NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/ Helping Hospital and Medical Group Executives Lead and Manage With Confidence Tue, 27 May 2025 11:50:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cropped-1-32x32.jpg NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/ 32 32 112612397 How to Be Happy and Appreciated: Switch to Direct Primary Care – Part 1 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/switch-to-direct-primary-care/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/switch-to-direct-primary-care/#respond Tue, 27 May 2025 11:50:52 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=67536 Interview with Dr. Josh Umbehr - 406 In this week's podcast episode, Dr. Josh Umbehr explains why physicians should switch to Direct Primary Care if their current practice leaves them unfulfilled. He shares how simplifying healthcare by removing insurance, offering transparent pricing, and focusing purely on patient care can restore meaning to medicine [...]

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Interview with Dr. Josh Umbehr – 406

In this week's podcast episode, Dr. Josh Umbehr explains why physicians should switch to Direct Primary Care if their current practice leaves them unfulfilled.

He shares how simplifying healthcare by removing insurance, offering transparent pricing, and focusing purely on patient care can restore meaning to medicine and create a more sustainable, fulfilling way to practice.


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Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 900 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes, all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.

Foundational Economics of Healthcare

Dr. Josh Umbehr’s path to Direct Primary Care started with an early look at the business side of medicine. Working as a medical biller for a plastic surgeon, Josh discovered the financial struggles caused by insurance reimbursement issues that his medical training hadn’t prepared him for. That experience, paired with his father’s simple and successful trash collection business, where customers paid once a month for weekly service, revealed how misaligned healthcare delivery and payment systems had become.

Over the past 15 years, Dr. Umbehr has shown how a membership-based model that eliminates insurance middlemen can help physicians return to what drew them to medicine in the first place. By spending time with patients, diagnosing problems, and providing care without the heavy administrative burden that turns doctors into data clerks, practice is fulfilling again. Jumping through numerous hoops to successfully document, code, bill, and collect payment for your services adds a huge administrative burden that detracts from patient care. You will be shocked by how pleasant practice can be when you switch to direct primary care and eliminate those distractions.

Practical Strategies to Switch to Direct Primary Care

Success in Direct Primary Care requires understanding that the membership model creates natural balance points where practices must provide sufficient value to retain patients while maintaining operational efficiency to remain profitable. Dr. Umbehr's Atlas MD practice operates with five physicians across two locations, demonstrating scalability while preserving the personal relationships that define quality primary care, where physicians know not just patients but their family members by name.

The model attracts physicians seeking alternatives to burnout-inducing volume requirements, offering the professional satisfaction of practicing medicine as originally envisioned rather than serving as intermediaries in complex billing systems. By providing free consulting and resources to other physicians interested in DPC transitions, Dr. Umbehr advocates for movement growth that benefits the broader healthcare system through increased access to affordable, relationship-based primary care. He makes the switch to direct primary care so much easier.

Summary

Dr. Josh Umbehr shows how the switch to Direct Primary Care (DPC) gives physicians more autonomy while making healthcare affordable and accessible for patients. In Part 2 of this episode (next week), he shares his tech innovations and “Not Health Insurance” model, while also offering free DPC consulting and tools through Atlas MD.


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 406

How to Be Happy and Appreciated: Switch to Direct Primary Care

Part 1 with Dr. Josh Umbehr

John: I recently interviewed a family physician who established her DPC about six years ago, and her practice was very lean with only a few employees. But this week, I'm interviewing what I call a DPC pioneer, because he's been doing this for a lot longer. It started about 15 years ago, and since then he's created an EMR and other useful resources for DPC physicians. So with that, Dr. Josh Umber, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: Thank you for having me, looking forward to it.

John: This is good. Gosh, I wish I learned this stuff about 20 years ago, but I can just live vicariously through you. What we usually do is, have you give us a little bit about your background and education, and then when did you discover DPC and how did you get interested in it so early in your career?

Dr. Josh Umbehr: Yeah, the long version of a short story I like to tell is growing up, my dad was a trash man. He's a lawyer now, so we still tell people he's a trash man because it's less embarrassing. But he had a fantastic business model for 20 some years, which you pay once a month, you pick up once a week. What could be complicated about that?

And then in 2000, in undergrad, I started working for a plastic surgeon as a biller and coder and he hired me knowing full well, I was just a pre-med student and never done this before. And he had never done it before. And no one taught him in all those years of training or fellowship, how to bill insurance. And he struggled to make what a private practice or a resident would make in private practice because insurance doesn't want to pay. And he came from a medical family. So it was even more amazing that no one thought along the way. So you saw that sausage get made and said, look, this makes no sense. He's fighting every payment for everything and not getting reimbursed well. And he was a brilliant surgeon.

That started the path down this idea of surely there's businesses that run like my dad's business that run well and are simple. And that led to concierge physicians in some areas or fee for service, urgent care and others. But the trend being that insurance is enough of a problem even in 2000 that people were saying, I got to get out of this.

Then I became kind of the only med student really involved in the National Society of Concierge Physicians and watched that for 10 years. And the bitter truth there was that the failure rate was like 98%. It didn't work for most doctors. You had to have some sort of shtick of you were George Bush's doctor or Michael Jordan's doctor or something. But they were, some were making it work and doctors were still excited to leave a broken system and some things never change.

But the business side was very underdeveloped. We learned about it through undergrad and med school and residency. And I was kind of that token guy telling anybody who'd listen, this is what I would do. And attendings on rotations would say this is crazy or, but it was a blast. We graduated residency in July, 2010, launched our practice September 2nd, 2010 to pay homage to the book Atlas Shrugged because that's a key date in that book. And so a lot of our website and story has Ayn Rand-isms throughout it but it's been a wild journey since.

John: Funny you should bring that up because when I was listening to some of your videos online and then I heard you bring that up Atlas Shrugged in the book, which yeah, I definitely have read but you made me think I got to go read it again because apparently you've read it more than once.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: 19 times. Yeah, read or listened to it.

John: Yeah, oh man. Well, so you've done some planning beforehand, obviously. So what were the complicated parts of the beginning? It only took you a few months to get going. What were the little steps in there that needed major attention?

Dr. Josh Umbehr: I really like building the business model. There was everybody knew insurance. So 99% of doctors you talk to just knew that. Occasionally you talk to part of the movement at that time which I think has kind of faded away was the ideal micro practice movement and variations on these things that just really struggled to get any true formation or momentum.

