What if the key to better mental health wasn't a new medication or therapy technique, but something already hardwired inside you? In this episode of Nurse Rosa's INsights, I sit down with Dr. Royan Kamyar, physician, MBA, and founder and CEO of Owaves, a circadian wellness app used by over one million people worldwide. Dr. Kamyar shares the raw personal story behind why he built it, including his own rock-bottom moment after medical training, and the science that changed everything for him.

If you've ever felt like you're running on empty no matter how hard you try, this one is for you.

IN THIS EPISODE:

0:48 – AI Med Shark Tank: Owaves wins 3rd place

1:30 – What is Owaves? Digitizing lifestyle medicine & circadian biology

2:15 – Royan's background: MD + MBA, from medicine to entrepreneurship

3:32 – Growing up entrepreneurial in a family of physicians

4:37 – The intern year revelation: ignoring prevention in medicine

5:25 – The "24-hour formula" insight that sparked Owaves

5:46 – Discovering UC San Diego's Circadian Biology Center

6:04 – Wearable integrations: Oura, Apple Watch, WHOOP

7:03 – Why Owaves is a planner, not just an activity tracker

8:08 – The forward-looking approach to lifestyle change

8:35 – Dean Ornish's lifestyle medicine pillars & the calendar as the core tool

9:40 – Being honest with yourself: planning vs. reality

10:27 – Hours & minutes as a more accessible health metric than lab values

12:18 – Gen Z & health culture: why they're the ideal audience

13:03 – Gen Z, mocktails, and the shift away from alcohol

14:04 – Owaves' traction with college students: ADHD, time blindness, and mental health

14:57 – The billion-dollar question

15:24 – A nationwide lifestyle medicine course for college students

16:13 – Yale's Happiness Course & the student wellness movement

17:23 – N=1: students as citizen scientists of their own health

18:24 – YouTube vs. university: where health education actually lands

19:25 – The mental health crisis on campus & lifestyle psychiatry as prevention

20:40 – Chronotherapy, peer support, and the Blue Zone campus effect

22:03 – Rosa's APSU 1000: why every college already has the format

22:50 – UW's "quantified self" course: students analyzing their own wearables data

24:05 – Obesity, pre-diabetes, and why we must get in front of it early

25:27 – Proving the endpoints so students want the course (no mandate needed)

26:23 – Chronotype & GPA: aligning your schedule with your biology = 0.4 GPA boost

27:24 – Relationships as a lifestyle pillar: why eye contact matters

28:05 – Planning date nights: Jordan Peterson's 90-minute life management session

28:52 – Owaves helps you see if your time matches your stated values

29:55 – Bridging the delta: what you planned vs. what actually happened

30:56 – Where to find Owaves: owaves.com / bodyclock.ai / "My Body Clock" in the App Store

31:33 – How to connect with Royan: [email protected] / LinkedIn

31:42 – Closing & Rosa's book: Speak Up, Start Now at nurserosaspeaks.shop

CONNECT WITH DR. ROYAN KAMYAR:

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Owaves

CONNECT WITH NURSE ROSA:

Website: nurserosaspeaks.com

What happens when a critical care nurse becomes the executive building the tools she once struggled with?

Susan Grant, DNP and Chief Clinical Officer at Symplr, has lived both sides. She has navigated 3 a.m. staffing crises, chased credentialing deadlines, and wondered if the systems she used were built with nurses in mind at all. Now she builds those systems, and she is doing it differently.

In this episode, Rosa Hart sits down with Susan to unpack how AI-driven staffing tools, smarter scheduling, and nurse-led technology decisions can reduce burnout and bring predictability back to the bedside.

If you have ever felt like the tools you use every day were designed without you in the room, this one is for you.

In this episode:

Burnout as a systems design problem. When technology works the way nurses actually work, the burden lifts. Susan and Rosa challenge the idea that burnout is only a staffing issue.

About Susan Grant

About Nurse Rosa's INsights

Topics covered include AI in nursing and health tech, clinical innovation, workforce sustainability, nursing leadership, healthcare policy, and the future of patient care.

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What happens when burnout breaks you open, and you decide to build something from the wreckage?

In this episode, Rosa sits down with Ashley Chancellor and Matthew Harless, co-founders of The Business of Hope, to explore why burnout in healthcare goes far deeper than exhaustion, and what hope, as a functional tool, can actually do for clinicians on the front lines.

