Presentation by Dr. John Jurica – 459
In today's lecture, John offers a webinar on the topic of 6 amazing nonclinical careers that require a medical degree, but not necessarily board certification or residency training.
He opens with four job search tactics that apply across all of them, then walks through each career, what the work involves, how to break in, and where to find the right resources.
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Four Tactics That Apply to Every Job Search
Before getting into the careers, John covers the four strategies that matter most in any nonclinical job search. The first is finding a mentor, someone already doing the work you want to do, who is willing to answer questions informally and for free.
The second is networking, which goes well beyond conference events. Roughly 60% of professional positions are filled through direct referral rather than online applications, and a meaningful percentage of any medical school class has already moved out of clinical practice and into fields worth knowing about.
LinkedIn functions as a discoverable profile that works even when a physician isn't actively searching. Adjusting visibility settings allows a physician to signal openness to recruiters without alerting a current employer.
And professional organizations, the American Medical Writing Association, the MSL Society, ACDIS, each offer education, networking, and in some cases certification that shortens the path to a first role considerably.
Six Careers, No Boards Required
Medical writing is the most accessible starting point. The work is almost entirely remote, freelance is a viable entry route, and physicians command higher rates than non-clinical writers. Building a portfolio through free submissions to KevinMD, Medium, or professional journals is the standard first step.
The freelance course at sixweekcourse.com is consistently recommended by physicians who have made this transition successfully.
Clinical documentation improvement/integrity is a strong option particularly for international medical graduates working in hospital-adjacent roles. The ACDIS certification provides a formal credential that helps with hiring.
Medical communications involves joining agency teams producing marketing materials, package inserts, and pharmaceutical event content, non-residency-trained physicians typically enter as associate medical directors.
Healthcare consulting at firms like McKinsey sometimes actively prefers physicians without clinical experience, valuing the scientific foundation without the habits that develop after years in practice.
The medical monitor role tracks patient safety data across clinical trial sites within pharma or CRO environments.
And the medical science liaison, one of the most common first pharma roles for physicians without residency training, is a field-based educational position with no sales component and a clear path for advancement.
Summary
A medical degree opens more doors than most physicians in this situation realize, and the six careers John covers each have a defined entry point for someone starting from scratch. For medical writing, start with amwa.org and sixweekcourse.com. For clinical documentation improvement, visit acdis.org and look up Dr. Cesar Limjoco on LinkedIn for an active feed on the topic. For the medical science liaison path, themsls.org and mslinstitute.org are the two most established resources. For healthcare consulting, John recommends searching for the top 25 healthcare management consulting firms.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
- Clinical Documentation Improvement – Interview with Dr. Cesar Limjoco – 005
- Find Your Great First Nonclinical MSL Job
- How To Start Your Lucrative New Regulatory Medical Writing Career
- 5 Reasons to Consider a Healthcare Management Consulting Job
- PNC Podcast Blast from the Past Medical Communications Revisited – 207
- How to Get a Great Job with a CRO with Dr. Christian Urrea – 070
- PNC Podcast Blast from the Past – No Residency Is No Problem – 211
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No Boards Needed for 6 Amazing Nonclinical Careers
Welcome back, nonclinical nation. Today, I'm presenting my lecture on the topic of nonclinical jobs for physicians of all backgrounds, including those who have not completed residency training or board certification.
It will be especially helpful for younger physicians who have decided that upon graduating from medical school, that they don't want to work clinically, but they wish to leverage their medical degrees. But first, I have one important message. I wanna let you know that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast.
I don't have all the details worked out, but you will notice soon that I am changing how I'm sharing my podcast with a much greater emphasis on video. What I wanna do is elevate the content to that of a weekly series of master classes like this one for those interested in accelerating their career advancement.
But I still plan to post weekly audio content for those that prefer that model. So stay tuned over the coming weeks. I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. Now, let's get right into today's presentation about six non-clinical careers open to all physicians, residency trained, board certified or not.
All right. That should be looking at my PowerPoint presentation. So I've done this, several times, in different settings and, I hope you get something out of it, and we'll have a chance at the end to talk. I'll probably use the chat primarily for the questions, although, if, one or two of you wanna get on, and actually verbally discuss a topic, we could probably do that as well.
But I would say think about your questions as we go along, and then towards the end, let's say once we get 30 minutes or so into this, you can start putting the questions in the chat. It can be a little, not really disruptive, but, it can just be, something that I, don't wanna necessarily be distracted by during the presentation.
So all right, let's see. Ah, that's working. Fantastic. so this is who I am. I think most of you know me in some form or another, either you've listened to the podcast or we've even had conversations or email exchanges. But, My background is as a family physician. I have worked multiple non-clinical jobs in my career.
the most early one was as a physician advisor at my hospital. I served as a medical director for several different, I wouldn't call them service lines, but for oc med and for, other paid situations in the hospital that I eventually became the chief m- medical officer for. I've owned small businesses, my own practice, and, right now I'm a part owner in a three-site urgent care center.
and I'm a partner in NewScript. Some of you may be members of that, which is an online community of clinicians. And, about six years ago, I got really interested in learning about the types of jobs and careers that physicians in particular pursue when they leave medicine, when they're burnt out or they're just frustrated or nearing retirement and they wanna try different things.
And so I thought, well, starting a podcast might be a good way to do that so that I could interview these people and learn from them. So I've interviewed about 200 guests, in the last six years. I've also posted, I think, close to 100 of my own solo episodes for whatever topic I happen to wanna talk about that are all related somehow to non-clinical careers.
And so, again, if you've never seen or heard the podcast, I would advise you to check it out. There's so many episodes in the past that address some of the issues that m- might even come up today that it's out there for anyone to, to listen to. what we're gonna do today is talk about six non-clinical careers that are open to all physicians, even if they haven't started or completed a residency program, and that's based on my experience in talking directly with physicians who are doing those jobs and others who are experts in those careers, having told me that there are non, residency-trained physicians doing those careers.
And I'm going to try and provide as many resources for you to use. and I will be making all of this available to you. and I'm recording this, so if, even if you want a recording of it, you'll be able to get that. But I'm gonna send you all the resources that I mention today, either as, a link or as an actual document.
I have all your emails, so that's not going to be a problem. All right. So let's just get right into it. These are the six careers that I'm gonna be talking about today, because these are the ones that I found are most Amenable to adding physicians either who have an MD, a DO, MBBS, or the equivalent, who for whatever reason did not become, either licensed or did not complete a residency program or board certification.
there are certain jobs, non-clinical jobs, that require you to have a license, for example, and so this might exclude some of you if you, don't have a license. Of course, there are those who do- don't do a residency, but they might have done an inter- a internship, and you may be licensed, with a one-year internship.
That's legal in many states, and I've talked to many people that are doing that actually as we speak. but any one of those situations, faces, causes a challenge, and so I'm gonna talk about the careers that seem to be the most amenable to, those of you in that situation. So we're gonna be basically talking about medical writing, CDI, medical communications, I'll have to distinguish how that's different from medical writing in a minute, consulting, the medical monitor position, which represents some other positions in pharma, and the medical science liaison All right, now I do want to remind you about some things.
There are some strategies or tactics, you might call them, that we use when we're looking for a non-clinical or non-traditional job that they all share, the tactics that pretty much any job search w- will share. They fall under the heading of, of, basically, just any, career transition, and this could be in or outside of medicine.
So I wanna remind you about those. I wanna touch on those for the next 10 minutes or so, and I want you to really, seriously, if you haven't become familiar with these different tactics, which I'm sure you're all aware of or you've heard of. but I just wanna highlight these and focus on these and, and try and make sure that when you do pursue one of these six careers, if you do, and some of these can be part time, some can be full time, that you're using these tools to accomplish that, that pursuit and land that job.
So there are some of these, what I call universal tactics. there's probably more than this, but these are the four I wanted to touch on today, and that has to do with getting a mentor, using networking to a real good effect, using LinkedIn, and taking advantage of professional organizations I'm gonna go through each of these individually and just highlight some of the things I've learned about them over the past six or seven years.
So mentors. My first mentor was a physician who I was interacting with because I was a member of the Committee on CME Accreditation for the Illinois State Medical Society. So I'd been the chair of the CME Committee at my hospital. We had been surveyed. I subsequently became a surveyor for the ISMS, and then as part of that, eventually, because I did spend a significant amount of time and showed interest, I was asked to join the committee.
