard a nd things like th at. So th at, that's sort of my Friday night fun charity. I am also recently not announced, but recently determined and soon to be announced the, I' ve b een elected to the board of directors for great charity called Lighthouse Wo rks a n d, and they're part of the National Institutes for the Blind. And it's basically two groups, lighthouse that provides all these great services for people who are either partially, partially blind or fully blind, just so that they can understand how to navigate life, reading braille, using a stick, navigating in a grocery store, looking at money and, an d o rganization and using screen readers and things like that. And then Lighthouse Works is how they fund the great programs at Lighthouse, but also provide an avenue for employment because it's not the easiest thing, even during the great designation for somebody who is site impaired to get a job if they don't have the right tools in hand. So wh at L ighthouse Wo rks i s, does is they train and provide those tools so that they're able to provide employment opportunities for call centers, for IT support for manufacturing and assembly and things like that. And they've done really well in supporting the State of Fl orida a n d, an d s ome of their federal programs. And I'm gonna try to help them expand into more of a federal space. So helping them ge t o n the GSA schedule so that they can sell their services nationally. So it, it's a, a great program. I' ve j ust told a c ouple days ago that, th at I was elected. So I' m, I'm excited to be able to serve.

Deb: 24:46

Congratulations and thank you for all your contributions, um, in, not only in healthcare, but you know, some of your disparity populations. I absolutely warms my heart. Thank you.

Brian: 24:58

You're welcome.

Deb: 25:00

Now, Brian, is there anything you wanna ask me?

Brian: 25:02

Sure. So I am a new blogger. I just recently started writing and I was interested to know from you as a podcaster how your journey began into this world and, and what, what kept you going?

Deb: 25:18

Thank you. Really what kept me going is people who believe in me,<laugh>. I started out in 2017 when I opened the company and I was just doing some consulting and most of my clients were people that knew me from somewhere and they would maybe left that somewhere and then they would have me come in and help'em get started with simulation. And then in 2020 when the pandemic hit, I had to really go ahead and decide where I wanted to focus. And so I was picked up by DePaul University's women's entrepreneur group and they select like 10 women in the Chicagoland area and they work with us and try and help us with our business skills because as a nurse we like to give everything away for free. That's just what we do, right? You know, so these people who are business people, they teach us how to do things and how to get smart investments, how to see if you can get seed money, all different kinds of things. They're just fascinating women to be around. And one of'em, I decided to put some courses online, so I, I was helped with that and we got some courses up online and simulation in telehealth. And then one of them said, I wanna see where you're gonna be at in about five years. There's about a guy by the name of John Warlow who his parents were entrepreneurs. And so instead of going like to simulation conferences or nursing conferences, he would go to to entrepreneur conferences. So from the get go when he was a kid, he learned all these things. So I read his book, it's called Build to Sell,

Brian: 26:52

I'm gonna write that one down as well.

Deb: 26:54

Build to Sell and then to sell<laugh>. It's a, it's a really good, it's a good book and it's fun to listen to. And then he had a podcast and it was called, I think it's Built To Sell Radio. And I started listening to his podcasts and then I was thinking to myself, you know, self and at the time I really was just learning about podcasts. So it was about a year ago. So my daughter said to me, cuz she had listened to the murder and mystery types, she said, you should start one. I said, you know, I do have a lot of friends in simulation who, who might be, you know, willing to interview with me. And then before you knew it, I was doing it. And I think it kind of brings me to my Zen moment because having the opportunity to interview people who are so smart like yourself and so many others that I've interviewed is just a complete honor. And they've taken off, they've taken off really well.

Brian: 27:46

Yeah, it's a great platform. I just enjoyed going through and listening to some of the old ones getting prepared for today and just hearing some of those stories and some of the people I knew. So it's even funny to hear some of their stories that you didn't know their stories, but you knew the people.

Deb: 28:00

Right, right. I'm actually working on, um, well I, I think, you know, I work a little bit with Fara Canor, we do a lot together. Right. I'm gonna make coffee mugs that say the Sim Cafe. I was a guest, so you maybe gets

Brian: 28:15

<laugh>. That would be good. That would be nice. I, I watch The Today Show and I love when they have their Today Show mugs, those yellow mugs and the pictures on Sunday morning.

Deb: 28:25

Yeah. All right, well if our listeners wanna get a hold of you, is there any special ways that they can, if they have ideas for you or if they have things that they wanna help you with or you get information from them, is there a way to get a hold of you?

Brian: 28:38

Yes. I, I think probably the easiest way would either be through LinkedIn, you know, looking at Brian Levine dlh, uh, or my email address, which is Brian.Levie@dlhcorp.com.

Deb: 28:55

Thank you very much, and I will put those in the show notes. This has been a very special interview and I greatly appreciate you.

Brian: 29:04

Thank you

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Outro: 29:22

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