Ashley Chancellor, RN spent 14 years as a nurse, much of it traveling the country as an ICU nurse. A fractured spine and severe PTSD during COVID took her off the floor indefinitely. What came next was a memoir, a coaching practice, and a mission: reminding the helpers of the world that they are worthy of the same compassion they give.

Matthew Harless, RN brings over twenty years of clinical experience across psychiatric care, emergency medicine, rehabilitation, and hospital leadership. He's the creator of the Harless Method and the Hope Assessment, tools designed to help burned-out clinicians measure where their hope actually stands and start moving toward recovery instead of self-blame.

Together, they're making the case that hope isn't a soft skill or a poster slogan. It's infrastructure. And it can be measured, built, and protected.

In this conversation, Rosa, Ashley, and Matt dig into the real difference between burnout and moral injury, walk through the Hope Assessment live on air, talk about what it looks like to use hope-informed care in real clinical settings, and ask the hard question: what would it actually take to fix this?

Resources mentioned in this episode:

hopeassessment.org

Meet Angie Cauthorn, a two-time stroke survivor and host of the Brain Friends podcast as she shares with Nurse Rosa Hart about gaps in stroke and aphasia aftercare and the community-based solutions she has built.

Angie describes developing aphasia after working in finance and realizing survivors are discharged medically stable but unprepared to navigate recovery. She shares her work as co-founder and president of the Aphasia Resource Collaboration Hub (ARCH), the R.O.S.A. symposium (Resource Orientation for Stroke and Aphasia) convening at Temple University - now in its fifth year -with panels, keynotes, and activities like line dancing, plus quarterly Science of Aphasia sessions. Angie also discusses creating an Aphasia Fantasy Football League to reduce isolation through shared interests. Both explore scaling these models and answer a “$1B grant” question, emphasizing standardized post-discharge navigation, community access, survivor-centered research, early stroke recognition, improved EMS, vocational rehab awareness, and the non-linear reality of stroke recovery.

Connect with Angie Cauthorn:

LinkedIN

Learn more about ARCH:

https://www.aphasiaresource.org/

Connect with Nurse Rosa:

Follow in the Health Podcast Library

Get the Book:   ( Nurses Week Gift of the Year)

On social media: 

Nurse Rosa's INsights is part of the Health Podcast Library. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review to help more healthcare professionals find this conversation.

Invisible doesn't mean harmless, and Zoë Slaughter is done letting people pretend otherwise.

Zoë Slaughter joins Nurse Rosa for a candid conversation about living with food allergies, navigating a complex healthcare system, and building an advocacy movement through storytelling and policy action.

Zoë shares her personal journey from childhood food allergies to adult advocacy, breaking down how community support groups form, why misconceptions about food allergies persist, and what the latest research on early food introduction means for prevention. She also gets into the real financial burden of managing food allergies, including what she calls the "food allergy tax," and makes the case for free, universal access to epinephrine.

The conversation also touches on the power of documentary film and graphic content in health education, and how everyday people can move from awareness to action, locally and at the federal level.

In This Episode:

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Zoë: Instagram @invisiblyallergic

Nurse Rosa's INsights is a nurse-led healthcare leadership and innovation podcast hosted by Rosa Hart, RN, available on the Health Podcast Library, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and all major platforms.

What would you do with a billion dollars to fix healthcare? For Sandra Johnson, SVP of Client Services at CliniComp, the answer is clear: solve interoperability, once and for all.

Rosa Hart sits down with Sandra to unpack one of healthcare's most persistent problems, fragmented data environments that slow clinicians down, create gaps in patient care, and quietly fuel burnout across health systems. Sandra brings 25 years of healthcare IT experience to a candid conversation about why interoperability is so hard to crack, what it takes to design technology that actually works for clinicians, and how CliniComp's System as a Service model is shifting the burden of implementation away from health systems so they can focus on what matters most.

In this episode:

Why interoperability remains healthcare's most foundational unsolved challenge

How fragmented data contributes to clinician burnout and care gaps

What vendor-agnostic interoperability means and why health systems need it

How CliniComp's System as a Service model removes the implementation burden from clinical teams

Why workflow integration is the real key to making data meaningful at the point of care

Guest: Sandra Johnson, CDH-E, SVP of Client Services, CliniComp

CliniComp: clinicomp.com

Connect with Nurse Rosa:

Follow Nurse Rosa's INsights in the Health Podcast Library

Get the Book:  Speak Up, Start Now ( Nurses Week Gift of the Year)

On social media: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Nurse Rosa's INsights is part of the Health Podcast Library. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review to help more healthcare professionals find this conversation.

