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Connect with Amy Lehman, MD

About the Guest:

Amy Lehman, MD
Founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic/WAVE

Dr. Amy Lehman is the founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic and Iroko Health. She is recognized and sought after as a key expert, adviser and partner to actors as diverse as regional governments and local tribes, and to donor governments, philanthropists, non-profit organizations and multinational corporations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the African Great Lakes more broadly.

She received both an MD and MBA from the University of Chicago, and additionally trained in General Surgery at the University of Chicago Medical Center and was a Senior Fellow with the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Dr. Lehman received the 2014 Distinguished Young Alumni Award from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, as well as was one of the 2014 Chicagoans of the Year.

She has been honored by Newsweek as one of the “150 Women Who Shake the World,” and by a number of other publications for her work.

About the Episode:

Not every medical entrepreneur builds the same thing; some build apps, some build groundbreaking devices, some build alternative care methods. This week’s guest built a floating hospital in the Congo. Her name is Dr. Amy Lehman and she’s the Founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, a revolutionary health clinic that is saving lives in Africa. Amy talks about how she transitioned from practicing medicine in Chicago to building a clinic in the Congo and what she’s doing to change the lives of people in eastern Africa.

To find out more about Amy and to support the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic go to floatingclinic.org.

 

Entrepreneur Rx Episode 3:

Rx3_Podcast_Amy Lehman MD Founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Rx3_Podcast_Amy Lehman MD Founder of the Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Narrator:
ForbesBooks presents: Entrepreneur RX, with Dr. John Shufeldt. Helping health care professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Not every medical entrepreneur builds the same thing, some build apps, some built groundbreaking devices, some build alternative care methods, some smart clinics, some start other services. This week's guest built a floating hospital in the Congo. Her name is Dr. Amy Lehman and she's a founder of Lake Tanganyika Floating Health Clinic, a revolutionary health clinic that is saving lives in Africa. Amy, welcome to the podcast. I am really excited to have you on!

Amy Lehman:
Well, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me!

John Shufeldt:
So I have to ask you the most obvious question. First, you went from Chicago to Africa. I grew up in Chicago, never thought about going to Africa. How did that happen? You sound like a superhero!

Amy Lehman:
Well, it's not as an abrupt about-face as it might seem on the surface. I was an adolescent that was extremely interested in sub-Saharan African politics, literature. I was kind of a Congo-obsessed 15-year-old. Why I was like that? I can't tell you. But it goes back to my kind of formative years as a person. And I was in boarding school and I actually had a number of friends who came from east and southern Africa. And so it's an interest and a focus that has been pretty consistent for multiple decades now.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. So you were in a boarding school, like during high school?

Amy Lehman:
Yes, I went to Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut.

John Shufeldt:
Sure.

Amy Lehman:
So I had some friends, some of whom are still my close friends. We really connected on some of these issues around post-colonial African state issues.

John Shufeldt:
And so you were, kind of, you did that in high school? That's, hey, you know, so in high school at Choate and then you went to undergrad at University of Chicago?

John Shufeldt:
Yes, I did. And how did you get in the University of Chicago? That's an incredibly difficult school to get into. So I just did not even apply to it. But how did you landed there?

Amy Lehman:
To be fair, when I was applying to colleges, the University of Chicago was much more selective in terms of picking nerds. So it wasn't, it's much more competitive now, I want to say in terms of scores and grades, I mean, I had really good grades and I did really well in secondary school, but it was more that you see with so particularly its own thing, its own kind of experience. And a lot of students, you know, they didn't necessarily want to have that type of experience, whereas there were, small group of us who really wanted to have that kind of experience. So I've always been a fairly studious, nerdy person, and I frankly loved filling out the application for the University of Chicago. They asked me questions that I thought were kind of probing and interesting and less of that kind of cursory package yourself kind of series of essay questions that other schools posed. And I had been away from the Chicago area for, you know, then a number of years. And so I was enthusiastic to come back and go to the U of C.

John Shufeldt:
Now, didn't you, University of Chicago has some crazy, and I won't recall the name of a Halloween party, and they did it every other year where many of the folks showed up naked to that.

Amy Lehman:
It's possible. But something else that you should know about me is that I actually became a single mom in college at the University of Chicago. And so the party, the party circuit was not my circuit.