And there were other physicians, and this physician, his name was Don, I interacted with him. He was the former chair of that committee, which I ended up chairing later. And I had occasion to meet with him and actually do surveys with him. And it, I discovered at one point that he was, he wasn't practicing.
So it was sort of interesting 'cause I, wasn't really sure what he did. So one day I just asked him, and he said, well, he was the chief medical officer for a hospital. It was a very large... It was probably the largest freestanding nonprofit hospital in the state of Illinois. I think at the time it had 700 or 800 beds, and that was over 30 years ago.
And, I was intrigued by that. And during the time that I was interacting with him, I was becoming somewhat frustrated with patient care. I was in private practice. I was doing some of those other non-clinical jobs part-time. And I learned over time about what his job was, what he was doing, and it became attractive to me.
And I had already set myself up to maybe pursue that because I was doing some things in the hospital that enabled me to meet a lot of people in the hospital and become very familiar with how the hospital worked So, what happened, subsequently as I became more interested, I could go to him and I could ask him questions.
He would give me ideas, organization to join, steps to take, things not to do, and it helped me greatly as I pursued my first job as a chief medical officer at the hospital I was working at. So ins- what I wanna say about a mentor is you may not be lucky enough to find a mentor who's going to actually introduce you to your career, your future career, as I did.
But once you decide on a particular job that you're gonna pursue, and whatever it is, whether it's the, one of the m- one of these medical writing, something in pharma, as soon as you have that fairly narrowed down, and it doesn't have to be concrete where you've actually started to apply.
So obviously you should find somebody who can serve as a mentor. And I will say, just for clarification, when I talk about a mentor, I'm talking about someone who does this for free. They do it as a professional, just like we precept our residents and medical students, just as we, try to teach our colleagues as we come up through medical school, or younger medical students, and maybe even talk to college students about becoming physicians.
It's just part of the profession. And that's what he did, and I've been a mentor for many people myself. So it's something that's done intermittently, it's free, and it's just based on a collegial, relationship with somebody that's doing that thing that you want to do at some point in the future.
That's the best way to really learn about that job, and also to avoid the, landmines that can come up as you're trying to pursue that job. So I guess that's all I wanna say about mentors. We can talk about that at the end if you have questions. Now, the next one is networking. networking, a lot of us, if we've gone to large meetings, we have a networking event at the end of the meeting sometimes.
We're all standing around, having a drink, eating snacks, bunch of s- upright table- tables. standing at these tables and chatting and trying to learn about what other people are doing. That's really, I mean, that's an old style of networking, but, that's not... I, talking about something similar.
But now with social media, we have a much more effective ways of networking. But I want you to understand that 60% of all- jobs, all professional jobs for sure, maybe not, blue collar jobs. But I think the estimate is 60% of positions like this are, landed or develop as a result of a direct referral by another person as opposed to going through a recruiter or finding a job online and doing an online, application.
I could probably talk an hour or two about how to network. In fact, I was just putting together a podcast episode where I'm talking about LinkedIn and how you can use LinkedIn to network. But the idea is, in some manner you're going to try to outreach and contact, people that you went to medical school with, people you went to undergrad with, people you may have be- been in high school with, friends.
I was looking at my network on LinkedIn. I have about 2,400 direct first degree links on LinkedIn. When I look at my second degree links, that jumps to about 90,000. And when you get to, third degree, because basically what you're saying is the people that are linked to the people that your first degree and second degree contacts are on LinkedIn, it's, I think over 100,000 now.
I would never try to reach out to any of those third degrees unless I knew for a fact that it might be helpful in my career. So there are strategies to use L- LinkedIn, to use Doximity, to use Facebook and other ways of networking, and also non-social media sites where just personal contacts. what can you learn?
I found that if you were to contact everyone that you went to medical school with, you'd probably find at least 10 or 20% of those people are no longer practicing, if they ever were, and they're doing something non-clinical. So you can learn a ton from those people. I've interviewed a, a cardiologist who was getting suddenly quite frustrated with her job, decided to leave it after 10 or 20 years, and, by virtue of just talking to one of her former, uh, co-medical students, um, she found a job and within six months had taken that job and she's been in it ever since, and she loves it.
And she did not do it intentionally. I mean, she didn't even know what job she was looking for. So these things happen all the time. So networking is very important, and so you're going to use that, um, and keep that in mind when you're looking at one of these six jobs that I'm gonna talk about The next one is LinkedIn.
So I've alluded to LinkedIn and the fact that it can be a very useful way to network, but, what is LinkedIn? It's an online, resume basically. It's a profile. It's generally much more extensive than a resume you would ever send to anybody. So when you're applying for a job, you're going to send generally a two-page resume at the most, and there's a distinction between a resume and a CV, which are mainly used, CVs are used for professionals that are in clinical medicine, and PhDs, and scientists, and so forth.
Usually it's just a long list of presentations and, periodicals, articles they've written and so forth. but LinkedIn has much more information, and when you're applying for a job or even looking for a partnership or something, if the resume looks good and the screening goes well at the beginning, most people are, most employers are gonna be looking at LinkedIn to get a little more information about you.
They'll also do a total social media search for you to look for things that maybe you wouldn't be too proud of on social media, so those situations should be avoided. But I would say for most professionals, LinkedIn should be used. It's a very professional social media site. There's, there's not a lot of, strange behavior and, TikTok-like behavior or videos on LinkedIn at all.
So again, I'm not going to talk in great detail, but you should be using LinkedIn because not only does it sit out there as a profile, but you can actually contact recruiters, you can do job searches, and then you can also in your profile mention things so that other people looking for someone for a position, a hiring manager or recruiters, they will actually search for you even if you're not searching for a job actively on LinkedIn, as long as you set it to being open to being contacted by those people.
There are settings you can do in LinkedIn, if you haven't learned this, where you can avoid notifying your current employer when you do make changes to your profile, but you do have to sometimes be careful about what exactly you put in there. But there are ways, there are nuanced ways of letting recruiters know, that you're available on LinkedIn without letting your current employer know if you are working.
And professional organizations, and I'll mention this, while I'm going through some of these jobs today, but definitely there are some professional organizations that have a lot of support for those seeking their first job in that industry. And I'll give you examples of that. There are several jobs here where those don't exist, so where they don't exist, it's unfortunate.
But where they do exist, they're a great help. sometimes the organizations will only be for those who are, in the process of being hired or have started a job in that field. but, again, you just have to keep that in mind as a tactic that you should take advantage of if you can. So that's all I wanna say about those, but keep all those four things in mind, and we'll touch on them as we go.
So I'm gonna get right into the six careers that I mentioned at the beginning, of this hour, and the first one is medical writer. there are many, many medical writers who are physicians who are not licensed, and, really, it's almost a free-for-all, particularly on the freelance side. Anybody can be a medical writer.
You could have a master's degree in writing or science. You could be a PhD. You could be a physician, a nurse, a PA. Really, anybody with an interest in writing, medically, can do that job. Now, if it's more open to freelancers outside of medicine who, let's say, are, doing, journalistic writing where they're, basically a reporter writing articles for, publication to the general public, it d- doesn't take a physician to write about all of those things.
But physicians and PhDs that are medical writers make more money than those that are master's and bachelor's and other freelancers. You don't have to be a freelancer to get a job as a medical writer. but it's a good way to start, with the advantage being that you can do it part-time and develop quite a portfolio of writing, which is what you need to sell yourself and really demonstrate what you've done on LinkedIn, either by the actual l- linking to publications or just listing, a long list of, articles you've written or companies that you've worked with.
the job is, has the other advantages that it's remote for the most part. There aren't a whole lot of medical writers that are actually going to an office every day. But there are some, if you work for a large firm, that has, that's a publishing firm, let's say, it has a lot of in-house writers, that you might be applying for that job.
so it's remote, and it's flexible Which the other side of the coin is it does require a fair amount of discipline. So you're going to have deadlines, and so you have to make sure that when you're asked to write a, I don't know, 80,000-word article on a particular topic, or you're applying to get that job or get the assignment, that you're going to have to get that done within the deadline But a lot of the people that I've spoken with have been doing, they start by writing for free, submitting articles to KevinMD and Medium and other journals.