What happens when a nurse gets splashed in the face with biohazardous waste and decides to do something about it? She builds a company. In this episode Rosa Hart, RN, BSN, SCRN, sits down with Sarah Waimon, RN, BSN, CEO of Waimon Innovations Inc. and creator of Looey, a nurse-invented medical device designed to protect healthcare workers from hazardous splash-back during bedpan and ostomy care.

Sarah shares her journey from 16 years of bedside nursing across medsurg, oncology, ICU, colorectal, and nursing supervision to becoming a nurse entrepreneur and medical device innovator. She breaks down the moment that changed everything, a contaminated splash to the face on a colorectal postoperative unit, and how it sparked the creation of Looey, a transparent shield that attaches to standard bedpan washers to contain biohazards and protect caregivers.

This episode covers nurse entrepreneurship, nurse-led innovation, healthcare worker safety, infection control, and why nursing ideas are the future of medical device development.

Topics covered:

Nurse-invented medical devices and nurse entrepreneurship

Occupational health and healthcare worker safety

Infection control and biohazard exposure prevention

Ostomy care and colorectal nursing

Bedpan washer safety and splash-back prevention

Nursing leadership and clinical innovation

Mental health gaps in nursing education and patient care

From bedside nurse to CEO: the nurse founder journey

Connect with Sarah Waimon:

Pre-order Looey: [email protected]

Connect with Nurse Rosa:

Follow Nurse Rosa's INsights in the Health Podcast Library

Get the Book: Speak Up, Start Now ( Nurses Week Gift of the Year)

On social media: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Nurse Rosa's INsights is your go-to podcast for nurses who are ready to lead, innovate, and speak up. Subscribe, share, and leave a review.

The culture killing your career isn't the patients. It's the colleagues.

Renee Thompson, DNP, RN, FAONL, FAAN, CSP has spent 32 years in nursing and the last 15 building one of healthcare's most important movements: a structured, proven approach to ending bullying and incivility in the workplace. As CEO and Founder of the Healthy Workforce Institute, she has seen what toxic culture does to nurses, to teams, and to patients, and she refuses to accept it as inevitable.

In this episode of Nurse Rosa's INsights, Renee breaks down why incivility is a patient safety issue, not just a morale problem, and what nurses and leaders can do right now to change the culture on their unit.

In this episode:

Connect with Renee:

Follow Nurse Rosa's INsights for conversations at the intersection of nursing, innovation, and leadership.

Connect with Rosa and follow on your favorite platform: https://linktr.ee/nurserosaspeaks?utm_source=linktree_profile_share<sid=a32f4b44-4e7b-4e69-bfa1-d9cfba0190e5

Can hearing aids prevent dementia? Hearing instrument specialist Madison Levine joins Rosa Hart to explore the connection between hearing loss and cognitive decline, and why treating your hearing early may be one of the most important things you can do for your brain health and longevity.

Madison founded "Levine Hearing" 11 years ago, building on her mother's 35-year legacy in audiology. She now leads a full clinical team offering hearing diagnostics, hearing aid fittings, ear hygiene, tinnitus care, and vestibular services, while speaking at national conventions to advance public awareness of hearing health.

In this episode you will learn why untreated hearing loss is linked to dementia and cognitive decline, how the ear-brain connection affects memory and longevity, what is driving the stigma around hearing aids and how that stigma is shifting, which innovations are expanding access to hearing care, and why early detection and treatment change long-term outcomes.

Connect with Madison Levine at

levinehearing.com

on Instagram at @levinehearing and @madisonlistens, and on LinkedIn.

Connect with Nurse Rosa

Instagram: @NurseRosaSpeaks

Get her Book: Speak Up, Start Now

What if the reason cancer wins isn't the tumor itself, but the silence it forces on your immune system?

Aaron Edwards grew up in Henderson, Kentucky, left home at sixteen for a bold academic experiment, and spent a decade in biotech working on some of the most cutting-edge gene therapies in the world before asking himself a hard question: why does promising science so rarely reach patients?

That question led him to Harvard, and then to KiraGen Bio, where he and his team are building what he calls "noise-cancelling headphones for cancer therapy." Using gene editing and AI, KiraGen is engineering immune cells that can finally hear through the suppressive environment solid tumors create, and fight back.

In this episode, Aaron and Rosa talk about the journey from a small Kentucky town to the frontier of CAR-T cell therapy, what glioblastoma patients and their families need to know right now, and why the future of cancer treatment should show up in your community clinic, not just at elite academic centers.

In this episode:

Connect with Aaron: