 I'm Rusty Komori, and this is Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. I was the head coach of the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years, and we were fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. My books Beyond the Lines and Beyond the Game are about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, and finding greatness, which is what this show is all about. My special guest today is the co-founder of the very popular Doctors of Waikiki, and he's also my personal doctor. He is Dr. Alan Wu, and today we are going beyond urgent care. Hey, Dr. Alan, welcome to Beyond the Lines. Hi, Rusty. Thank you for having me. Now, Dr., you know, you are absolutely fantastic. I mean, I've seen everything that you and your co-founder, Dr. Tony Tropkovsky, you know, do at Doctors of Waikiki, and it's absolutely fantastic, but I want to start at the beginning. Tell me where you were born, and how were your early years growing up? Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the show. I'm very happy to be on the show, and I'm honored to be your doctor. I'm a local boy. I was not born in Hawaii, but I grew up here. I was born in time one. My family and I immigrated here when I was eight years old. I went to public school, very proud of Pro City. I went to Pro City High School, and I kind of grew up in Waikiki also, where my parents had little souvenir shops. So it's just really awesome for me to get to come back home and practice here and open Doctors of Waikiki and to a familiar place that I grew up in. Well, Dr. Allen, your family is super cute. You know, tell me about how your wife and kids are doing. Oh, they're great. My wife and kids are just... They're my spiritual support. And in that picture, you also see my mom, whose I have a very close relationship with my mom. As most first generation immigrant family, we're very close knit. My parents sacrificed so much for us, and it was through the wise upbringing that I contribute where we are today. I do have a younger brother, and we were both very fortunate to have our parents, my mom and dad are super. I have a very supportive wife. I'm hardly ever at home. I work about 60 to 80 hours a week, and my kids are super awesome. On my days off, I do just dedicate my entire time just taking care of both of them, doing fun stuff, going out, going to the beach, going to the park, teaching them how to do hoverboards now, scootering for the young one. My little princess, two-year-old, just turned to amazing. My big guy is 11, and we're just doing a lot together. So it's just wonderful. I like hearing that, Dr. Allen. And I know that you graduated from the University of Hawaii Medical School. How was that experience for you there? I think it was very fortunate. For me, I was able to be accepted. I had John Burns a long time ago before the new med school is built. So I actually went to school in Manoa where the old med school was. And that was a wonderful experience. I was accepted in a couple of different medical schools, but I chose to stay home and be around my family and friends, which is a great support. And it's a very difficult task to complete med school. So I was very fortunate. I was able to have all of their supports throughout that. So Dr. Allen, after graduating UH Medical School, what did you do after that? I was very fortunate. While I was in med school, I had a full scholarship through med school with the U.S. Army. I got selected to be a part of greatness, being a part of our uniform services. So after med school, I was matched at Walter Reed National Presidential Hospital in Washington, D.C. It made a lot of headlines recently because that's where usually all the presidents and all the vice presidents, all the senators and our Congress will go for healthcare. And it's dedicated also to take care of our service members. So I was very fortunate to train there at world-class training, world-class facility in Washington, D.C. Yeah, I mean, that's amazing, Dr. Allen. I mean, that's where President Trump went when he had COVID. And I mean, I think we're just so lucky to have somebody like you here in Hawaii. And I wanna ask you more about your military experiences in the Army. I know you were in the Army for 15 years, but can you tell me about some interesting, impactful stories? Oh, it's, let me tell you. Being in the military, it's really rewarding. And what was really rewarding for me was actually I got to deploy and I got to serve my country during our confrontations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was also fortunate enough after Walter Reed was to be deployed. I was in Germany. I was also in Afghanistan. And I did a lot of great things for our service members. I was a frontline doc. I worked at a FOB and I was part of FST for surgical team. So we were the first positions of medical providers at point of injury. So we will pick up our injured service members and stabilize them to make sure that they are able to survive the long trip home because of their injury. And we did surgery in tents. So it was