I think, some of our, most of our professional journals, that do have journalistic writing, like, like say the American Association for Physician Leadership has a journal, and they're very strict in what they accept, but authors submit those all the time, and they don't get paid for those.
But then you have that as something to add to your portfolio. And then as a freelancer, you can go and you can identify different companies that are looking for writers. I happen to be an editor for NetCE, which is a company that does CME, manuscripts, and it provides CME credit for those. I'm not a writer for NetCE, but I am an editor, so I review the manuscripts when they first come out before they're published, and then when they have a basically every three-year review, and I get paid to do that.
And there are medical writers who submit articles to that company. The, the net pay over time goes up gradually. And so and you can make definitely a career of doing that and make a good living. You have to become very efficient and again, stay on your deadlines. Maybe you should specialize in a particular type of writing and a t- particular subject, of writing.
and as you get more efficient and, and sometimes you end up going back and rewriting and editing and getting paid for that as well, you can definitely make, close to a, a physician's salary, and you can travel and work remotely. and then the other thing is you can do, the tricks you can use is that once you've done some freelance, you can put that all on your website or, and/or your, which you should have, and/or your LinkedIn, and you can be discovered by companies that are looking for writers.
I've spoken with several, writers and interviewed them on my podcast who were doing freelance writing for several years, and they were hired by a communications company or a CME company or something of that nature and went to a full-time job. And then there's also opportunities for promotion. usually a medical writer, when they're promoted to a, what you might think of as an editorial position editor, medical editor or writing, editor, they actually call them medical directors.
So if you're at a company that produces, patient, information, patient education in the medical field, then you're probably gonna be a medical director supervising the other medical writers As far as resources go, there's some really good ones for medical writing. The American Medical Writing Association, amwa.org, is very useful.
It, like a lot of the organizations that I usually talk about for these and other jobs, there's everything from education, certification, networking within that professional organization. Okay? So that's another source of networking, and courses and things like that. So Everything I put in here as a resource I will be sending to all of you, later today or tomorrow mor- most likely.
There are groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, different types of medical writers that get together and share information and answer questions and so forth. I did put down a specific profile on LinkedIn if you wanna look this up. Dr. Freda Wiley, she was a guest on my podcast, I think about a year ago.
If you look at her profile in LinkedIn, you'll see that she... Look under her experiences, and you'll see that she has 26 separate experiences, each of which is basically, a demonstration of where she was writing. So it'll give you some ideas of the companies that she worked for that you might want to, consider looking at, to submit articles.
and the other thing is, sometimes a CRO, which is a contract research organization, which I'll be talking about when I'm discussing pharmaceutical industry jobs, they will hire writers as well. Mostly they're technical writers. There is a course called sixweekcourse.com that many of my podcast guests and others that I run into have taken.
This is a course that teaches you about medical writing, but it focuses heavily on the business side and the freelance side, so how to set that up, how to create a portfolio, how to... The, the other advantage of this and the reason that the, person who teaches this does the six-week course is she actually hires her students, the better students, to write for her because she has a backlog of publications that she commits to writing, 'cause she has a long list of, publication companies, publishers, CME, and so forth, that are looking for that.
She teaches PhDs and physicians to do this, but that's, Everyone I've talked to that did the six-week course, thought it was fantastic. And I also set, added this as an idea. The ACCME, lists all the CME producers that are, that at least produce CME for CME credit, AMA CME credit. There's, I think, several thousand.
And it's a little tedious, but you can actually look through that list and to see if there's companies either within driving distance or companies across the country there that might be producing materials that you would like to produce and consistent with your background and, and interest and so forth, and so it's another source of potential employers.
Okay, I'm gonna move to the next one, career number two. CDI expert. I guess I won't spend a lot of time on this. I don't have a lot of resources. Clinical documentation improvement, medical directors and physician advisors and so forth, usually in the hospital, that's where the biggest need is. They usually have some, residency or maybe been in practice, but I have talked to people that have not.
And basically, I know a lot of, let's say foreign medical grads in particular who come, and they'll do... They might even be physicians, that have been practicing in another country. Some of you may fall in that category. And they come here, and they're trying to get into residency, or they're trying to see how they're gonna use their degree.
And so they'll work in these ancillary roles, sometimes volunteer, sometimes for, some pay, and essentially working at, like, a nursing level within the healthcare system. And I had a guest who did that, and, he was helping. And he was helping with the, basically the utilization management hospital side of that, not the insurance side.
And so he was interacting with physicians. He was helping the nurses, and then he got into helping with clinical documentation. And so he did that for a while, and then he got certified by the ACDIS, which I'll mention in
a minute, which gave him a little more expertise in, in sort of a 10-week course and a certification in coding and documentation. And ultimately, he was hired by a hospital, and it wasn't the one he was working at, to be a physician advisor for clinical documentation improvement. It's a very important topic in hospitals.
Really is critical to the bottom line in demonstrating quality And, he advanced. He eventually started working for a larger national company. He did some freelancing and starting his own business for a while. I'm not sure if he's working for someone else or still independent at this point, but, he definitely never had a license, did not do any residency training here in the US.
So as far as resources for, for this one, I would mention the ACDIS. I think it has several certifications that one can take, and that sometimes gives you a leg up i- in terms of finding that job. I would look through LinkedIn groups, that are dedicated to clinical documentation integrity or clinical documentation improvement.
And, a colleague of mine, so to speak, because he was actually a consultant at my hospital for a while, his name is Cesar Limjoco, Dr. Cesar Limjoco. You can look up his LinkedIn profile. He has about 25,000 connections on LinkedIn, and he, he does a lot of sharing. And so if you wanna get a sense of the topics that are discussed and, the importance of clinical documentation improvement in the hospital setting, he would be a good profile to follow up on.
So that's probably not the most common of what I'm talking about today, nowhere near as common as, medical writing, but still, it's an option. Okay, number three, medical communications. Now, I'm gonna distinguish this from, let's say medical writing for two reasons. there's a lot of overlap. technically a CME company is a medical communication company.
So the one that I do edi- editor or editing for, the NetCE, is a medical communications company that provides CME, uh, manuscripts online and, and on paper. Um, and so they qualify as this term, but what I'm talking about and what's listed on this slide here, these little spheres that you're looking at, these are all advertising agencies that work either directly for a pharmaceutical company or also for a contract research organization that I mentioned earlier, um, to do support when a drug is being released.
So an OBGYN that I, uh, interviewed for my podcast, um, transitioned from a medical writer to medical communications. She joined a team at one of these companies, and she, during our podcast, mentioned that definitely they hire those who are not board certified, who are not in active practice to join them as well.
Because what they need is, someone with a medical background, someone with a degree, the MD, the DO, MBBS, the equivalent, and some patient exposure, which you get in medical school, a knowledge of the tech- technology, knowledge of the terminology. And, basically they usually come in as an associate medical director, whereas the board certified and residency trained come in as a medical director, which is the title they generally use.
this is a 9:00 to 5:00 job. This is usually one where, at least in the past you would, go to the office five days a week. I think since the pandemic, that's gone out the window, in the sense that there's a lot of remote work now. I mean, basically to work in these teams, you don't have to be face-to-face.
So I suspect a lot of them have gone remote. Some start, let's say working... Most of these companies are based in a large metropolitan area, so if you're in a big city that helps. You could probably find, a dozen of these i- in each city, and... But the thing is, if you move away, they'll probably let you, telecommute, so to speak.
And so again, this, the thing is y- you'd think that this involves the physician doing a lot of writing, but it's really not. It's being part of the team. These teams produce, marketing materials, and even the package inserts in, for pharmaceutical companies, and they also create, videos, computer programs, live events, the material behind the live event, and even, the major, major large live meetings.
like the radiology association and the, orthopedic s- society, and so forth. When they have their national meetings and they have the very large, displays, they are behind... They're the ones that are putting those together. So again, it's all about marketing, communications, advertising, at least in this subgroup of medical communications.
So I'm going to send you this slide, the original of this slide, so you can s- see the names of each of these companies. If you're interested in this, you can look them up. You can find out where they're located. You can go to their websites, and, let me go to the next slide, and you can also do research on LinkedIn.
And b- between the LinkedIn research and looking at their websites and the career, page for their websites, if this is something that interests you, again, the physician in these teams is really there to make sure that the marketing side and the advertising side isn't overstepping, the claims being made.