We knew we wanted to be membership based because that was easy from a business model. We knew we wanted to be affordable. Ironically in some ways in those years the biggest complaint against concierge medicine came from doctors that it was expensive and elitist. Now we've come full circle and the biggest risk to direct care is doctors making it expensive and elitist.

We've become our own enemy here. And in a weird way, that's an outgrowth of the successful movement is that doctors before never, they saw more failures than successes. Now they see so many successes that they're getting soft at the edges of the business model. But I remember being in med school maybe as a first or second year, their AM radio show was talking about healthcare innovation. I called up and said, I want to do a cash practice. I remember vividly they laughed like, oh, does that mean you don't take checks for credit cards? Ha-ha, next caller.

Like this idea of even what is a cash practice and insurance free, third-party free, concierge, administrative, had all these sort of rough, ugly names except for concierge, which was at least a nice sounding name, but still didn't quite, people didn't connect that to what it did. So it was a fresh slate in a lot of ways of explaining to patients, this is just a new model. Netflix was 13 years old at the time launched in.

People were at least, you could say something like we're the Netflix of medicine or a gym membership, but it really was getting the idea out that you could do healthcare differently. We would have doctors or nurses come to us and say, it's actually illegal to take cash. No, it's against your insurance contract to take cash if you're contracted with insurance. But I remember in residency as well, they bring the Medicare rep or whatever to help everybody enroll. It's like, well, what if you don't want to enroll? And they couldn't fathom that, everybody enrolls.

And so then piecing that out because in a large way that hadn't been done, concierge movement was so expensive and underdeveloped, they didn't see meds or labs or procedures or imaging or DME as a problem to solve. And again, one time a doctor kind of like, very sort of flippantly said, it's not my problem. It is, and that's the strength of family medicine is that we touch everything. And it's still the underappreciated aspect of this.

Amy Finkelstein's got an amazing set of books, Risky Business, Why Insurance Companies Fail, We've Got You Covered, and kind of her economic research of healthcare models. And she's an MIT economist, and she misses the point. She says two kind of funny things. At one point in the book, she references Helen Hunt, who I've always had a crush on. So I think my wife looks like Helen Hunt.

In some movie where a doctor sends, Jack Nicholson sends a doctor to look, do a home visit and look at her kid. And the kid says, mom, did you know doctors do home visits? And in at least the audible book, Amy Finkelstein, the author says, not in the 21st century, this economist screams at the TV. And I'm like, I did a home visit today. She goes so far as to say, primary care is only five to 8% of the national spend. It doesn't matter how we administer it. Let's move on. Everybody forgets what family medicine or intramedicine primary care peds can do because we touch meds, labs, procedures, urgent care, ER, referrals, imaging, patho. It starts from here.

And so to find a cash pathologist, to find where you dispense meds, again, we had pharmacists tell us it's illegal. And if you read the Kansas law, the board of pharmacy manages pharmacists and the board of medicine manages physicians. And they read their law and it does sort of sound like we can't, but that's not my law.

Because most of them were still part of a corporate pharmacy, didn't really quite appreciate there was a wholesale world out there. That you can get a thousand Lucinapril for $20. A thousand amlodipine, five milligrams is $8. It's less than a penny a pill, even after our 10% markup or getting somebody to give us cash labs and like just figuring out each of these things along the way.

And that's one reason we do all the consulting for free is because none of that's really proprietary. If we all practice best practices, then the whole movement grows faster. If you want to go fast, go alone. You want to go far, go together. And we need a thousand doctors converting to direct care a month for the next hundred months to make a real impact.

John: All right, I got a comment on a couple of things here. I did at one point, I was part of a three person group, traditional many years ago. And for whatever reason, the group kind of fell apart. I had to start my own practice. And literally half of the work of doing that and all of the delays was insurance billing. Finding staff that knew what they did, systems, whatever. So you take that out. It's just half of the problem just disappears.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: It's amazing. It really is designed by subtraction. If you're familiar with the Emperor's New Clothes, we were the wise fool at the end of the story because we had never seen how it was supposed to be done. We kind of just did what made the most sense to us at the time. And does it make sense to jump through all these hoops? No. And the key question was, what is the best, most affordable thing for the patient? Well, if you put that out front, then everything kind of just mapped itself to that. Well, client bill prices. When we started 15 years ago, a CBC was a buck 50. Now it's $225, damn inflation.

But it's like, well, I hate doing all of this stuff. I am a workhorse for stuff that matters, but I don't probably tolerate busy work very well. If we can offer unlimited visits and we knew practices were struggling with marketing and value and explaining to people, it's almost starving artist style. You threw as much value at the wall as you could. And then if you did that, the rest just kind of fell in place because you don't need all these extra systems.

I'm reading a fantastic book from 1975. The old phrase, if you want a new idea, read an old book. Systemantics: How Systems Work and When They Fail. And most things are a system, a great line in there. Systems fight themselves, resist themselves. Most systems don't do what they're supposed to do. He had a quote from a Russian czar that said, I never led the country, 10,000 clerks did. And we're not practicing medicine in this system. We're collecting data to send to an insurance company. Those are two very different systems.

And so when you remove all that and like, well, why are we insuring strep throat? It's not even, because I think we're perpetual students and that feels like a multiple choice test. And we did the paperwork, so we should get the dopamine. But we've extrapolated all of these extra steps to get paid when it still doesn't do what the system was supposed to do, which was just deliver a diagnosis and a treatment to a patient.

John: Yeah, you know what? The other thing that occurred to me recently as I'm learning more about this is that my wife and I are not a DPC in the practice, but we opt out or we sometimes we'll just go get imaging at the MRI center and pay out of pocket because it's deductible so high anyway and then hassle factor so high, it doesn't make any sense. So it's like, I don't know, systems and everything is getting in place to really just make this like the logical solution.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: It'll come full circle. There's a brilliant author, Christine Ford Chaplin. She is a medical economic historian. And I think social transformation of medicine, I think is the book. But anyway, she says 1920s, this is the model they did. They called it prepaid medical, but there was no insurance.

And so you had these groups combined. And so she would say a beautifully self-balancing system, because if you, in a prepaid model, if you don't do enough for the patient, they leave. If you do too much and your overhead is too high, you're less profitable.