just like how you imagine watching MASH back in the day. That was real life. And I was in Afghanistan for 12 months. It was a very hectic 12 months. One the most memorable thing was we were also the team that actually captured Osama bin Laden when I was there. So I was part of a lot of historical events when I was there. Wow, talk about impactful. That's amazing being part of the team on that bin Laden situation. And I wanna ask you a little bit more about Afghanistan. I mean, how dangerous was it for you there in Afghanistan? Well, like I said earlier, we were on the four surgical team. I was in a very hostile environment in Afghanistan. It was in the hillside of the Himalayas was the Pakistani and Afghanistan border. I was at an area called Wardak province. Wardak, as you can hear, there's the war in it. It was very hostile. We were shot at every day. The Afghanis tried to overrun our compound many times where we actually have to defend ourselves throughout this confrontation. Even though we're there to serve our country, we have to fight for our lives. But we were also able to take care of them. So our whole purpose there is not only to stabilize, but also try to win their hearts and minds as my boss during that time gave us directive. And that was my job as the provider to ensure that I was able to assist the Afghanis also if they're in need of medical needs. Well, that's, I mean, what experiences you must have had there. And you also met General Petraeus. I mean, how was it meeting the big general? It was groundbreaking for me. I was very proud to serve under him. He was our commanding general during that confrontation. And he's just a great guy. He was very thankful for the type of work we did out there. And I was just honored to work with him. Wow, that's impressive, Dr. Allen. And I wanna turn now to doctors of Waikiki. I mean, it's, you and Dr. Tony Tropkovski, you guys are the co-founders. Why did you guys start Doctors of Waikiki? For us, we wanna, just like your book, we wanted to be underlined with being physicians. And we wanted some platform that we can use that we can provide healthcare to our local populations and our residents in Hawaii that is unheard of. And we're open to midnight. There's no other urgent care that's open to midnight every day. So we wanna be different. We wanna be able to serve our community, to represent the type of outstanding care that we can provide. Not only for our residents, but also for anybody who's traveling to Hawaii. And that's why doctors of Waikiki exist. We're growing, we're making sure that we take care of our community. And we're here to serve everyone. And growing up in Waikiki, this is an awesome place for me to practice now. It kind of brings me back to my roots. And just like every family who works in Waikiki, they are so inundated with their daily obligations for work. Imagine you living in Ewa Beach, coming all the way out to Waikiki to work. By the time you get home, it'll be really late at night. And if you don't have access to medical care, while you're in Waikiki, sometimes you're unable to see doctors for many years. And I think that's why we have it here. So it's centrally located and it serves a lot of our local population. Dr. Allen, I can attest. I mean, your office is really beautiful and your entire staff, they're so welcoming. You guys have such a great team. And I wanna know, what is it about? Why do you and Dr. Tony get along so great where you guys make such a great team? I think it's because we communicate well, just kind of like your book. Communication is key. And we try to establish a great culture here. And our entire staff here believe in our culture. We're trying to serve our community. We sacrifice our lives every day. Through this pandemic, we have not changed our hours because we wanna ensure that our community feels safe to come here, our community feels reassured when they can access urgent care like ours with a lot of state-of-the-art tools to ensure that they have a good medical care when they come here. Yeah, Dr. Allen, you guys are, I mean, you guys are uniquely equipped with so many things at your workplace. I mean, can you tell me more about that? We try to bring in probably the latest equipments at medical lab and our treatment plans and our medication. We try to be very up-to-date of what is around the world, not just in the US, but globally. We were the first to have the capability to detect COVID even when other bigger laboratory can't. We have the newest Admit machines that can help us make diagnosis for COVID within 20 minutes, instead of waiting five days for the results to come back. And I think that's groundbreaking. And we started these improvements even before the outbreak, knowing the fact that globally, this was gonna impact Hawaii more than most people thought initially. And we knew it was not gonna be an easy task for our entire community. And to open up safely and to treat everybody, it's very important that we diagnose people who have COVID right away, instead of having them wait around and they might