You have to stick to what's in the, package insert for these drugs, and a medical device has the same thing. And so the physician's expertise is useful there to try and add to the, the, the team and help them, put together th- these, whatever it might be. It might be slides, it might be, the material used by the salespeople that go out to the, offices on a computer, and so on and so forth All right, the fourth one that we've seen, definitely consultant.
Okay, so, there are two types of consultants that I typically talk about. There's the freelance consultants, and then there's the employed consultants. when I talk freelance, it's usually some, a physician who has some expertise in, in some small area, that they can put together a website, get an LLC going, and actually help others implement or correct things.
It could be marketing, it could be running your practice, it could be, anything that would be of interest to physicians or anybody else for that matter. But really what I'm gonna focus on here are those physicians who work for a large international or national healthcare consulting firm. Might even call it a healthcare management consulting firm.
When I was working in the hospital, we usually had two or three major firms in at any given time. We had a firm to help us implement our EHR. We had a firm to help us do, improve our productivity and measure our productivity of our employees. We might have had a firm to help us set up our first hospitals program or develop an observation unit before they were common.
Every time there's some new service line or some new process that hospitals are developing and bringing into their facilities, there's going to be consultants helping them to do that, and many of those consulting firms hire physicians. I spoke to one physician who was a manager in, management level in McKinsey & Company, and he said that, sometimes we really prefer to hire some of the physicians who have not gone through a residency and who have not been in practice."
And the basic reason for that is they wanted their scientific background, their knowledge of the, anatomy, biology, physiology, and all those things we learn in medical school, how the human being, functions, and the pathophysiology and all these other things, but didn't really want someone who had maybe learned some bad habits, really ha- before they learned how not to work, in large teams, without being the actual head of the team.
So for some, they really preferred to hire the, the MDs and DOs right out of their medical school and then train them they wanted to be trained. Now, these jobs oftentimes involve a significant amount of travel. I mean, you can work remotely from home, when you're doing things, but then you do have to go out usually and help, market a little bit, go into a pitch to a company saying why your team is s- such a good selection to help solve this problem at this hospital or other healthcare facility.
And then you have to usually go on site to collect information and interview people and do surveys and things like that. But a lot of it's done then remotely in terms of analyzing the data, preparing reports, preparing, presentations before you go back and present those things and, and so forth. So, I think it's one that is not, pursued as much as the others.
it's not something people think of at first. I, y- so usually that the job, as I said, could be a combination of remote and on-site. And in terms of, how to find these jobs, I do have a resource that is probably gonna be useful. It has top 25 healthcare management consulting companies by, basically by net revenues.
so I'm going to be sending that to you. So if you would want to look into any of these companies as a consultant, what the requirements would be, you can go right to their, website and their career website, which I have links to. you could go on LinkedIn, you could go on Indeed. but I think, for these companies, a lot of times it's best to go right to the company website.
the other strategy here, which I'll mention now, it applies to everywhere that you're, looking to become employed by a large company, is to learn who the recruiters are. You can connect with the recruiters on LinkedIn as well. You can actually look the companies up, you can look up the recruiters, and you can start to interact with them.
You can even go to them for questions just to find out about these jobs, even if you haven't gotten to the point where you feel comfortable to apply. You might even call them and say, "Well, what is it, the requirement? What is the most common job that we're looking for? How much travel is involved?" And so forth.
So, that's how I would approach that one, but it's definitely one of the major ones. okay, now the last two are pharma jobs. I'll probably spend a little bit more on the sixth one, more time on the sixth one than this one, but, pharma is a huge industry. It pays well. All these jobs, really, once you get in at this level, are gonna be paying at least between 150 and 200.
The thing is, you have a lot of upward m- mobility, so that's a generalization, but it, it's pretty accurate. If you think about it, you're, you're competing with PhDs in a lot of these jobs. You're competing with other physicians maybe who do have, more clinical background. So you might come in at a lower salary, but over time, the options for advancement are really quite good.
You could come in as a medical monitor, w- who is someone who tracks the performance, perf- particularly on the patient safety and pharmacovigilance side, either again, for a contract research organization or directly for a pharmaceutical company. Oftentimes you'll visit the sites where patients are being enrolled into studies.
You'll make sure all the paperwork is being done properly. You'll look for trends. You'll look for s-, evidence of side effects and problems that are coming up in, let's say, larger groups of patients You communicate that back to the rest of the, team that's responsible for releasing these drugs, either, again, this might be pre-release or post-release.
but most of the time as a medical monitor, you're probably gonna be doing some of the post-release m- types of monitoring, and you're going to be meeting with the team back at the home office. This one usually is a combination of remote and, working from home, being on the road to go to these places and, and, actually pull together the paperwork or do some teaching of the s- the people, the nurses, and, other support staff doing the data collection for the studies.
I mean, you can imagine some of these are pretty well spread out, but if you've got a large academic center that's enrolling a lot, then, you'll be w- won't be moving around as, as much. But usually you're handling multiple different locations for one or more studies. Or you could work directly for the pharma company, as they say.
Sometimes these jobs are called things like research associate or research assistant or clinical research associate or other clinical research support staff. and, it's, it's an entry-level position, and definitely available to those with an MD, or equivalent degree. as far as resources go, I didn't really have a resource slide for this one.
the main thing is to go onto different pharmaceutical companies, try and identify if they're using a CRO to hire people. They'll usually do a little bit of both. When a new drug is released and there's a lot of activity going on to get the drug out, then they'll hire people through the CRO as well as directly in, some cases.
So, the main thing is just to identify the companies, see which ones might be working on studies. There is, I think it's, clinical, clinicalstudy.gov or similar, has a list of every clinical study being done in the US and possibly in the world. you can track that down, but I did not have that available for this.
I could probably add that to the list of things to send you tomorrow. All right, and the last one is medical science liaison. I've talked a lot about this in the past. I've studied it quite a bit. I've interviewed half a dozen guests, who are medical science liaisons, and actually have other colleagues who are medical science liaisons who I've never interviewed for this topic, but I've talked to many of them.
I actually have a six-lesson course, my Non-Clinical Career Academy. it's similar to the medical monitor, but it's a much more specific, in my mind, position where you are an educational consultant. You're taking the information that you garner back at the pharmaceutical company or medical device company, you bring it out to key opinion leaders and influencers who use the drugs or are positioned to use the drugs.
It's, there's no sales involved whatsoever, and, it's simply an educational, type of position. Typically, in the past, it's involved a lot of travel, back and forth to different sites to visit. If you have a very large territory, it could mean even overnights, away from home. But it w- since the pandemic, again, there's a lot more remote interaction with these key opinion leaders and influencers.
so they've gotten used to getting on a Zoom call, and the medical science liaisons have done that as well. Typically, they'll spend, under the, in the old days, let's say two days traveling, Two to three days traveling really. And if you're in a dense area, that means just, you'll be home at night, but you'll be doing a lot of driving from place to place.
And then a day of, doing your paperwork and reports and things, and then another day interacting directly with your, the rest of your team at the organization. But, some of this, interacting with the key opinion leaders now is done remotely at least half the time, so that's cut back on some of that travel.
it's a very good entry level position. It's not always easy to get. there are PhDs, MDs, DOs, other physician level. There's APNs, there's PAs, there's PharmDs that all do medical science liaison. But each company has a need for each of these and more, and it depends on the company and what the drug is as to how they do that.
And but there's always jobs in the MSL realm. There are recruiting companies that focus just on MSLs and, The There is definitely an opportunity once you're in as an MSL and you demonstrate that you're, you're doing a good job, and you're capable, and you have the, background and, experience to move to a- another level job, it's definitely doable.
I know many people that have moved up within pharma industry, which is, like I said, massive. So, it's a good job to consider doing that. There are definitely some good resources here. Themsls.org, that's the Medical Science Liaison society.org, is an excellent website. It has courses, training, how to get your first job, and so forth.
The MSL Institute at mslinstitute.org has all kinds of publications. It's, I don't know, it's been out there for at least 10 or 15 years. It's run by a PhD MSL. At least she was an MSL. I don't know if she still is. But a lot of, including a book that, every MSL had to get their first MSL job, because there's no such thing as a, as a, uh, a license or a certificate to be a medical science liaison.
