The Brain Savers

By: Colin T. McDonald, Bonnie Harvey, Michael Houlihan

Narrated by: Alamada Karatihy, Full Cast

Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

A full-cast performance, featuring Hollywood actors, sound effects, and an original score!

From the authors of the New York Times best seller The Barefoot Spirit and the Audie Award finalist, genre-bending audiobook of the same name comes a story of vision and invention, failure and setbacks, mistakes and lessons. Business Audio Theatre presents a Sherwood Players Production, The Brain Savers, the true story of how a scrappy start-up used technology to put the humanity of patients first and ended up changing medicine forever.

Amid the internet boom of the mid-2000s, a band of entrepreneurs stood at the intersection of medicine, technology, and business. They saw a solution to the crucial problems of emergency care, which was too often handicapped by underfunding, overscheduled specialists, archaic practices, and onerous equipment. Through pioneering telemedicine and new inventions like the portable CT scanner, the founders of Specialists on Call (S.O.C.) did more than just make emergency care better, faster, and more humane; they brought health care, which is often described as the slowest industry in America to change, into the 21st century.

This is Dr. Colin McDonald's story of how S.O.C. came to be. After leaving a cushy teaching position at Harvard, it took years of pursuing a single objective, then changing on a dime, to create S.O.C. In the end, what he created was a system that saved lives—and continues to save lives today.

Some of these hard-learned lessons are complex, while others are so timeless they almost sound cliché ("trust your vision and your moral compass, change when you must, just keep going"), but they are far from cliché for the founders of S.O.C. Theirs is a story of people with imagination and drive who wanted to make the world better, who trusted their ideas and each other, and who, despite everything, kept on going!

©2022 Footnotes Press, LLC (P)2022 Footnotes Press, LLC

Well done!

An inspiring story well told. This is a wonderful production which communicates a complex storyline using an engaging blend of theater and real life interviews. We loved it.

Top notch

This is the story of the birth and growth of a business. The twists and turns of an entrepreneurial journey are shared in all of their "pivot-liciousness". Aspiring entrepreneurs need to hear this, and the audio theatre format really brings the experience to life.

Inspiring, insightful, and entertaining

I liked how the story unfolded into business and life lessons through an ensemble of actors rather than one single narrator. I’d recommend this to existing and aspiring entrepreneurs who will see themselves in Colin’s journey of bringing new ideas into the world. The episodic formula was easy to digest and entertaining.

Fascinating story… Inspirational and exciting

I also listened to the barefoot Spirit by Bonnie Harvey and Michael Houlihan, produced by Sherwood players.

There were moments I felt like I was in a real theater listening to this!

What a phenomenal performance by everybody involved.

You can tell that there was tremendous care in writing the screenplay and choosing the different sound effects.

There wasn’t a boring moment in the book and I listened to it in just one day.

very well done team!!

Engaging and Innovative

A wonderful and enlightening listen. Important exciting work being done with telemedicine. I Highly recommend.

Fascinating

Really enjoyed this great story of how entrepreneurship can save lives. It's a great example of how enterprise can impact our lives in a positive way.