infect other people unknowingly. And I think that's really important. Dr. Allen, why are you, why is your business at Doctors of Waikiki? Why is it so successful? Knowing all of those things, but beyond that, why is it successful? I think it's the culture that we have here. And I think also not only the providers have to have that culture, is our entire staff from our nursing staff to our front desk, to our drivers, they have to believe in our purpose, believe that we're here to serve our community. And to ensure that people's lives matter, all life matters here at Doctors of Waikiki. We are here to help. We are very dedicated. And that creates a very enjoyable place. We have meetings here daily and our staff feel great after hard days of work because they go home feeling satisfied that they helped save a life, made a difference in everybody who walks through our doors. Well, you definitely have a great team around you, Dr. Allen. And can you give me the latest updates regarding COVID? For us, we're working just like we're working with the state. They reach out to us to do the post-travel testing survey. So we're part of that team, the trusted list for that. So for us or our travelers coming back or even returning residents, they will get selected right now to come in and get another post-arrival test after they already completed their pre-travel testing to see if that pre-travel testing is very effective or not. And we're working with John A. Burns School of Medicine and the epidemiologists to report all those numbers to ensure that, hey, this is a pretty good test. A program that we have launched and to keep us safe. As you can see, we've been doing this for two weeks and our numbers still remain low with our COVID positive cases. So it's very reassuring that the program is launched and it's safe and it's successful so far. Of course, there's more data that needs to be gathered and we can kind of see from that. And besides that, I think our team is very quick with having the pandemic right now. We treated over 900 COVID cases here at Drs. Waikiki. And out of that 900, about four patients got hospitalized, usually due to late onset of coming in, late diagnosis or multiple underlying conditions that kind of led to the hospitalization. We do tailor our treatment plans for each individual based on the symptoms and we have close follow-up. And that's how we are able to maintain a low hospital administration admitting to the hospitals. To, our job is trying to keep them out and ensuring that they are on a good road to recovery. That makes sense. Dr. Allen, let's talk about my books for a little bit. You know, I'm all about creating that superior culture of excellence and you totally are all about that too. What else stood out to you in my books? To me, I really like your books about the three Cs, about your choices about your communication and about your culture. And it's the same thing we apply here at Dr. Wykey Key. If you have great communication with your staff, from the nursing staff to the providers, to the front desk, that's really important. Great community, everybody's one team and they all feel that they're part of a bigger picture. And if they all understand that, then your culture comes naturally because you all have similar beliefs. And we all chose the medical field because we wanna make a difference in people's lives and their safety. So it's very important that we all have the same choices here and our staff are all handpicked. And one of their, the first question and interviewing with me, I'm the last person they have to get through is why they wanna work with us at Dr. Wykey Key? And you'll be surprised with the amount of different answers I get. But we believe that we're just trying our best to serve our Ohana. And we also want to remind people that we talk about different bubbles, especially in the pandemic, about a family bubble and work bubble. But remember, where a state bubble, we should all be part of this bigger bubble that encompass our entire state. Only then we can really conquer this pandemic here. Well said, I like that you said about the three C's, the choices, communication and culture. And Dr. Allen, I wanna ask you about, I also talk about welcoming adversity. What's a big adversity situation that you dealt with in your life that you overcame? You know, I've been asked that question before and my response to that question is adversity, there's no single adversity I think I wanna talk about. But I wanna talk about adversity in life. That's what makes our life so challenging because every adversity at any point of life, you will feel that it's the biggest you ever met. And for me, it's lifelong. You know, when I was growing up, being an immigrant child, it was very adverse for me. I couldn't speak English. I could say that's my biggest adversity. But then you go on to med school, med school was very tough. That's a very big adversity. You know, being in the military, being deployed, I was deployed for many times and I struggled with a little post-traumatic stress disorder. And that was a