Now, the MSL Society puts, put together a certification and training, which is absolutely not required to get your first job. But there's lots of strategies for becoming an MSL. I have a whole course just on that. The MSL Society has a course on that. And so it's definitely something that, it's probably one of the most popular.
When I see people going into non-traditional jobs that are clinicians, um, and, uh, they're... The, the most common ones are medical writing, medical science liaison, and utilization management. So that one requires experience and usually board certification or at least residency training. But, uh, the MSL position is one of the most popular first jobs for, especially for those without the residency training.
All right, we're pretty much coming to the end here. What I'm going to That's it for today's presentation. These six careers are open to almost any physician, regardless of residency or years in practice, as long as you've completed medical school. And once you're in any of these positions, you will continue to use that education and experience to advance in terms of status and income.
You can find the show notes, as well as links to related content and a transcript of today's presentation by going to nonclinicalphysicians.com/6, the number six, -amazing-nonclinical-careers. If you have any questions or comments, as always, reach out to me at john.jureka.md@gmail.com, and join me next week for another episode of Physician NonClinical Careers.
I'll remind you that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast, as I said earlier, with a much greater emphasis on video, and I want to elevate the content to that of a weekly series of masterclasses for those interested in accelerating their career advancement. It will include both interviews and solo episodes, so stay tuned.
I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. If you're not already receiving newsletters, be sure to sign up so you don't miss anything at nonclinicalphysicians.com/newsletter. That's one word. Finally, don't forget that the opinions expressed here are mine, and while the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
So always consult an attorney, accountant, or career strategist before making any major decision about your career. Okay. Bye for now.
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No Boards Needed for 6 Amazing Nonclinical Careers
Welcome back, nonclinical nation. Today, I'm presenting my lecture on the topic of nonclinical jobs for physicians of all backgrounds, including those who have not completed residency training or board certification.
It will be especially helpful for younger physicians who have decided that upon graduating from medical school, that they don't want to work clinically, but they wish to leverage their medical degrees. But first, I have one important message. I wanna let you know that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast.
I don't have all the details worked out, but you will notice soon that I am changing how I'm sharing my podcast with a much greater emphasis on video. What I wanna do is elevate the content to that of a weekly series of master classes like this one for those interested in accelerating their career advancement.
But I still plan to post weekly audio content for those that prefer that model. So stay tuned over the coming weeks. I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. Now, let's get right into today's presentation about six non-clinical careers open to all physicians, residency trained, board certified or not.
All right. That should be looking at my PowerPoint presentation. So I've done this, several times, in different settings and, I hope you get something out of it, and we'll have a chance at the end to talk. I'll probably use the chat primarily for the questions, although, if, one or two of you wanna get on, and actually verbally discuss a topic, we could probably do that as well.
But I would say think about your questions as we go along, and then towards the end, let's say once we get 30 minutes or so into this, you can start putting the questions in the chat. It can be a little, not really disruptive, but, it can just be, something that I, don't wanna necessarily be distracted by during the presentation.
So all right, let's see. Ah, that's working. Fantastic. so this is who I am. I think most of you know me in some form or another, either you've listened to the podcast or we've even had conversations or email exchanges. But, My background is as a family physician. I have worked multiple non-clinical jobs in my career.
the most early one was as a physician advisor at my hospital. I served as a medical director for several different, I wouldn't call them service lines, but for oc med and for, other paid situations in the hospital that I eventually became the chief m- medical officer for. I've owned small businesses, my own practice, and, right now I'm a part owner in a three-site urgent care center.
and I'm a partner in NewScript. Some of you may be members of that, which is an online community of clinicians. And, about six years ago, I got really interested in learning about the types of jobs and careers that physicians in particular pursue when they leave medicine, when they're burnt out or they're just frustrated or nearing retirement and they wanna try different things.
And so I thought, well, starting a podcast might be a good way to do that so that I could interview these people and learn from them. So I've interviewed about 200 guests, in the last six years. I've also posted, I think, close to 100 of my own solo episodes for whatever topic I happen to wanna talk about that are all related somehow to non-clinical careers.
And so, again, if you've never seen or heard the podcast, I would advise you to check it out. There's so many episodes in the past that address some of the issues that m- might even come up today that it's out there for anyone to, to listen to. what we're gonna do today is talk about six non-clinical careers that are open to all physicians, even if they haven't started or completed a residency program, and that's based on my experience in talking directly with physicians who are doing those jobs and others who are experts in those careers, having told me that there are non, residency-trained physicians doing those careers.
And I'm going to try and provide as many resources for you to use. and I will be making all of this available to you. and I'm recording this, so if, even if you want a recording of it, you'll be able to get that. But I'm gonna send you all the resources that I mention today, either as, a link or as an actual document.
I have all your emails, so that's not going to be a problem. All right. So let's just get right into it. These are the six careers that I'm gonna be talking about today, because these are the ones that I found are most Amenable to adding physicians either who have an MD, a DO, MBBS, or the equivalent, who for whatever reason did not become, either licensed or did not complete a residency program or board certification.
there are certain jobs, non-clinical jobs, that require you to have a license, for example, and so this might exclude some of you if you, don't have a license. Of course, there are those who do- don't do a residency, but they might have done an inter- a internship, and you may be licensed, with a one-year internship.
That's legal in many states, and I've talked to many people that are doing that actually as we speak. but any one of those situations, faces, causes a challenge, and so I'm gonna talk about the careers that seem to be the most amenable to, those of you in that situation. So we're gonna be basically talking about medical writing, CDI, medical communications, I'll have to distinguish how that's different from medical writing in a minute, consulting, the medical monitor position, which represents some other positions in pharma, and the medical science liaison All right, now I do want to remind you about some things.
There are some strategies or tactics, you might call them, that we use when we're looking for a non-clinical or non-traditional job that they all share, the tactics that pretty much any job search w- will share. They fall under the heading of, of, basically, just any, career transition, and this could be in or outside of medicine.
So I wanna remind you about those. I wanna touch on those for the next 10 minutes or so, and I want you to really, seriously, if you haven't become familiar with these different tactics, which I'm sure you're all aware of or you've heard of. but I just wanna highlight these and focus on these and, and try and make sure that when you do pursue one of these six careers, if you do, and some of these can be part time, some can be full time, that you're using these tools to accomplish that, that pursuit and land that job.
So there are some of these, what I call universal tactics. there's probably more than this, but these are the four I wanted to touch on today, and that has to do with getting a mentor, using networking to a real good effect, using LinkedIn, and taking advantage of professional organizations I'm gonna go through each of these individually and just highlight some of the things I've learned about them over the past six or seven years.
So mentors. My first mentor was a physician who I was interacting with because I was a member of the Committee on CME Accreditation for the Illinois State Medical Society. So I'd been the chair of the CME Committee at my hospital. We had been surveyed. I subsequently became a surveyor for the ISMS, and then as part of that, eventually, because I did spend a significant amount of time and showed interest, I was asked to join the committee.
And there were other physicians, and this physician, his name was Don, I interacted with him. He was the former chair of that committee, which I ended up chairing later. And I had occasion to meet with him and actually do surveys with him. And it, I discovered at one point that he was, he wasn't practicing.
So it was sort of interesting 'cause I, wasn't really sure what he did. So one day I just asked him, and he said, well, he was the chief medical officer for a hospital. It was a very large... It was probably the largest freestanding nonprofit hospital in the state of Illinois. I think at the time it had 700 or 800 beds, and that was over 30 years ago.
And, I was intrigued by that. And during the time that I was interacting with him, I was becoming somewhat frustrated with patient care. I was in private practice. I was doing some of those other non-clinical jobs part-time. And I learned over time about what his job was, what he was doing, and it became attractive to me.
And I had already set myself up to maybe pursue that because I was doing some things in the hospital that enabled me to meet a lot of people in the hospital and become very familiar with how the hospital worked So, what happened, subsequently as I became more interested, I could go to him and I could ask him questions.
He would give me ideas, organization to join, steps to take, things not to do, and it helped me greatly as I pursued my first job as a chief medical officer at the hospital I was working at. So ins- what I wanna say about a mentor is you may not be lucky enough to find a mentor who's going to actually introduce you to your career, your future career, as I did.
But once you decide on a particular job that you're gonna pursue, and whatever it is, whether it's the, one of the m- one of these medical writing, something in pharma, as soon as you have that fairly narrowed down, and it doesn't have to be concrete where you've actually started to apply.