John Shufeldt:
One of the guys that was my attending that, I would ... Christ. And while didn't emerge as much, one of my attendings, someone at this party where someone showed up wearing only a bagel. So I was, you know, that's something ... I want to, but that sounds pretty cool. OK, so when you were in college, did you know right away you want to go to medical school?

Amy Lehman:
Not at the beginning. I was always interested in science and biology. You know, I can remember being a, like a six-year-old, and watching brain surgery on NOVA and stuff and being completely riveted with that, so on the kind of science aspect, I always had those interests. I had some medical problems when I was younger as well, and I found the experience of being a patient in the medical system at that time to be a truly terrible and noxious experience, frankly. And there was part of me that thought to myself, well, I don't want these people to be my colleagues in the future.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Amy Lehman:
There have been a lot, suffice to say, there have been a lot of changes, I think, in medical education and how physicians should see their patients, how they should communicate with them. It's a very different world than it once was. And I think that that is a really positive change. But it was really, it was actually when I was pregnant with my son and I was thinking about how much I really loved biological science and physiology. And I thought to myself, OK, well, maybe really you have the responsibility to become the doctor that you think should be available to patients. You can act the way you think doctors should act. You don't have to act the way they currently act now.

John Shufeldt:
Totally.

Amy Lehman:
And so that's really was my kind of conversion, like, oh, you know, maybe you actually have some agency in this and you can be different if you want to.

John Shufeldt:
Yeah, it's exactly like this become the change you want to see in the world, but like Gandhi. That's very prescient for somebody in college. And I had a bit of the same experience. I had my appendix out when I was eight. And I remember thinking when I went to the doctor and then to the hospital, I was like, ha, this does not seem like this caring environment I'd hope for at eight years old. And that was like a zillion years ago and I remember still thinking, wow, that was kind of heartless and right, medicine has changed a lot since then. All right. So you go through college, you have a son and you decide to apply to medical school. And I suspect you applied all over and then stayed at the University of Chicago.

Amy Lehman:
I didn't actually.

John Shufeldt:
Hahaha, of course.

Amy Lehman:
So because I had my son as a single parent in college and because my major in college was not biology or some other kind of premed-compatible major, I had only satisfied some of my premed requirements. And also, you know, I had this small child. And so I took a job at the University of Chicago and it was to start a writing program within the biological sciences division to help science writers communicate scientific ideas to a lay audience. I also taught introductory biology to the non-bio majors. University of Chicago, it's still is probably one of the last holdouts to have really, really significant interdisciplinary requirements that all students have to fulfill. And so if you are a non-science major, you're still expected to take a certain number of courses across different scientific subjects. And so I also taught introductory biology to these kind of non-science majors. And I bought a little bit of time for my son to get a bit older and to start school and be in school more full time. And then I also finished off all of my premed requirements.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. So you're a grad student helping scientific people, write more effectively, and you were teaching undergrad biology?

Amy Lehman:
Yeah, more or less.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. And taking undergrad premed courses and raising your son, other than that, you had a lot of free time to go to parties, obviously.

Amy Lehman:
Right? That's why when you ask me, do I know anything about the party scene, the answer is no!

John Shufeldt:
No. I miss that phase. OK, so you take the premed classes, you take the m-catch, you get into the University of Chicago. What made you interested in general surgery? You could not have picked a more difficult road as we both know.