big adversity for me. Starting a private practice, Dr. Waikiki, that's a big adversity for me too. But it's throughout life, I think life is adversity but what you do with that, I think is the biggest challenge. And if you can overcome all those adversities, I think that will make you a better person no matter what field you are in. Just like you, Rusty, winning 22 state championship, it's an adversity. Every year you have a different adversity. So we don't want to just single out one special event but it's a lifelong adversity. You're right, it's a journey, it never ends but it's training ourselves and our team to really be in the right mindset, to welcome adversity, to look forward to it. Like you said, once you get through it, you become stronger, you become better, you become smarter for going through that experience. And Dr. Allen, I wanna ask you, what's an important lesson you learned in life so far? I think my biggest life lesson so far is that never giving up. Just like your book says, defeat is just temporary, but giving up, that's permanent. So do not ever give up. I think if you look back in 83 when I first immigrated to Hawaii, if I given up back then, I wouldn't be where I am today. And there's many bumps in the road throughout life and for any viewer out there, it's never to give up. Continue to drive yourself. I mean, there are times when I was in Afghanistan and being shot at every day and getting bombarded with bombs every day, I could easily given up, but I didn't, I tried to focus on my job and through adversity and even with PTSD when I came back home, you can falter into those traps, but just keep on pushing yourself and having small goals. Once you achieve those small goals in life, you can continue on to bigger goals. I think that's very important for anyone. I like hearing that too. I always say, little things matter, little victories matter, little victories lead to big victories. And Dr. Allen, you and Dr. Tony are great leaders. What do you, what are some of the qualities that you think great leaders possess? Well, we think we're okay, Dr. T and I, we're okay, but we are inspired by a lot of other people that we've had met. And I can tell you that from all the great leaders I have met in my lifetime, one thing that stuck out to me is persistency and determination and joy. If you have those three, continue to work on everything. I mean, it's the same thing as you never giving up. I think persistency is so vital to anyone in any field to be successful. And of course, being the best of what you do, I think is also important. So push yourself to get a little bit better. I'm never satisfied with anything I do. I always look for the next thing to improve on. And always trying to improve yourself is also a big key. Well, you have high standards and it's all about a constant striving for excellence. And Dr. Allen, what is a, what's a good example of courage? You know, when you look back on your life so far, whether it be in the military or the medical field, what's a good example of courage? I think good example of courage is knowing that when you're doing the right thing. You want to do the right thing even when other people are against you. We were, for example, we were the first one, something reason, we're the first one to say, hey, it's not safe to travel. I went on the news to say that on what COVID first hit. And I got a lot of, I got a lot of flak from our other physicians in the community saying that we can't make a generalized statement. I'm like, well, but if you really look at the science and the data and how infectious something like this is, you know, and this never happened before. So nobody believed me. But I found some inner strength in myself to say, hey, publicly, I'm like, I don't think it's a great idea to travel and I'm sticking to my guns. And despite all the adversity I got even from our own profession, colleagues telling me, hey, you can't say that. But I'm like, well, you have to let the public know what's the truth and the truths don't lie. And I think if you are able to stick to the truth, no matter how many people are against you, I think that's probably the best thing you can do as courage. Dr. Allen, I got to say that you are definitely a man of great character and you are a fantastic leader and of amazing doctor with all of your experiences. And I'm very grateful for you. And, you know, I think all of us again in Hawaii were, I mean, we should be so thankful to have, you know, you here as well as Dr. T. And wanted to thank you for joining me on the show today, Dr. Allen. Thank you so much for having me on Rusty. I'm so grateful to have you as a friend and I want to wish you the best health in life. Thank you, Dr. Allen. And thank you for watching Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. For more information, please visit RustyKamori.com and my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I hope that Dr. Allen and I will inspire you to create your own superior culture of excellence and to find your greatness and help others find theirs. Aloha.