So obviously you should find somebody who can serve as a mentor. And I will say, just for clarification, when I talk about a mentor, I'm talking about someone who does this for free. They do it as a professional, just like we precept our residents and medical students, just as we, try to teach our colleagues as we come up through medical school, or younger medical students, and maybe even talk to college students about becoming physicians.
It's just part of the profession. And that's what he did, and I've been a mentor for many people myself. So it's something that's done intermittently, it's free, and it's just based on a collegial, relationship with somebody that's doing that thing that you want to do at some point in the future.
That's the best way to really learn about that job, and also to avoid the, landmines that can come up as you're trying to pursue that job. So I guess that's all I wanna say about mentors. We can talk about that at the end if you have questions. Now, the next one is networking. networking, a lot of us, if we've gone to large meetings, we have a networking event at the end of the meeting sometimes.
We're all standing around, having a drink, eating snacks, bunch of s- upright table- tables. standing at these tables and chatting and trying to learn about what other people are doing. That's really, I mean, that's an old style of networking, but, that's not... I, talking about something similar.
But now with social media, we have a much more effective ways of networking. But I want you to understand that 60% of all- jobs, all professional jobs for sure, maybe not, blue collar jobs. But I think the estimate is 60% of positions like this are, landed or develop as a result of a direct referral by another person as opposed to going through a recruiter or finding a job online and doing an online, application.
I could probably talk an hour or two about how to network. In fact, I was just putting together a podcast episode where I'm talking about LinkedIn and how you can use LinkedIn to network. But the idea is, in some manner you're going to try to outreach and contact, people that you went to medical school with, people you went to undergrad with, people you may have be- been in high school with, friends.
I was looking at my network on LinkedIn. I have about 2,400 direct first degree links on LinkedIn. When I look at my second degree links, that jumps to about 90,000. And when you get to, third degree, because basically what you're saying is the people that are linked to the people that your first degree and second degree contacts are on LinkedIn, it's, I think over 100,000 now.
I would never try to reach out to any of those third degrees unless I knew for a fact that it might be helpful in my career. So there are strategies to use L- LinkedIn, to use Doximity, to use Facebook and other ways of networking, and also non-social media sites where just personal contacts. what can you learn?
I found that if you were to contact everyone that you went to medical school with, you'd probably find at least 10 or 20% of those people are no longer practicing, if they ever were, and they're doing something non-clinical. So you can learn a ton from those people. I've interviewed a, a cardiologist who was getting suddenly quite frustrated with her job, decided to leave it after 10 or 20 years, and, by virtue of just talking to one of her former, uh, co-medical students, um, she found a job and within six months had taken that job and she's been in it ever since, and she loves it.
And she did not do it intentionally. I mean, she didn't even know what job she was looking for. So these things happen all the time. So networking is very important, and so you're going to use that, um, and keep that in mind when you're looking at one of these six jobs that I'm gonna talk about The next one is LinkedIn.
So I've alluded to LinkedIn and the fact that it can be a very useful way to network, but, what is LinkedIn? It's an online, resume basically. It's a profile. It's generally much more extensive than a resume you would ever send to anybody. So when you're applying for a job, you're going to send generally a two-page resume at the most, and there's a distinction between a resume and a CV, which are mainly used, CVs are used for professionals that are in clinical medicine, and PhDs, and scientists, and so forth.
Usually it's just a long list of presentations and, periodicals, articles they've written and so forth. but LinkedIn has much more information, and when you're applying for a job or even looking for a partnership or something, if the resume looks good and the screening goes well at the beginning, most people are, most employers are gonna be looking at LinkedIn to get a little more information about you.
They'll also do a total social media search for you to look for things that maybe you wouldn't be too proud of on social media, so those situations should be avoided. But I would say for most professionals, LinkedIn should be used. It's a very professional social media site. There's, there's not a lot of, strange behavior and, TikTok-like behavior or videos on LinkedIn at all.
So again, I'm not going to talk in great detail, but you should be using LinkedIn because not only does it sit out there as a profile, but you can actually contact recruiters, you can do job searches, and then you can also in your profile mention things so that other people looking for someone for a position, a hiring manager or recruiters, they will actually search for you even if you're not searching for a job actively on LinkedIn, as long as you set it to being open to being contacted by those people.
There are settings you can do in LinkedIn, if you haven't learned this, where you can avoid notifying your current employer when you do make changes to your profile, but you do have to sometimes be careful about what exactly you put in there. But there are ways, there are nuanced ways of letting recruiters know, that you're available on LinkedIn without letting your current employer know if you are working.
And professional organizations, and I'll mention this, while I'm going through some of these jobs today, but definitely there are some professional organizations that have a lot of support for those seeking their first job in that industry. And I'll give you examples of that. There are several jobs here where those don't exist, so where they don't exist, it's unfortunate.
But where they do exist, they're a great help. sometimes the organizations will only be for those who are, in the process of being hired or have started a job in that field. but, again, you just have to keep that in mind as a tactic that you should take advantage of if you can. So that's all I wanna say about those, but keep all those four things in mind, and we'll touch on them as we go.
So I'm gonna get right into the six careers that I mentioned at the beginning, of this hour, and the first one is medical writer. there are many, many medical writers who are physicians who are not licensed, and, really, it's almost a free-for-all, particularly on the freelance side. Anybody can be a medical writer.
You could have a master's degree in writing or science. You could be a PhD. You could be a physician, a nurse, a PA. Really, anybody with an interest in writing, medically, can do that job. Now, if it's more open to freelancers outside of medicine who, let's say, are, doing, journalistic writing where they're, basically a reporter writing articles for, publication to the general public, it d- doesn't take a physician to write about all of those things.
But physicians and PhDs that are medical writers make more money than those that are master's and bachelor's and other freelancers. You don't have to be a freelancer to get a job as a medical writer. but it's a good way to start, with the advantage being that you can do it part-time and develop quite a portfolio of writing, which is what you need to sell yourself and really demonstrate what you've done on LinkedIn, either by the actual l- linking to publications or just listing, a long list of, articles you've written or companies that you've worked with.
the job is, has the other advantages that it's remote for the most part. There aren't a whole lot of medical writers that are actually going to an office every day. But there are some, if you work for a large firm, that has, that's a publishing firm, let's say, it has a lot of in-house writers, that you might be applying for that job.
so it's remote, and it's flexible Which the other side of the coin is it does require a fair amount of discipline. So you're going to have deadlines, and so you have to make sure that when you're asked to write a, I don't know, 80,000-word article on a particular topic, or you're applying to get that job or get the assignment, that you're going to have to get that done within the deadline But a lot of the people that I've spoken with have been doing, they start by writing for free, submitting articles to KevinMD and Medium and other journals.
I think, some of our, most of our professional journals, that do have journalistic writing, like, like say the American Association for Physician Leadership has a journal, and they're very strict in what they accept, but authors submit those all the time, and they don't get paid for those.
But then you have that as something to add to your portfolio. And then as a freelancer, you can go and you can identify different companies that are looking for writers. I happen to be an editor for NetCE, which is a company that does CME, manuscripts, and it provides CME credit for those. I'm not a writer for NetCE, but I am an editor, so I review the manuscripts when they first come out before they're published, and then when they have a basically every three-year review, and I get paid to do that.
And there are medical writers who submit articles to that company. The, the net pay over time goes up gradually. And so and you can make definitely a career of doing that and make a good living. You have to become very efficient and again, stay on your deadlines. Maybe you should specialize in a particular type of writing and a t- particular subject, of writing.
and as you get more efficient and, and sometimes you end up going back and rewriting and editing and getting paid for that as well, you can definitely make, close to a, a physician's salary, and you can travel and work remotely. and then the other thing is you can do, the tricks you can use is that once you've done some freelance, you can put that all on your website or, and/or your, which you should have, and/or your LinkedIn, and you can be discovered by companies that are looking for writers.
I've spoken with several, writers and interviewed them on my podcast who were doing freelance writing for several years, and they were hired by a communications company or a CME company or something of that nature and went to a full-time job. And then there's also opportunities for promotion. usually a medical writer, when they're promoted to a, what you might think of as an editorial position editor, medical editor or writing, editor, they actually call them medical directors.