Amy Lehman:
Well, you'll soon come to see that that's basically the theme of my life, I choose extremely hard path. I like hard problems. I like complexity. You know, if it's too easy, I get absolutely no satisfaction from it, so it's like. But OK, so I actually was extremely interested in general thoracic surgery. And even before starting medical school, I found myself as the mentee of the chief of thoracic surgery at University of Chicago, and all throughout medical school, I actually spent a lot of time with him in his operating room and doing some research. And, you know, one of the projects I took on, for example, as I rewrote all of their post-surgical instructions for their patients because I felt like, OK, you do this massive operation on a person and then you send them home and they really have no idea what's happened to them, what they need to look out for, how they can do their pulmonary rehab, etc, etc. So I rewrote all of those post-operative instructions and I spent a lot of time in the operating room. For me, you know, like surgical personalities are kind of a thing, right, and I spent a long time thinking about, OK, well, is there anything else that I would want to do in medicine? And the idea of becoming an internal medicine doctor was not appealing to me at all, not because I don't find some of the problems interesting. It's just that I find it to be incomplete because I am like a do-er, an actor. And there's, you know, and it's the surgery is kind of the most, you know, invasive, doing something, you know, kind of medicine basically that you can do. And so I was already very predisposed to that. And so I had a hard time imagining myself, imagining myself, choosing something else. And also it kind of pissed me off, frankly, that people would make these assumptions about what you were good at and what you were interested in, based on the fact that, like, I was a woman, I was a single mom, you know, so that must mean that I want to be a pediatrician or something. And I was like, hell no! I don't want to be that. You know, I, you know, sometimes people don't come in the packages that you're expecting. So I was always interested in surgery and it was always clear to me that I would do surgery. And the question was more about, you know, how I could make it work with my domestic responsibilities. And, you know, I knew it was a really hard path, but I also knew that that was the medicine that interested me.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. That's really interesting. You know, I always wanted to be a CT surgeon since I was like five or six years old. I read books by Coulis and DeBakey, and then I went to medical school and I got paired with these two male CT surgeons who are the epitome of narcissists. And I remember thinking, well, I don't want to end up like them. And so I did emergency medicine, which in retrospect feels like Steve Jobs. I connected the dots backward and makes tremendous sense looking back at it today. But at the time, I was a little bit crestfallen because I always wanted to do this my entire life. And these two guys were the prototypical surgeons, at least that I knew of. And that's the last thing I wanted to do, was become like them. OK, so you did five years of general surgery

Amy Lehman:
So that isn't actually what ended up happening. What happened is, is I, I'd spent all this time already with my mentor, the thoracic surgeon, and I was super gung-ho and had, saw a pathway for myself about what I wanted to do. I guess I failed to mention a detail here, which is that I also went to business school at the same time that I went to medical school and my vision for where I was going to be in my career kind of 10 years hence, was that I was going to be a general thoracic surgeon in an academic setting that did research on making decisions under risk and using decision analysis as a tool to help guide kind of patient care and patient decision making. And so my drive to go to business school was more kind of within that framework of where I saw myself professionally in the future. And in the course of my training, I ended up developing, redeveloping some of the health problems that I had had. And I ended up having to have surgery myself. In the course of having the surgery, the sensory nerves and my dominant arm were damaged. OK, so I ended up with a regional pain syndrome that's I think what they call it nowadays.

John Shufeldt:
So RSD, Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy disorder.

Amy Lehman:
Exactly. That's the old name. Regional Pain Syndrome is what you're supposed to say now.

John Shufeldt:
Wow.

Amy Lehman:
And so I retrained my arm totally, right, I went through this kind of grueling therapy to completely retrain my arm. But it was really a significant moment, right, where I thought to myself, wow, you know, I have this whole career trajectory mapped out and I've worked really hard for it and I've made a lot of sacrifices for it. But now I see how kind of vulnerable and tenuous that plan you really might be for me because of things that I can't control. That is around the same time that I started kind of re-engaging in a very serious way about doing some global health work and had been to Lake Tanganyika, and so it was that kind of reckoning with my life trajectory at that moment was kind of part of this major detour that I ended up taking.

John Shufeldt:
OK, so so you did medical school and grad business school the same time, you went in, you had that RSD or Regional Pain Syndrome, and then did five years of general surgery? And then.

Amy Lehman:
It was during my general surgery residency that I had.

John Shufeldt:
Oh.

Amy Lehman:
Been where I fell ill. So I'd done

John Shufeldt:
Got it. OK.

Amy Lehman:
A few years of my residency. And I was also doing research and I did a fellowship in clinical medical ethics, you know, so I was kind of down the pathway. But then when it seemed like, OK, so you're going to finish general surgery, then you're going to do a thoracic fellowship. But your health, right, is kind of brittle, you know, when it comes to doing this incredibly physical job, I felt like I had to step off the path. You know, I feel every patient deserves a surgeon who is in his or her top form. And I felt like even though I had completely retrained my arm, that I just had these physical limitations that I didn't think was fair to impose on others just because I wanted to be a general thoracic surgeon so badly and I had worked at it for a decade, it didn't give me the right to do it under any circumstances. That's when I decided that I needed to pick something else.

John Shufeldt:
But you. But you. But you completed the general surgery but didn't do a fellowship.

Amy Lehman:
I didn't complete general surgery. I left before I completed my five clinical years.