So you oscillate somewhere in this Goldilocks zone. But then in terms of branding, you'd think you wouldn't want sick people, but everybody could be sick. So you want everybody to think that you could handle them if they were to get sick.

The brand really developed from bringing in specialists and giving out free care and taking on complicated patients, just so you could show all the other patients that don't worry. If you get sicker, we have the resources to help. And in this same book, it talks about how systems oscillate from academia, from letter grade to pass fail to letter grade.

And in true economic fashion, we're coming full circle that the emperor's new clothes analogy again is that the lie we were told is that insurance made care affordable. And I don't even blame insurance companies. I blame doctors.

Because doctors are the ones delivering the care. The doctors are the ones who don't know the prices, who keep trying to prescribe name brand or get paid by insurance. And so that had nowhere to go but up.

We're using a hammer as a wrench. So we're always going to get a bad result. First and foremost, if we're talking business startups in the world of clean energy or clean water, the term is too cheap to meter.

And doctors should be taking business classes to understand what they're doing. So the goal to making healthcare affordable isn't by making everyone have even more insurance, it's by making so much healthcare so affordable, it's too cheap to insure. At 0.8 cents a pill, it costs more to mail you the meds than it does to give you the meds.

There's no reason to insure that. That's great because those chunks of meds make up about 30% of everything insurance pays for. So we could bring it back to 2000s prices if every doctor dispensed wholesale meds, which is well within their license in 45 states. And again, answers the question of what's best for the patient.

John: All right, another basic question is we're going to get too far down here and I'm going to drift off in a different area and focus. But I've got to think of my listeners. So besides the membership model as opposed to using some weird thing called insurance, are there any other major characteristics of this model that make it stand out?

Dr. Josh Umbehr: I think it's that one, there's a lot of flexibility for the doctors. There's a recipe that works best, but like bumper lanes on a bowling alley, there's a variety of stuff. I used to make the joke that you can put almost anything on a pizza, but if you put sushi on a pizza, it's not going to work.

But I would eat the hell out of a sushi pizza. So I'm always in look for a better analogy. So the doctors have that to say, okay, do I want more patients or less patients? And is it hard to recreate this model? No, because it's easy to get wholesale labs, wholesale meds. A lot of the free consulting work we do is just getting that information out to them and letting them know we have a free lawyer, free cardiologist, free radiologist, free pathopharmacist, free national quest account, all these sort of things so that they know, all right, just now come out and practice medicine.

Designed by subtraction, we've removed 90% of the headache. Now you, which I will often say, if you really understand the model, you should wave the BS flag. When done well, this should sound too good to be true.

We have this sort of love hate Stockholm syndrome thing with American healthcare. Canadians love to say that they love their system, even though it's broken. Americans love to hate our system and refuse any possible solution.

But it should sound farcical that we can get meds 95% less than Walgreens. In general, I would say we're 80% less than Amazon, 70% less than GoodRx and 40% less than Mark Cuban. Jokingly, there's not a billionaire on the planet that can get meds for less money to our pay.

So the family physician has all of these tools and you'd think that would be expensive and hard. And the reality is it's very easy. That means doctors can have some staff, no staff, more patients, less patients, chart how they want, do the procedures they want, but it's all in the service of the patient. It's amazing how little burnout there is when 95% of the work is what you would have wanted to do when you were trying to get into med school. Just sit in front of a patient and figure out what's going on. Remove the noise and the job's actually pretty good.

John: Well, one of the things that occurred to me also was when I was in practice, we wouldn't really like to take phone calls and we basically had to drag our patients in, otherwise we couldn't charge them and we couldn't get paid. So it was a weird dynamic where today you could do a one minute phone call, text, whatever. I'm assuming you use whatever methods are convenient to you and the patient.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: It is kind of, I like to think teasingly, respectfully. I think doctors are some of the smartest dumb people that I know because we're so good at being cogs in a wheel, professional academics, et cetera, multiple choice test takers, that it blows my mind that it took COVID for us to finally embrace telemedicine. We knew for, I'll say 40 years, not to bring influenza patients to the office.

Like what a horrible system, but that's the only way we got paid so that we full stop, we won't do it, even though it's horrible infectious disease protocol to bring and then have them sit in an office and for a long period of time and no, no, no, no, no, no. Right, like if nothing else, just bring the sickest patients in or schedule them apart from the other patients or call, text, email them or do anything other than just decide the type of medicine I practice is based solely on what insurance will pay for. Whenever we made that switch, that was the beginning of the end.

John: Let me ask another leading question. This sounds like something, like hang up your shingle, be a solo and ride into the sunset, but I'm assuming, I think you have partners or people that work with you. So what, tell me how that evolved for you.

Dr. Josh Umbehr: I'm very lucky to have fantastic people around from my partner, Dr. Doug and co-founder to my wife, my family works for me or with me, dad, a couple of brothers, a couple of nephews. I joke on the software side, I used to think half of my ideas were good and then I got married and started working with the project manager. Now I think it's closer to 10%, but I just try to make it up on volume.

So much of this has been accidentally successful in a weird way, which is a longer story. But I think because we kept asking the right question, we just naturally led to the right answer. What is best for patient care?

And that helped us to avoid all kinds of pitfalls. But I hired all my friends from residency and then realized I didn't have a whole lot of friends. So we've got two locations and five docs, but they're all just, they're great people.

They want to commit to this model. It's an amazing group of doctors that will say at the direct care conferences, it's the happiest group of doctors you'll ever meet because they're not messing with all the other stuff, they're focused on patients. And it's amazing how much other support you get when you tell people the main goal is to make healthcare too cheap to insure.

Everybody kind of rallies around that idea. I think the luckiest thing we did is had clarity of purpose. And then everything came around that is we just, and again, longer story, but who I wrote my med school and residency personal statements on was my neighbor, Toronto, probably an illegal immigrant from Germany, but just an eccentric lady in all these kinds of ways and was sick and I had to take her to the hospital and follow up and physical therapy.

