The Orlando Business Journal recently recognized Dr. Daniel J. Podberesky, Radiologist-in-Chief for Nemours Children’s Health System, with a Veteran of Influence award. This award recognizes military veterans who have made a significant achievement in their careers, have a strong record of innovation and outstanding performance in their work, and are involved in the community.
“It felt good to know that the community values our veterans that are working in many different areas and that I was selected as one of those individuals,” Dr. Podberesky says. “It certainly was humbling, and I appreciate the recognition.”
Dr. Podberesky served in the Air Force for just under 10 years. For much of his military career, including his internship and diagnostic radiology residency training, Dr. Podberesky was stationed at Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. During his time in the Air Force, Dr. Podberesky learned valuable leadership skills that he uses in his work today.
“I was able to assimilate what I thought were the best leadership skills that I saw,” he says. “The military does leadership development really well. It helped shape the leader that I am today.”
In his fourth year of medical school, Dr. Podberesky completed a radiology rotation and fell in love with the field. He loved the people, the technology, and the fact that the doctors that he had gotten to work with were relied upon by other doctors for their expertise. Radiologists are what they call the “doctors’ doctors,” and Dr. Podberesky was fascinated with, and continues to be fascinated with, how much radiologists seem to know about different specialties, pathologies, and the advancing technology available within the field. More specifically, Dr. Podberesky chose to pursue pediatric radiology because pediatric radiologists stayed involved with all the different imaging modalities within radiology and because he enjoys working with kids. Something about working with children really spoke to him and made his work especially meaningful.
Pediatric radiologists make up only a small percentage of the total number of radiologists in the country. What many people do not realize is that when children are taken to adult hospitals or community imaging centers, the majority of the time, it is not a pediatric radiologist reading their imaging exams. For Dr. Podberesky, it has been critically important to work toward increasing access to pediatric radiologists by helping educate parents to assure that imaging exams will be performed and interpreted appropriately by pediatric radiologists.
In October 2014, Dr. Podberesky joined Nemours. He was drawn in by the hospital’s mission to improve the health of children using care and programs that are not readily available through high standards of quality and safety. He was also attracted by the hospital’s presence in a variety of geographic locations both in Florida and in the Delaware Valley. Once he was with Nemours, Dr. Podberesky pushed to create a completely integrated department of nearly 40 pediatric radiologists located throughout Florida and the Delaware Valley, bringing together varying sub-specialties and areas of expertise.
“It’s extremely rewarding,” Dr. Podberesky says of the process of creating an integrated department. “It allows us to enable, for example, a pediatric neuroradiologist here in Orlando to read a brain MRI on a child in the emergency department in Jacksonville or in Pensacola or in Delaware, and that’s something that didn’t really exist a few years ago within our system.”
The creation of this team allows children to have access to pediatric radiology expertise without necessarily traveling long distances or even necessarily being a Nemours patient. For the radiologists recruited to the Nemours Radiology Department, joining this team means a lot. It means that they get the opportunity to pursue different personal, clinical and academic interests and to continuously develop their careers. Thanks to the work that Dr. Podberesky and others have put into cultivating this team, recruited radiologists will join one of the largest pediatric radiology departments in the country.
Dr. Podberesky’s long-term vision is to establish the foundation for Nemours to one day become one of the leading academic children’s hospital radiology departments in the country. He knows that this goal will take time to accomplish, but he believes that Nemours is well on its way, and he feels fortunate to be leading the team.