John Shufeldt:
Got it. OK. All right. That makes total sense. All right. Interesting. OK. There's all sorts of cool adjectives I could put up there, but you have a lot of guts. OK, so you do the medical ethics business, you do a bunch of general surgery, and then you decide, you get out and say, now what? When did you decide to go to Lake Tanganyika?

Amy Lehman:
So I had been to Lake Tanganyika during my residency, actually. I had planned a trip using the vacation time that I had, and I had this incredibly interesting experience there that involved being shipwrecked? On Lake Tanganyika sort of, you know, like that there was a big storm on the lake, the airstrip where we were supposed to be picked up was washed away. We had to kind of drive on these terrible roads one hundred kilometers away, that took us 12 or 14 hours, all during that time, right, I'm kind of observing what's happening, what health care is available, kind of the condition of these villages, that was on the Tanzanian side of the lake. And I'm kind of looking across the lake at the kind of giant mountains of the Congo that have always been that part of Congo in particular, was of great interest to me because of the first and second Congo wars. And so it just I was it was a very thought-provoking, important kind of experience. And when I came back from that trip, I actually was on night duty in the cardiothoracic intensive care unit. And it was one of those times where the unit was filled with, frankly, kind of moribund patients. That didn't always happen. But it sometimes happened where you would have all of these patients who were quite elderly, had multiple medical problems, maybe it already had a number of cardiac or chest procedures in the past, and everyone was on a ventilator. There were people who were on continuous dialysis. People were really, really critically ill. And so that whole week that I came back, I mean, we had like take backs to the operating room for bleeding and lots of bedside procedures and just kind of, you know, it was the most insane manifestation of tertiary care medicine, you know, that you can imagine. And by the way, I should say, I love critical care medicine, I love surgery, I love all of those problems. But I thought at the end of the week, OK, where are we after all of that? And how much money did we spend for these patients who have no real prospect for any kind of quality of life on the other side of this anyway? The kind of best that any of these patients, you know, at that moment I was looking at was maybe they would go to a nursing home or something.

John Shufeldt:
Right. So at the end of the day, you're not saving them.

Amy Lehman:
Right. But a lot of them probably wouldn't live, you know, too much longer. And so I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how much I thought we had spent on this exercise of kind of crazy interventional tertiary care medicine on patients who were very unlikely to recover. And it was about three million dollars. And I thought, wow, what could you do with three million dollars in the Lake Tanganyika basin? Right? You could probably help, you know, tens of thousands of patients at the beginning of their life or in the prime of their life, in a way that we certainly weren't at that time in the cardiac surgery ICU.

John Shufeldt:
I mean, that is an interesting leap. And now I can see how you, how you got there.

Amy Lehman:
Yeah. So between my health issues and then this sort of fundamental question about where should I spend my time and energy given my training, my experiences, my interests, you know what? What's the right path? And, you know, ultimately, the only thing that seemed more interesting to me than thoracic surgery was kind of this complex place with its complex problems in Central Africa.

John Shufeldt:
This is a lot. You are the ultimate entrepreneur. You run from working in a major hospital, a tertiary care center, to starting a floating clinic in Africa. What was that transition like?

Amy Lehman:
Well, I was looking at a supply chain and access-related issues. And the reality was, is that. So in the global health and this has started to change, thankfully, but a number of years ago, the way that we kind of looked at health indicators in the developing world and particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, as we would look at these kind of rolled up national public health numbers, we would kind of look at the epidemiology of disease in a very kind of country by country fashion, let's say. And what became very clear to me is that the Lake Tanganyika basin was like its own epidemiological unit. If you see what I mean, because you had the longest lake in the world, OK, surrounded by four countries, but the kind of riparian areas around the lake are surrounded by these tall mountains. The infrastructure is terrible. The road systems are poor to nonexistent. There is no mobile cell coverage around a majority of the lake. And you have all of these people who are kind of making up their own lakeside community. So you had a lot of cross-border trade and you had a lot of population movement for different reasons, you know, based on security or opportunity or kind of small scale capitalism. And so you have this enormous mixing of all of these people around all of these countries around this giant body of water. And they weren't really mixing with the rest of the population in their host country, so to speak. And so when you would look at disease indicators, there was enormous similarity around the lake, kind of irrespective of country that was very distinct compared to other parts of, you know, those countries. So malaria, diarrheal diseases, et cetera, they had very common prevalence in the whole basin. And those patients suffered from the same kinds of barriers to access. And there were degree changes, right, in severity, but more or less, you had these very isolated populations who could be thought of comprehensively as their own market. So that is kind of where the idea of using the water as the high way to reach these different communities of people around the lake came to me, but it was also really challenging some of those fundamental ideas in global health and public health epidemiology in general. It was to say, I don't think we're looking at this in the right way, you know, we have to look at things more heterogeneously, and we have to probably tailor our interventions a lot more than we have been in the past.