And you saw how the system made an amazing person as my neighbor, a horrible patient in the system. But art of war, if the soldier makes a mistake, blame the general, the system made her a bad patient. She was a wonderful person until healthcare got involved. Oh, they're upset that they had to wait an hour? Who isn't? Doctors don't wait an hour for anything. Oh, they wanted a clear bill? Oh, who wouldn't want that. They're distrusting, so they show up late, but then they have more questions and so they stay long. Like, yeah, so it's the system's problem. And if good people can't become good patients naturally, then we should be fixing that.

And so that was kind of the ethos that led that. I think in large part, yeah, we're successful because of all the wonderful people in and around the movement who share that same desire to put patients first and fix healthcare.

Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.  

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Opportunities With First Class Consulting Firms Are Fantastic https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/first-class-consulting/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/first-class-consulting/#respond Tue, 20 May 2025 11:18:38 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=64526 Interview with Dr. Jonathan Jaffin - 405 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, Dr. Jonathan Jaffin shares how his 30-year career in military medicine paved the way for a first class consulting position at a Top 4 Global Consulting Company. He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the consulting world and describes [...]

The post Opportunities With First Class Consulting Firms Are Fantastic appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Interview with Dr. Jonathan Jaffin – 405

On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, Dr. Jonathan Jaffin shares how his 30-year career in military medicine paved the way for a first class consulting position at a Top 4 Global Consulting Company.

He offers a behind-the-scenes look at the consulting world and describes how to leverage clinical credibility and leadership experience to drive change at a system-wide level. And he shares his tips for navigating client travel, optimizing compensation, and building a reputation without an MBA.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short Weekly Q&A Session on any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 a month.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.

Building a Diversified Medical Career with Part-Time Consulting

Dr. Jaffin’s journey shows how consulting can be part of a well-rounded career, without giving up clinical work entirely. While he moved into full-time consulting after his military service, many firms offer flexible roles that make it possible to continue practicing while developing advisory expertise.

This setup helps maintain clinical credibility, keeps board certification active, and strikes a balance between patient care and broader healthcare impact. It also provides a low-risk way to explore consulting, allowing gradual growth in the field while relying on the stability of ongoing clinical work.

Maximizing Value in First Class Consulting Opportunities

Success in consulting means offering more than just medical expertise—it’s about turning that knowledge into practical solutions that connect clinical practice with organizational strategy. Jonathan points out that ambiguity is part of the job. Clients may think they need help in one area when the real issue lies somewhere else, so it takes tact and trust to guide them in the right direction.

Building a strong reputation, or personal eminence, is key. That often comes from publishing, public speaking, leading committees, and staying active in professional circles. While consulting may not offer the same income as procedural specialties, it provides steady pay and a better work-life balance. For many, the chance to solve complex, system-level problems is just as rewarding as patient care.

Summary

For physicians interested in exploring consulting career opportunities or learning more about Dr. Jaffin's experience transitioning from clinical leadership to advisory roles, he welcomes direct outreach through LinkedIn. Dr. Jaffin also recommends the SEAK NonClinical Careers Conference as a valuable resource for physicians considering consulting and other nonclinical paths. He has presented there multiple times and found that it brings together a diverse group of physicians who have successfully transitioned to various nonclinical roles, including consultant.


Links for today's episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 405

Opportunities With First Class Consulting Firms Are Fantastic

Interview with Dr. Jonathan Jaffin

John: You know, I'm very familiar with consultants for my job as a CMO at a hospital. We used to have consultants in there all the time. And so it's kind of weird that after, you know, 400 episodes, I've never interviewed a consultant from a large consulting firm like we're going to do today. So I'm really happy to be able to introduce you to today's guest, Dr. Jonathan Jaffin. Welcome to the show.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Thanks, John. It's great to be here with you and sort of excited to tell my story.

John: Excellent. That's fantastic. So I've done a little intro, you know, that kind of I recorded separate from this. But why don't you start by just telling us about your background. You have a long background and in practicing and then not practicing. So tell us a little bit about what you did as a physician.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: So as a physician, I did my internship and residency in general surgery and did that at Walter Reed because I was in the army, stayed in the army 31 years, so long army career. I then went and went to Honduras as a general surgeon, came back to Walter Reed as a general surgeon, went and was a group surgeon for Fifth Special Forces Group when I was a lot younger and a lot better shaped than I am now. And then went and went to Command and General Staff College with the Army. So have always done some nonclinical stuff. At Command and General Staff College, spent a year there and then went and did a fellowship in trauma surgery and critical care medicine. So went back into clinical medicine, was chief of trauma at Brooke Army Medical Center for my next job.

Then went and was the division surgeon for 4th Infantry Division up at Fort Hood, Texas. Went back, did some stuff with combat developments, took command of a hospital, a small hospital at Fort Eustis, Virginia. Then did my war college equivalent instead of going to the War College, I worked with Health and Human Services for a year. And that was supposed to be an easy year, but turned out to be 2001, 2002, if you can imagine with the anthrax attacks and everything else, we were busy. And so we had to set up the Secretary's Command Center. We spent long hours working and making ourselves helpful to the nation as a whole while we set up DHS, while we answered the anthrax attacks and everything else.

Following that, I took command at Walter Reed and that was when the war in Iraq broke out. So we got quite a few soldiers back. Fortunately, it was before all the scandals at Walter Reed, but it's still, my boss ended up getting fired as Surgeon General. And so that was not a good thing for my career progress.

John: Oh boy.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: But, then went and did the assignments for the medical corps. So I was the branch chief for the medical corps. Then did, was deputy commander and for nine months the acting commander up at the medical research command that the army runs. Then went back to the surgeon general's office where I served for the warrior transition units as chief of staff. And then for the Surgeon General, basically his CMO, they called it Director of Health Policy and Services, but it was the equivalent of a CMO, Army Surgeon General. And then, then retired from the Army.

When I retired from the Army, got a phone call from a friend of mine, and I had applied to a number of places, including CMO jobs. And he said, hey, have you ever thought about consulting? And since he outranked me, I said, no, sir, I haven't. And he said, come see me. So I did. And we talked. And he said, well, Deloitte would be very interested in somebody like you. We actually have 20 or 30 docs who work for Deloitte. And you can open doors and use your clinical expertise because they want to see somebody who's been in the trenches the same as they have.