So if you're at a company that produces, patient, information, patient education in the medical field, then you're probably gonna be a medical director supervising the other medical writers As far as resources go, there's some really good ones for medical writing. The American Medical Writing Association, amwa.org, is very useful.
It, like a lot of the organizations that I usually talk about for these and other jobs, there's everything from education, certification, networking within that professional organization. Okay? So that's another source of networking, and courses and things like that. So Everything I put in here as a resource I will be sending to all of you, later today or tomorrow mor- most likely.
There are groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, different types of medical writers that get together and share information and answer questions and so forth. I did put down a specific profile on LinkedIn if you wanna look this up. Dr. Freda Wiley, she was a guest on my podcast, I think about a year ago.
If you look at her profile in LinkedIn, you'll see that she... Look under her experiences, and you'll see that she has 26 separate experiences, each of which is basically, a demonstration of where she was writing. So it'll give you some ideas of the companies that she worked for that you might want to, consider looking at, to submit articles.
and the other thing is, sometimes a CRO, which is a contract research organization, which I'll be talking about when I'm discussing pharmaceutical industry jobs, they will hire writers as well. Mostly they're technical writers. There is a course called sixweekcourse.com that many of my podcast guests and others that I run into have taken.
This is a course that teaches you about medical writing, but it focuses heavily on the business side and the freelance side, so how to set that up, how to create a portfolio, how to... The, the other advantage of this and the reason that the, person who teaches this does the six-week course is she actually hires her students, the better students, to write for her because she has a backlog of publications that she commits to writing, 'cause she has a long list of, publication companies, publishers, CME, and so forth, that are looking for that.
She teaches PhDs and physicians to do this, but that's, Everyone I've talked to that did the six-week course, thought it was fantastic. And I also set, added this as an idea. The ACCME, lists all the CME producers that are, that at least produce CME for CME credit, AMA CME credit. There's, I think, several thousand.
And it's a little tedious, but you can actually look through that list and to see if there's companies either within driving distance or companies across the country there that might be producing materials that you would like to produce and consistent with your background and, and interest and so forth, and so it's another source of potential employers.
Okay, I'm gonna move to the next one, career number two. CDI expert. I guess I won't spend a lot of time on this. I don't have a lot of resources. Clinical documentation improvement, medical directors and physician advisors and so forth, usually in the hospital, that's where the biggest need is. They usually have some, residency or maybe been in practice, but I have talked to people that have not.
And basically, I know a lot of, let's say foreign medical grads in particular who come, and they'll do... They might even be physicians, that have been practicing in another country. Some of you may fall in that category. And they come here, and they're trying to get into residency, or they're trying to see how they're gonna use their degree.
And so they'll work in these ancillary roles, sometimes volunteer, sometimes for, some pay, and essentially working at, like, a nursing level within the healthcare system. And I had a guest who did that, and, he was helping. And he was helping with the, basically the utilization management hospital side of that, not the insurance side.
And so he was interacting with physicians. He was helping the nurses, and then he got into helping with clinical documentation. And so he did that for a while, and then he got certified by the ACDIS, which I'll mention in
a minute, which gave him a little more expertise in, in sort of a 10-week course and a certification in coding and documentation. And ultimately, he was hired by a hospital, and it wasn't the one he was working at, to be a physician advisor for clinical documentation improvement. It's a very important topic in hospitals.
Really is critical to the bottom line in demonstrating quality And, he advanced. He eventually started working for a larger national company. He did some freelancing and starting his own business for a while. I'm not sure if he's working for someone else or still independent at this point, but, he definitely never had a license, did not do any residency training here in the US.
So as far as resources for, for this one, I would mention the ACDIS. I think it has several certifications that one can take, and that sometimes gives you a leg up i- in terms of finding that job. I would look through LinkedIn groups, that are dedicated to clinical documentation integrity or clinical documentation improvement.
And, a colleague of mine, so to speak, because he was actually a consultant at my hospital for a while, his name is Cesar Limjoco, Dr. Cesar Limjoco. You can look up his LinkedIn profile. He has about 25,000 connections on LinkedIn, and he, he does a lot of sharing. And so if you wanna get a sense of the topics that are discussed and, the importance of clinical documentation improvement in the hospital setting, he would be a good profile to follow up on.
So that's probably not the most common of what I'm talking about today, nowhere near as common as, medical writing, but still, it's an option. Okay, number three, medical communications. Now, I'm gonna distinguish this from, let's say medical writing for two reasons. there's a lot of overlap. technically a CME company is a medical communication company.
So the one that I do edi- editor or editing for, the NetCE, is a medical communications company that provides CME, uh, manuscripts online and, and on paper. Um, and so they qualify as this term, but what I'm talking about and what's listed on this slide here, these little spheres that you're looking at, these are all advertising agencies that work either directly for a pharmaceutical company or also for a contract research organization that I mentioned earlier, um, to do support when a drug is being released.
So an OBGYN that I, uh, interviewed for my podcast, um, transitioned from a medical writer to medical communications. She joined a team at one of these companies, and she, during our podcast, mentioned that definitely they hire those who are not board certified, who are not in active practice to join them as well.
Because what they need is, someone with a medical background, someone with a degree, the MD, the DO, MBBS, the equivalent, and some patient exposure, which you get in medical school, a knowledge of the tech- technology, knowledge of the terminology. And, basically they usually come in as an associate medical director, whereas the board certified and residency trained come in as a medical director, which is the title they generally use.
this is a 9:00 to 5:00 job. This is usually one where, at least in the past you would, go to the office five days a week. I think since the pandemic, that's gone out the window, in the sense that there's a lot of remote work now. I mean, basically to work in these teams, you don't have to be face-to-face.
So I suspect a lot of them have gone remote. Some start, let's say working... Most of these companies are based in a large metropolitan area, so if you're in a big city that helps. You could probably find, a dozen of these i- in each city, and... But the thing is, if you move away, they'll probably let you, telecommute, so to speak.
And so again, this, the thing is y- you'd think that this involves the physician doing a lot of writing, but it's really not. It's being part of the team. These teams produce, marketing materials, and even the package inserts in, for pharmaceutical companies, and they also create, videos, computer programs, live events, the material behind the live event, and even, the major, major large live meetings.
like the radiology association and the, orthopedic s- society, and so forth. When they have their national meetings and they have the very large, displays, they are behind... They're the ones that are putting those together. So again, it's all about marketing, communications, advertising, at least in this subgroup of medical communications.
So I'm going to send you this slide, the original of this slide, so you can s- see the names of each of these companies. If you're interested in this, you can look them up. You can find out where they're located. You can go to their websites, and, let me go to the next slide, and you can also do research on LinkedIn.
And b- between the LinkedIn research and looking at their websites and the career, page for their websites, if this is something that interests you, again, the physician in these teams is really there to make sure that the marketing side and the advertising side isn't overstepping, the claims being made.
You have to stick to what's in the, package insert for these drugs, and a medical device has the same thing. And so the physician's expertise is useful there to try and add to the, the, the team and help them, put together th- these, whatever it might be. It might be slides, it might be, the material used by the salespeople that go out to the, offices on a computer, and so on and so forth All right, the fourth one that we've seen, definitely consultant.
Okay, so, there are two types of consultants that I typically talk about. There's the freelance consultants, and then there's the employed consultants. when I talk freelance, it's usually some, a physician who has some expertise in, in some small area, that they can put together a website, get an LLC going, and actually help others implement or correct things.
It could be marketing, it could be running your practice, it could be, anything that would be of interest to physicians or anybody else for that matter. But really what I'm gonna focus on here are those physicians who work for a large international or national healthcare consulting firm. Might even call it a healthcare management consulting firm.
When I was working in the hospital, we usually had two or three major firms in at any given time. We had a firm to help us implement our EHR. We had a firm to help us do, improve our productivity and measure our productivity of our employees. We might have had a firm to help us set up our first hospitals program or develop an observation unit before they were common.
Every time there's some new service line or some new process that hospitals are developing and bringing into their facilities, there's going to be consultants helping them to do that, and many of those consulting firms hire physicians. I spoke to one physician who was a manager in, management level in McKinsey & Company, and he said that, sometimes we really prefer to hire some of the physicians who have not gone through a residency and who have not been in practice."