John Shufeldt:
So, Amy, so as you know, we focus on entrepreneurs in this podcast, and I think you're a true entrepreneur. Maybe the definition of entrepreneur, and one of the things that struck me about what you're doing is when you start a business here in the U.S., the breadth of what you have to learn is pretty broad, but it's figure-out-able and it's searchable. But you had to figure out an enormous amount of information to get this thing up and running, things like security and food safety and water safety and all the environmental issues and transportation. How did you manage all this? And were you over there the entire time with your son?

Amy Lehman:
I went back and forth a lot. And I think that the single most important lesson for me was to say to myself, you have no idea, you have no idea, so why don't you just kind of listen and learn and observe for a while and kind of go from there? And I really did intensely do that, of just talking to people and observing things and just being in places where, you know, a lot of outsiders never ventured, frankly. And listening to what local people say that they needed and wanted and making relationships at these kind of local levels in, you know, because, you know, in many of these governments, the capital is is a very, very far distance. And you have these kind of intermediate roles of kind of local administration of things. And so I just was patient and tried to absorb as much of that kind of contextual knowledge as I felt I could. And so that when it became time to, like, create or advocate for something, I felt like I was standing on solid ground, that I knew what I was talking about and could kind of go from there.

John Shufeldt:
How long did that take you?

Amy Lehman:
I mean, I still feel like I'm doing it in the sense that, you know, where the work has taken the organization and also seeing certain kinds of barriers, structural barriers that wouldn't allow me to do one step, but maybe would allow me to do something else. I feel like that's the process that I've tried to internalize all the way along. But I would say that probably a couple of years in, and especially when we started to collect a lot of community-level data that was unavailable for the most part to the large aid agencies who weren't in these really far-flung locations like we were. Once we started kind of going back to the very, very basics. You know, I felt like I headed up kind of a portal that was opened up to me about what was really going on in these, you know, really poor, really complicated locations. And to kind of point to certain types of interventions that might slowly but surely make change. It was really it's going back to my nerdiness, like figuring out how to query people without judgment to get as realistic a picture of the reality as I could.

John Shufeldt:
So did it take you about three years to get up and running?

Amy Lehman:
Yeah. I mean, and just, you know, what we do is we use little boats to access these populations around the lake. And we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to improve and empower these little local health centers that dot Lake Tanganyika. And we're really starting from zero in the sense that a lot of these places, they have no running water, they have no electricity. Maybe they have cell signal, but likely they don't. Like this is the opposite of tertiary care medicine, this is like how do you even create the fundamentals of the health system itself so that it can start delivering the basics to the communities that it's there to serve.

John Shufeldt:
So how does that, so that brings up a great point, how do you fundraise for this? How do you, where do you find the funding?

Amy Lehman:
Well, I'm laughing because so I'm a terrible fundraiser, OK? Because I am a person who's really bad at telling other people what they want to hear. I'm really good at telling people what the reality is. But if the reality is like really complicated, you know, for the standard philanthropic relationship, you know, the model is, hey, we've identified Problem A and we want to do intervention B and we're going to make this impact C and you donor are going to feel really good about it. And I, you know, NGO, I'm going to feel really good about it and then we're going to just do it again, you know, with another problem. And what I spent a lot a long time saying, and I still spend a long time saying, you know, a lot of my time saying this is, you know, we really don't even know what the problems are in some of these places because we can't, right? That the information flow, the data flow, the understanding, and the complexity, right, is so out there that really our job is different than we thought it was, it was, you know, that we knew what kind of interventions we should target. And what I say is we need to do all of this really hard upstream work first, which is to characterize kind of what is what are the problems, what are the problems that the communities themselves are identifying, and then what are going to be kind of durable potential interventions. And sometimes we won't know what the right intervention is. And so we're going to have to try some things and then we're going to have to see how those trials turn out. But that's really the only way to operate here. I mean, and particularly in Congo, where you have this kind of post-conflict very, very complex operational environment where communities are suffering from multiple problems that are interacting with each other. And so we can't to apriori know. And so that meant, right, that I needed to figure out how to seek out potential funders and partners in the work that I was doing who would have a, an appreciation for my approach. And so that's not everybody. That's probably a small subset of the kind of conventional funding or philanthropic environment that's out there today. I will say that I think that over time there has been some evolution in how people think about data, what, how do you actually measure your impact, what is the accountability that we have to subject ourselves to? But it's been slow to, you know, the aid and development industry, despite what people say at conferences and stuff, to a certain extent is a pretty static, enormous, slow kind of institutional approach that still is like a hanger-on from Bretton Woods. You can't expect an aircraft carrier to turn on a dime. And so a lot of the work that I've actually done is choosing to accept kind of my role as the bad girl in the aid and development space and to talk about issues and complexity and problems with the view to kind of slowly educate and change some of the ways that we go about doing this work.