And so that was always important was the ability to translate my experiences to what they were facing or what we were trying to teach them or help them solve whatever problems they were having. Now, the interesting thing with consulting is you have to be willing that they won't take your recommendations or that they may ask you for help with one problem. And you may see that problem is really something completely different. And so you have to be willing, one, to not have your recommendations taken, two, be willing to say, you know, I think we'd be better off solving this problem than that problem. And you have to be always looking for the next opportunity.

Now, what I liked about consulting was that I always was doing something different. So whether it was working with the military health system or their legacy EHR systems, whether it was helping a VA with coaching their directors at a medical center, whether it was helping physicians learn about clinical documentation and its importance, had a wide variety of jobs at Deloitte. And so never got bored, which was one of the things. Was I well rewarded? Yes, I would say I was well rewarded. Was it as much as a trauma surgeon makes? Probably not. But the hours were much, much better.

As a consultant, you spend a good bit of time, unless you're a government consultant, on the road. So you have to be willing to travel. So that's an important consideration in your consideration. You have to have some clinical expertise. And that's very important because people will ask you, why should I listen to you? And if all you've done is gone to medical school, they probably won't pay much attention to you, even if you're giving great advice. So you want to make sure that you've got some clinical chops under your belt, that they will respect what you've done clinically as well as what you've done beyond that. And so that's why I say it's important to be a good doctor first, then you can be a good consultant.

People ask often whether or not you need an MBA. I never got an MBA. So I didn't, obviously you don't need one. There are people who have them. There are people who have an MPH and other degrees. I have none of those. But what was most important was knowing people. Helping them, knowing that they can call me with their problems and building that relationship of trust with them either from previously, and those were some of the strongest relationships to the ones where we had to develop relationships, but we still developed the relationships because it was still important to have that.

John: Now, just to give context to the listeners here, so you were doing this full time, I believe, for over 10 years, is that correct?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Yes, I did. I did it for probably 11 years full time.

John: OK. And I'll comment too on your background, because what I've seen in a lot of these nonclinical jobs, first of all, they love someone from the military. I think you have a little bit of an advantage because they assume you have that understanding of leadership, you know, which you have a lot of, and you throw that in with the clinical, you know, if you've been a CMO or a CEO equivalent in military, I mean, you have got a lot of leadership experience. So

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Thank you.

John: Did you run into other physicians that were consultants, number one of any type? And how many, if any, were had a background in the military?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: So we had a mixture. We had a number who'd been either department chiefs or CMOs of civilian hospitals. We had a number who'd been military, including ones who'd been at the surgeon general level in the military. So we had, so there were, there were some who were very, very experienced with leadership and had spent a career at, a leadership position. And obviously it's important that you have a good Rolodex because they want you to, to be able to call people and to call on people and to help generate business and your reputation lives with you, so you don't want to burn bridges as you leave the door, because those are the people who you're going to be working with again.

John: What's it like working in a team and what's the schedule like? Are you constantly doing something? Is there any downtime? Are you leading the team? Are you just a member of the team?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: It would vary. So it varies depending on what the problem is that they're trying to solve. So one team that I would be a member of was a team that was looking at revenue. So clinical documentation is an important part of revenue. So I would be the one who would educate the physicians on the clinical documentation, but I wouldn't review the charts to see which charts were necessarily had room for improvement and things like that. At the same time, I would be... I might lead a team that that had a purely clinical or a more clinical background. So the quality assurance team or something like that. So it would vary depending on the team itself and what was needed within that.

John: Now, I think Deloitte is known as maybe even a global company. Were you basically based in the US?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: So I did all my work in the US, but we did have stuff who folks who worked with our English firm, our German firm or Japanese firm. South American and Central American and Mexican firms, Canadian firm. We had a physician call with physicians from all over the globe. And that was really interesting because they obviously had a very different perspective. Often they work in, you know, have to work with a socialized medicine system and things like that. And so it was very interesting just comparing notes with how their experiences were different than ours.

John: I'll get into the nitty gritty here as much as I can, but how much were you on the road traveling versus working at home remotely or on calls?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I was probably on the road two weeks a month. So about half the time I was on the road, that was more my choice. I could have stayed home more and done a more government type consulting job because obviously that was an important part as well. But probably two weeks on the road. I got my frequent flight on Mars.

John: And was it regional in the sense that would they try, if they have dozens of physicians working for them, you, would they say, well, we're going to send this crew to the East coast and we're going to use Jonathan for the West coast?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: It was more, we had areas of expertise. So I was, I had the expertise with the military. I had the expertise with clinical documentation. There were others who had Cerner expertise or Epic expertise. And so we did an Epic or a Cerner implementation, may ask them instead.

John: Okay, yeah. So really kind of fit the best team together. And I assume you worked with lot of different people over the period that you were there.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Quite. I mean, traveled all over the globe, or all over the country.

John: Yep.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I had one week where I was in Bismarck, North Dakota, Des Moines, Iowa, and Little Rock, Arkansas, all in one week. So sometimes you went to places that you otherwise might not visit.

John: Yeah. So you gotta have a lot of flexibility. You gotta be able to, you're not tied to your home for whatever reason, you're raising 17 kids or something, you know.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: No, and luckily I'm a little bit older. My family's grown and things like that so that I was able to travel as much as I did and it wouldn't, the kids didn't worry where I was.

John: Right, right. Okay, now, you kind of, I mean, you hadn't planned this transition for, you know, 10 years or anything. It sort of all happened pretty quickly. Now, if you were advising someone else, let's say they're not in the military and, who knows, maybe they're just practicing, maybe dabbled a little bit in, you know, different leadership roles at the hospital or something. Any advice that you would give in terms of if you were really thinking about this?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I think one thing that's really, really important is to get leadership roles, whether it's chief of your department, whether it's running your practice, if you're more an outpatient practice, whether it's being a CMO or things like that. First of all, you make connections, you meet people. And one thing with consulting, you're more likely to consult with somebody you trust, somebody you know, somebody that you're concerned with, than somebody de novo. So the credentials always help, but they also would rather work with somebody they know already. And so that was, I would say, meet as many people, go to meetings. If you can, get yourself involved with the leadership in various organizations, because that also will translate to connections and people knowing you and developing a reputation.

One of the things that very important is to develop personal eminence. And so you want to be somebody that people will come to with problems. You want to be an expert in something. And whether you get that from being on a society membership leadership position, whether you get that by being a leader in the hospital or things like that, or leader in your medical system, those are ways to develop expertise and eminence and leadership.

