Recent Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine graduate Ryan Jou, M.D., got an early taste of a career as a physician. While in high school, he participated in the VolunTEEN Summer Program at Eskenazi Health, a two-week session for those aged 14 to 19 years old who are contemplating careers in health care. The program includes a week of tours, professional development training and discussions with health care providers, followed by a week of shadowing and volunteering.

The program helped Dr. Jou discover that he “absolutely loved medicine.”

Dr. Jou especially enjoyed shadowing as a VolunTEEN. He observed the rounds of an emergency room nurse and Ella Bowman, M.D., then the medical director for Acute Care for Elders (ACE) Unit and Consult Service at Eskenazi Health, a position she held for nine years before moving to Alabama.

“Dr. Bowman was very gracious,” Dr. Jou says. He spent four summers as a VolunTEEN. “Each year,” he says, “I progressed in terms of wanting to do medicine more and more and more.” He says he “really fell in love with just taking care of people.”

Dr. Jou was admitted to Johns Hopkins University after high school, aided by a reference letter from Scott Lawson, manager of volunteer services at Eskenazi Health. After earning a biomedical engineering degree, Dr. Jou pursued a master’s in physiology & biophysics at Georgetown University. Due to the need to limit onsite care during the pandemic, he experienced a rare glimpse of “some of the ways that old-school house calls were performed.” “It was really cool to see the evolution of medicine from that to where it currently is,” he says.

That experience confirmed a lesson Dr. Jou had learned from those he shadowed as a VolunTEEN: the importance of creating “a genuine connection” with patients. Dr. Jou valued listening to and talking with his patients during medical training, just as his mentors at Eskenazi Health and other institutions had. He also has found silence, which many patients need to absorb news, a “really powerful tool that a lot of people underestimate.” The personal connection that Dr. Jou has developed with patients through these interactions has “become one of the core principles of my own practice,” he says.

Dr. Jou preferred rotations at Eskenazi Health during his years at IU School of Medicine “because it had such a big influence on me in terms of early years and … in shaping my ideas of medicine and how I want to practice medicine.” “Treating people as other human beings is something that I feel like in our training gets lost a lot of times,” Dr. Jou adds, “especially because we work long hours. We have stressful situations that go on, and sometimes it’s very easy to forget how to be a human being, not only for the patients … but also for ourselves.”

He will take these lessons with him as he begins his new role as an intern in internal medicine at Creighton University School of Medicine. Internal medicine appeals to Dr. Jou because he enjoys “looking at a broad overview of medicine in general, trying to understand how we develop a good plan to take care of somebody.”

Whole-person care is an Eskenazi Health value, but it is also a Jesuit value, held by Georgetown University, where Dr. Jou studied, and by his new employer. “That’s something that’s always been really close to my heart if you will,” he says.

Before moving away from Indiana, Dr. Jou wanted to express how “incredibly thankful” he is to Lawson. “I’m just really appreciative of the effort he put in to make the volunteer program work as it did,” he says. While many of Dr. Jou’s medical mentors have been highly influential, Lawson also “shaped a lot of how I do things,” he explains.

Lawson invited Dr. Jou to talk to the new class of VolunTEENs this summer. His former mentee was eager to do so, believing young people considering a medical career need to know that “there’s no way to truly make that decision unless you actually have real exposure to it.” Dr. Jou was enthusiastic in reminding VolunTEENs that whatever their academic proficiency or skill level, “if that personal component is not there, the patient may not have all that great of a perception of you.”

Reflecting on his ties to Eskenazi Health as well as on his career plans, Dr. Jou observes that a personal connection holds a “much bigger role than a lot of people realize.”