John Shufeldt:
All right. Some people have called you an extreme marketer, but you actually tattooed an African Lake in the surrounding area on your back to promote your cause?

Amy Lehman:
Yeah, yes. I am an extreme marketer in that way. My funniest story about that is that I was at a conference where Sir Richard Branson happened to be and he came up behind me and kind of started like to rip open the back of my dress, saying, I hear that you have something on your back that I need to see. And I said, well, yeah, sure, you know, take a look, so he opens and he sees this map. And he burst out laughing. And it's like, wow, that's incredible. And I said, well, you know, how many people do you know that have skin in the game like I do?

John Shufeldt:
That was perfect.

Amy Lehman:
So I really do have skin in the game. And I really, I love my work. I, I really care about the communities that I'm trying to serve. And so, yeah, so I kind of I committed it to the body, so to speak.

John Shufeldt:
Wow. That is heart, mind, soul, and skin in the game. OK, last question. What advice would you give to an aspiring social entrepreneur in health care? Because I mean, you're all in, in fact, you're in more than anybody I've ever seen. Well, particularly now with that tattoo and all. So what advice would you give?

Amy Lehman:
I mean, I say the same things a lot to people who are interested in social entrepreneurship and particularly in kind of difficult locations. And that is don't be a solution trolling for a problem. If you really want to create things to serve certain populations, you have to understand who you're serving, what they want. You know, what they think their problems are, what the constraints are, you know, and that might mean that you're actually making something or providing a service that's very different from the idea that you may have had in your mind. And so having the humility to approach problems in a human-centric way, you know, in a truly like, service-driven way is a, is an outlook that actually is not that common in the world of social entrepreneurship, because I think the mystique, right, of the entrepreneur who's thinking of great ideas and creating things out of nothing, you know, really centers the credit and the action, right, on the person. But I want to do the opposite of that. I want to actualize the needs and desires of communities, of people that I want to serve, and that might mean that I am going to create a different kind of tool or a different kind of service or take a different direction in this work than I had initially projected from, kind of, a different vantage point.

John Shufeldt:
Well, Amy, this has been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I am completely amazed with your story and what you're doing to help folks in the Congo. Where can folks find you and how can they contribute?

Amy Lehman:
OK, so we have a website which is FloatingClinic.org, and that talks about all the kind of non-for-profit, data-driven related work that we do in the Lake Tanganyika basin. I have a new venture, which is like a for-profit social business that is about the creation of an electronic medical record for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And that has a website called Iroko Health.com. I R O K O H E A L T H .com floating clinic, iroko health. That's where people can find me.

John Shufeldt:
Amy, thank you so much. You are a rock star and is honored to have you on the podcast.

Amy Lehman:
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm always honored when people want to hear about my crazy life!

John Shufeldt:
And if you want to find out more about Amy and her floating clinic, we'll post all the links in the show notes for this episode. Until then, I'll see you next time. I may, in fact, even have a tattoo. Stay safe.

Narrator:
Thanks for listening to Entrepreneur RX with Dr. John Shufeldt. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. This has been a presentation of ForbesBooks.

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Key Take-Aways:

  • Life changes within seconds, do not be afraid of hard problems.
  • Lake Tanganyika is the longest lake in the world, surrounded by four countries. 
  • As an entrepreneur, one has to have skin in the game all the way through. 
  • Fundraising can be tricky, make sure you understand all the options you have.
  • Don’t be a solution trolling for a problem, understand who you are serving.
  • Use humility when you approach problems.

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