John: Now, did you get a sense of or ever meet others doing consulting for other big consulting firms? Any feedback on that?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: We would meet. And I think most people, the experience is going to be fairly similar. Lloyd's got a fairly good size health care practice. Any of the big four, I would say, does as well. But it's important that and there also are boutique firms that specialize in healthcare. And you may find that that's a better fit for you than a great big firm. I mean, we were one of thousands at Deloitte. And one thing I did enjoy doing that was unrelated to my medical profession was I helped with the Welcome to Deloitte consulting. So I helped with that class, taught that class multiple times and enjoyed that too because you'd see such a broad range of expertise and experience and you could really help people as they made that transition from say industry into consulting.

John: You know sometimes when physicians are thinking about shifting, let's say they're just burnt out or whatever, you know it's not necessarily a good reason to leave medicine but you know they may practice 20-30 years, thinking of doing something else. And one of the things that holds them back is that they feel like they're sort of abandoning patient care and abandoning patients. But do you have a recollection of like some project you worked on that really ultimately was gonna help so many patients? You know, it kind of gives you the sense, well, I am helping patients actually, but in a different way.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Absolutely. So I spent a good bit of time working with the VA leadership, especially at one of the VA medical centers. And we were able to markedly increase one, their throughput. So they were able to see more patients. Two, I think we helped them be more responsive to the needs of their community. So that not only were they seeing more patients, but they were able to help them more. And so that was one of the things that we did that I would say, yes, you're not you miss visual touch and you aren't going to do that, but you're definitely going to do things that affect a large number of patients that affect how a hospital responds to patients.

You're going to help people see that the patients are people too and need to be treated as such, not just physicians who usually get that, but sometimes administrators don't and sometimes People view the patients as a burden. And so you're able to bring your clinical experience in and say, you know, we actually were able to do this because of this patient, because this patient had this issue and brought it to our attention.

John: Now, I think it'd probably be pretty common that someone who had had a fairly long career would end up, you know, jumping into this because just the... You know, they're freed up a little bit and they're trying to do something different. Do you think some of that was really early in their career? Let's say after 10 years or so, did you meet some that had been physicians that have been with Deloitte for a long time?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Absolutely. And so often then I think it does make sense to get an MBA because you're going to be a longer time at the company. You're going to try and grow within the company. You're going to start at a lower level. And so that helps you get promoted within the company and things like that. So I think all of those play a role. Still have practiced medicine, so you still have that rapport with other doctors. And I think that's also important. And then it's important never to forget where you came from. So the clinical side of things still plays an important role. And you will get asked clinical questions. I still get asked clinical questions to this day.

John: Are there any particular roles that you ran into that other physicians were doing maybe that you didn't do, but that seemed pretty interesting. Well I didn't think they would hire someone for that.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: So a lot of physicians go work for insurance companies reviewing claims and things like that. A lot of physicians take leadership positions in the hospital, which, course, appealed to me. There were physicians who would do similarly to what you're doing. They would focus on helping promote other physicians into nonclinical jobs. And so I think that's a really fascinating field to make too.

John: Yeah, there's a lot out there that sometimes I'm just shocked by what physicians are doing, but it's still building on their expertise, their training, their experience, and finding a happy medium with their lifestyle, you know, that there's plenty of things out there.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I think one thing is that it helps to be a good doctor first so that that gives you a steal of approval from other physicians so that they say, yes, you're not doing this clinically now, but he still, used to be a good doctor.

John: Yeah. And when you do leave someplace, leave on good terms.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Oh yeah. Don't ever burn bridges.

John: Don't burn your bridges. Yes, exactly. So, you... we didn't talk about this at the beginning, but I want to mention it because, you know, I found you by basically looking back over the SEAK, you know, brochure in a way, because I had gone to seak a nonclinical conference, you know, several times and met a lot of physicians doing things like what you're doing, any anything about the meeting you want to share with the audience? Because you've been there, I think, at least twice and presenting.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Yeah, one, it's... It brings together a good group of people who have done a variety of things after their clinical practice. So I think it helps reinforce that there, one, are a variety of roles out there that you can fill, and two, that not only can you fill those roles, but you can prosper in them and your medical background provide you an extra area of expertise that they otherwise wouldn't have.

John: Yeah, and they're not a sponsor, so I have no financial relationship to them. I'm always looking for resources, you know, and for my listeners. And when I have someone like you that's been part of that, they can explain it. So I think the people that do help and go to SEAK are, you know, have good intentions. And so, again, I'm not promoting it, but it's just another resource for people. Now, I'm sure my listeners still have more questions that I haven't even thought to ask you. Would they be able to go ahead and maybe reach out to you through LinkedIn, back in the best way?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I check my LinkedIn. LinkedIn always notifies you when you've got a message and would love to hear from anybody things I've said correctly, things I've said incorrectly, things that their experiences and things like that. So feel free to reach out.

John: OK. You don't have any books coming out.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: No, nothing to promote.

John: OK. Well, any last advice for physicians who may be been practicing for a while, but they think, well, you know, I like medicine, OK. But you know, what happens is things get old and they want to try something different. So any advice in general or about consulting as an option?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Two things. One, don't be shy about trying something new. Yes, you may not make as much money, but the rewards are there are other rewards that you can gain. And two, the thing I like about consulting is it didn't bore me. There were always something different coming up. Somebody had a new problem. And let's be honest. If you can solve it yourself, you don't hire a consultant. So we only got tough problems. And so it was good. They were challenging, made us think. And I think we helped out people, which is also a very rewarding thing.

John: A great advice. Yeah, it sounds very interesting. Little, you know, you to deal with the travel and what have you, but the problems you're helping to solve and apply your medical background at the same time and your leadership experiences. It's just like a, just a way to really use a bigger, you know, panel of skills and experience. So what are you doing these days? You're not with Deloitte anymore?

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I do a little bit of consulting with Optimum Health, which is actually a sub to Deloitte. So I do some stuff with Deloitte. I've got seven grandkids, so that keeps me running, and uh... And three stepchildren and one son of my own. So between that, all keeps me busy.

John: I can relate to that. Just had three grandkids born in the same year.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Oh good, congratulations.

John: Zero to three, my wife is ecstatic.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: I'm sure. So am I.