And the basic reason for that is they wanted their scientific background, their knowledge of the, anatomy, biology, physiology, and all those things we learn in medical school, how the human being, functions, and the pathophysiology and all these other things, but didn't really want someone who had maybe learned some bad habits, really ha- before they learned how not to work, in large teams, without being the actual head of the team.
So for some, they really preferred to hire the, the MDs and DOs right out of their medical school and then train them they wanted to be trained. Now, these jobs oftentimes involve a significant amount of travel. I mean, you can work remotely from home, when you're doing things, but then you do have to go out usually and help, market a little bit, go into a pitch to a company saying why your team is s- such a good selection to help solve this problem at this hospital or other healthcare facility.
And then you have to usually go on site to collect information and interview people and do surveys and things like that. But a lot of it's done then remotely in terms of analyzing the data, preparing reports, preparing, presentations before you go back and present those things and, and so forth. So, I think it's one that is not, pursued as much as the others.
it's not something people think of at first. I, y- so usually that the job, as I said, could be a combination of remote and on-site. And in terms of, how to find these jobs, I do have a resource that is probably gonna be useful. It has top 25 healthcare management consulting companies by, basically by net revenues.
so I'm going to be sending that to you. So if you would want to look into any of these companies as a consultant, what the requirements would be, you can go right to their, website and their career website, which I have links to. you could go on LinkedIn, you could go on Indeed. but I think, for these companies, a lot of times it's best to go right to the company website.
the other strategy here, which I'll mention now, it applies to everywhere that you're, looking to become employed by a large company, is to learn who the recruiters are. You can connect with the recruiters on LinkedIn as well. You can actually look the companies up, you can look up the recruiters, and you can start to interact with them.
You can even go to them for questions just to find out about these jobs, even if you haven't gotten to the point where you feel comfortable to apply. You might even call them and say, "Well, what is it, the requirement? What is the most common job that we're looking for? How much travel is involved?" And so forth.
So, that's how I would approach that one, but it's definitely one of the major ones. okay, now the last two are pharma jobs. I'll probably spend a little bit more on the sixth one, more time on the sixth one than this one, but, pharma is a huge industry. It pays well. All these jobs, really, once you get in at this level, are gonna be paying at least between 150 and 200.
The thing is, you have a lot of upward m- mobility, so that's a generalization, but it, it's pretty accurate. If you think about it, you're, you're competing with PhDs in a lot of these jobs. You're competing with other physicians maybe who do have, more clinical background. So you might come in at a lower salary, but over time, the options for advancement are really quite good.
You could come in as a medical monitor, w- who is someone who tracks the performance, perf- particularly on the patient safety and pharmacovigilance side, either again, for a contract research organization or directly for a pharmaceutical company. Oftentimes you'll visit the sites where patients are being enrolled into studies.
You'll make sure all the paperwork is being done properly. You'll look for trends. You'll look for s-, evidence of side effects and problems that are coming up in, let's say, larger groups of patients You communicate that back to the rest of the, team that's responsible for releasing these drugs, either, again, this might be pre-release or post-release.
but most of the time as a medical monitor, you're probably gonna be doing some of the post-release m- types of monitoring, and you're going to be meeting with the team back at the home office. This one usually is a combination of remote and, working from home, being on the road to go to these places and, and, actually pull together the paperwork or do some teaching of the s- the people, the nurses, and, other support staff doing the data collection for the studies.
I mean, you can imagine some of these are pretty well spread out, but if you've got a large academic center that's enrolling a lot, then, you'll be w- won't be moving around as, as much. But usually you're handling multiple different locations for one or more studies. Or you could work directly for the pharma company, as they say.
Sometimes these jobs are called things like research associate or research assistant or clinical research associate or other clinical research support staff. and, it's, it's an entry-level position, and definitely available to those with an MD, or equivalent degree. as far as resources go, I didn't really have a resource slide for this one.
the main thing is to go onto different pharmaceutical companies, try and identify if they're using a CRO to hire people. They'll usually do a little bit of both. When a new drug is released and there's a lot of activity going on to get the drug out, then they'll hire people through the CRO as well as directly in, some cases.
So, the main thing is just to identify the companies, see which ones might be working on studies. There is, I think it's, clinical, clinicalstudy.gov or similar, has a list of every clinical study being done in the US and possibly in the world. you can track that down, but I did not have that available for this.
I could probably add that to the list of things to send you tomorrow. All right, and the last one is medical science liaison. I've talked a lot about this in the past. I've studied it quite a bit. I've interviewed half a dozen guests, who are medical science liaisons, and actually have other colleagues who are medical science liaisons who I've never interviewed for this topic, but I've talked to many of them.
I actually have a six-lesson course, my Non-Clinical Career Academy. it's similar to the medical monitor, but it's a much more specific, in my mind, position where you are an educational consultant. You're taking the information that you garner back at the pharmaceutical company or medical device company, you bring it out to key opinion leaders and influencers who use the drugs or are positioned to use the drugs.
It's, there's no sales involved whatsoever, and, it's simply an educational, type of position. Typically, in the past, it's involved a lot of travel, back and forth to different sites to visit. If you have a very large territory, it could mean even overnights, away from home. But it w- since the pandemic, again, there's a lot more remote interaction with these key opinion leaders and influencers.
so they've gotten used to getting on a Zoom call, and the medical science liaisons have done that as well. Typically, they'll spend, under the, in the old days, let's say two days traveling, Two to three days traveling really. And if you're in a dense area, that means just, you'll be home at night, but you'll be doing a lot of driving from place to place.
And then a day of, doing your paperwork and reports and things, and then another day interacting directly with your, the rest of your team at the organization. But, some of this, interacting with the key opinion leaders now is done remotely at least half the time, so that's cut back on some of that travel.
it's a very good entry level position. It's not always easy to get. there are PhDs, MDs, DOs, other physician level. There's APNs, there's PAs, there's PharmDs that all do medical science liaison. But each company has a need for each of these and more, and it depends on the company and what the drug is as to how they do that.
And but there's always jobs in the MSL realm. There are recruiting companies that focus just on MSLs and, The There is definitely an opportunity once you're in as an MSL and you demonstrate that you're, you're doing a good job, and you're capable, and you have the, background and, experience to move to a- another level job, it's definitely doable.
I know many people that have moved up within pharma industry, which is, like I said, massive. So, it's a good job to consider doing that. There are definitely some good resources here. Themsls.org, that's the Medical Science Liaison society.org, is an excellent website. It has courses, training, how to get your first job, and so forth.
The MSL Institute at mslinstitute.org has all kinds of publications. It's, I don't know, it's been out there for at least 10 or 15 years. It's run by a PhD MSL. At least she was an MSL. I don't know if she still is. But a lot of, including a book that, every MSL had to get their first MSL job, because there's no such thing as a, as a, uh, a license or a certificate to be a medical science liaison.
Now, the MSL Society puts, put together a certification and training, which is absolutely not required to get your first job. But there's lots of strategies for becoming an MSL. I have a whole course just on that. The MSL Society has a course on that. And so it's definitely something that, it's probably one of the most popular.
When I see people going into non-traditional jobs that are clinicians, um, and, uh, they're... The, the most common ones are medical writing, medical science liaison, and utilization management. So that one requires experience and usually board certification or at least residency training. But, uh, the MSL position is one of the most popular first jobs for, especially for those without the residency training.
All right, we're pretty much coming to the end here. What I'm going to That's it for today's presentation. These six careers are open to almost any physician, regardless of residency or years in practice, as long as you've completed medical school. And once you're in any of these positions, you will continue to use that education and experience to advance in terms of status and income.
You can find the show notes, as well as links to related content and a transcript of today's presentation by going to nonclinicalphysicians.com/6, the number six, -amazing-nonclinical-careers. If you have any questions or comments, as always, reach out to me at john.jureka.md@gmail.com, and join me next week for another episode of Physician NonClinical Careers.
I'll remind you that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast, as I said earlier, with a much greater emphasis on video, and I want to elevate the content to that of a weekly series of masterclasses for those interested in accelerating their career advancement. It will include both interviews and solo episodes, so stay tuned.
I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. If you're not already receiving newsletters, be sure to sign up so you don't miss anything at nonclinicalphysicians.com/newsletter. That's one word. Finally, don't forget that the opinions expressed here are mine, and while the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
So always consult an attorney, accountant, or career strategist before making any major decision about your career. Okay. Bye for now.
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