John: All right, Jonathan, this has been great. So I thank you so much for sharing all this wisdom and experience with our listeners. I think they're really going to appreciate it. So with that, I'll say goodbye.

Dr. Jonathan Jaffin: Thank you so much. And thanks for having me on.

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Triumph With An Awesome Direct Primary Care Practice https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/awesome-direct-primary-care/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/awesome-direct-primary-care/#respond Tue, 13 May 2025 11:32:35 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=64527 Interview with Dr. Ati Hakimi - 404 In this week's episode, Dr. Ati Hakimi shares how her awesome Direct Primary Care practice became her escape from corporate medicine burnout, without leaving clinical practice. After working in a system where only 3 out of 200 physicians could meet corporate metrics, she built a thriving [...]

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Interview with Dr. Ati Hakimi – 404

In this week's episode, Dr. Ati Hakimi shares how her awesome Direct Primary Care practice became her escape from corporate medicine burnout, without leaving clinical practice.

After working in a system where only 3 out of 200 physicians could meet corporate metrics, she built a thriving membership-based practice that cuts out insurance middlemen, offers affordable services, and restores the physician-patient relationship. Her journey provides a practical blueprint for regaining autonomy, reducing overhead, and achieving fulfillment and financial sustainability.


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  • John hosts a short FREE weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Join us THURSDAYS at 2:30 PM Eastern Time/11:30 AM Pacific Time by CLICKING the Zoom link HERE. If you have a question, email me at john.jurica.md@gmail.com. Sometimes, all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career.  And you can access ALL of the archived 60+ Q&A videos at the Nonclinical Career Academy Weekly Q&A for only $5.00 per month.
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Liberation Medicine

Dr. Ati Hakimi shares her journey from traditional practice models to establishing a Direct Primary Care (DPC) practice that aligns more closely with her vision of patient care. With impressive credentials including a geriatrics fellowship at Rush University and an executive MBA from UC Irvine, Dr. Hakimi sought a practice model that allows more autonomy in patient care decisions and relief from nonsensical performance monitoring systems.

After researching alternatives and shadowing an established DPC physician, she discovered this membership-based approach in which patients pay a flat monthly fee for comprehensive access to their physician without the involvement of insurance intermediaries.

Alternative Economics with an Awesome Direct Primary Care Practice

Dr. Hakimi describes how the DPC model creates different financial structures that benefit patients and physicians through direct contracting relationships. Her practice has established agreements with local clinical laboratories and imaging centers for significantly reduced costs, and direct ordering of medications from manufacturers that provide three-month supplies of common prescriptions for only $10.

Nobody in primary care should be working for anyone but ourselves. – Dr. Ati Hakimi

With approximately 150 members in her practice, Dr. Hakimi operates with minimal overhead expenses and no staff. This enables her to maintain relationships where she knows each patient by name while focusing on preventive care rather than reactive medicine. This approach, she notes, accommodates diverse patient demographics “from CEOs to Uber drivers,” demonstrating its accessibility across different economic backgrounds.

Summary

Dr. Hakimi's experience with Direct Primary Care demonstrates that it is possible to provide medical care that focuses on direct physician-patient relationships without insurance interference. 

Dr. Hakimi welcomes direct contact and offers mentorship for physicians interested in learning more about this practice model. She can be found on LinkedIn and through her practice website at VegasDPC.com. Her practice, Vegas Direct Primary Care, also maintains a presence on Instagram. Additionally, Dr. Hakimi recommends the Facebook group DPC Docs as a supportive community resource for physicians exploring this model, along with the professional organization DPC Alliance for those seeking more structured guidance.


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 404

Triumph With An Awesome Direct Primary Care Practice

Interview with Dr. Ati Hakimi

John: I've been following the DPC movement for several years. And I've spoken about it here in the podcast, but actually today's guest is the first physician to join me on the podcast to talk about her DPC practice and why it might be the salvation of independent physicians and their patients. So Dr. Ati Hakimi, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Thank you, John. I'm happy to be here.

John: I think this is going to be good because I have this feeling that, you know, the people that listen to me, they're trying to get out of clinical medicine. They're looking for these nonclinical jobs. But I don't think they've, a lot of them have really fully explored this DPC thing. They've heard of concierge and they feel like that's, you know, expensive for patients. So just tell us a little bit about your background and then maybe segue into, you know, why you decided to start this particular type of practice.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, definitely. So. My name is Ati Hakimi. I am a family medicine physician because we are the real doctors with all due respect to everyone else. That's why I chose to go into family medicine. I really wanted to know everything about everybody and how I could take care of the whole family. So that was my trajectory. I trained at Northwestern and I also did a little extra training at Rush University Medical Center. I got a year of geriatrics under my belt because we all know that medicine is geriatrics. So that was my calling in life. And I went on to actually work with the VA, which would have been the perfect fit, right? Because I just came out of a geriatrics fellowship and what have you. Unfortunately, it was not a good fit. And from there, I went to get an MBA. I have an executive healthcare MBA from UC Irvine because it had already started to become medicine was a business. Yeah. So I needed to learn how to speak the language. And that was the reason why I decided to get an MBA.

And so a caveat for your listeners as well is that you don't have to have an MBA to go into direct primary care. It was something that I chose to do to kind of give me more of the knowledge when I was actually in the insurance model of care because that's the care that is the business model, not what we do in DPC. So that's just a little caveat there. And so I actually went on to do more of the geriatrics practice in terms of post-acute care, things of that avail, and the primary care aspect was kind of put on hold until I came into DPC, even though I was trained in doing that outpatient primary care in my training.

So my story was that I was living in San Diego and I was with the Department of Defense there. Once again, not a good fit for me. And after doing my MBA, seemed Nevada became my calling. There was a gentleman who had actually became the president of one of the major HMOs out here. And if anybody knows any statistics about Nevada, unfortunately, we are number 47 in the nation in healthcare. There are just not enough of us here, specifically physicians. So he reached out and was like, we need doctors. And so I came out, it was a time in my life where it was a time for change and change is good. A lot of things that were going on were not good for me, but change was good. And California is very expensive. I don't pay state income tax here. So that was one of my major reasons to come out here. Quality of life was a little bit better for me. So it could have been worse, I guess. I ended up in Las Vegas. And I started working for that large HMO company. And at one time, it was an OK fit because they were physician run and operated. And they were called, can I say names?

John: Sure.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: I think names are OK. Health care partners, right? So they were physician run and operated, so it was a good fit. And once they started to go into the M&A world of mergers and acquisitions and sold and became DaVita, as you know, DaVita is a dialysis company with primary care, it was just not a good fit. And I really started to think that this was not for me because metrics started to become a thing in our world. And the metrics, unfortunately, were not attainable. There was probably at least 200 of us in the practice and like three of us would meet the metrics to get our bonus. So that was not what I went into medicine for.

And I decided that I needed to start thinking outside of the box, really. I actually left the company on my own accord when the metrics started coming because it was really egregious stuff, really egregious stuff and they had no answers for me when I had questions about these things. And I thought, you know, I'm a pretty smart cookie. Maybe there's other things I can do, right? But I'm a family doc. I love medicine. I love socializing with my people. I love taking care of people. I love preventing things from happen to them because that's my calling, right? My calling is to make a difference in your life before I leave this earth. It was a void. There was a void.

So I actually joined a leadership group in our city and found a tribe of people that believed in me, supported me. And I started volunteering. And when I was volunteering and just not being a scribe, not billing, not coding, not those horrible words that have nothing to do with what I was trained to do, I realized I'm a pretty good damn doctor. I am a good damn physician, and I deserve to continue practicing. And so I started doing my own research and I was a little bit into the whole internet world and social media and things like that. And I ran across direct primary care. And I started following a group on Facebook, which was literally, I think it's called DPC docs. And I just started becoming a little bit of a troll and checking out what people were saying and their experiences. And it was just different, right? It was positive, people were helpful, people seemed happy themselves, and it just lit up all of my sensors. What the heck is DPC? What is direct primary care?

And I went online and I tried to find someone locally that was doing this. And I did find someone and he was an... He is an amazing person. I'll call him out Dr. Jimmy Hawks. He already had started his own DPC practice. He had about 400 or members at that time. And his story was he was a hospitalist. So he actually found there were so many people that had no one to follow up with. And so he created his practice from that source and was extremely successful, and the nicest guy in the world. I mean, you couldn't find a nicer person, I have to tell you. So he took me under his wings and he literally said, just come to the office, just come check out, follow, shadow, see what I do. And honestly, I was floored. I was floored. It was just good old fashioned medicine, right?

The model that he had constructed, and I think we all have that base of the same model that we have constructed. We all go off on our own in terms of what we think is fulfilling, not only for our members. I don't call my people patients because they're not sick. Right? I call people that are sick patients. My people are members. So we all create our own models when we start doing DPC. And his model was chronic disease management and it was amazing. And I really just started to finally believe in myself and think that there is a possibility of practicing for myself, not dealing with insurance, not dealing with all of that drama. And I am a solo female minority physician. And I would like to think I'm pretty successful. And I would think that if I could do it, anyone can do it.

But the moral of the story is it's nice to have a mentor because we can talk you through it. We can show you how it's done. And we are glad to do it. Listen, John, nobody in primary care should be working for anyone but themselves. We have found a way. And we, the rest of us are... We would love to help you get out a hundred percent, right? Because we deserve to do this for ourselves. You know, for every one of us that gets hired, they might give us like, you know, measly six figures somewhere, but they make two to three million off of each of us. Right. Seeing 40 or 50 people a day. That is not quality care. That stuff was killing me personally. Right. It wasn't just my members or my patients at that time, cause they were sick. It wasn't my patients that weren't getting the quality of care they deserved. I was struggling and hurting and it was hurting my soul. So to find direct primary care, it was very selfish. It was really about me. It was really about me. Yeah.

John: Let me ask a couple of questions just because when you first heard about it, maybe weren't aware of it at all, but just the beginning, it almost sounds too good to be true at the beginning, doesn't it?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But it's all real. It's all real. And I think that, I mean, when I found out how much things really cost is where, you know, and having an MBA is where I was floored. I literally almost started crying when I found out how much things cost.

John: What were the surprises?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: The surprises for me, first of all, so let me just give you a quick spiel about direct primary care. This is the 32nd, you know, elevator speech.

John: Okay.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: So direct primary care is a flat fee healthcare membership. It is like the Netflix of healthcare, right? You pay us once and we are there for you. So for me, I am solo. So you call, me. You text, it's me. You email, it's me. When you see me, it's me. And I do a lot of telehealth still. So fun fact is that telehealth is going to be removed from that fee for service model again, because insurance just decided that's what they want to do, right? I don't work for insurance, I work for my members. So I get to do whatever I want. So that's fantastic.

So direct primary care has its benefits. And one of the benefits of course is access. You have your physician with you at all time. I pride myself on that being available, being accessible. Another part of that is labs. I can get an entire panel of labs from A to Z. I've actually got a relationship with LabCorp and it's something called client billing that we do. So basically LabCorp will give us prices that are pennies on the dollar, pennies on the dollar. The same labs that somebody would go in and say cash pay, if they do it through me because I pay LabCorp, so that prevents them from having to deal with billers and coders to run after everybody for all these ridiculous fees, they know that I'm going to be responsible for that bill.

So when I do that, it drops the prices significantly. My members compensate me afterwards, of course, but when they do it through me, it's probably a couple of hundred dollars, including all kinds of things, vitamin levels, not just your standard CBC, CMP, TSH. I can get all the vitamins in the world. I can get inflammatory markers. I can get it all, right? Pennies. Penny is on the dollar. That's one thing.

The second thing is imaging. I work with the local imaging center. So that's something that's city specific. You got to get out there and talk to your imaging centers, find out which ones are the ones willing to work with you. My people here, they'll give it to me for, I can get an x-ray for about $45. Walk in, I can, and that's with the read, that's with the radiologist read. There's not a separate fee that goes with that radiologist. So I can get that. I can get that x-ray. They will even do it for me for stat, same price. Same price. I can get a CT scan for probably three, $400. Those prices unfortunately just went up. It used to be less. And then I can get an MRI of any body part for maybe $500. Because nobody wants to deal with insurance. That third party model that we have in this country with everybody's hands in that pot is what is costing our healthcare system to be so egregious. There's too many hands in the pot. When you just go straight to the source, as with any business, everything drops tremendously, right?

And then the final one that I have for my membership, and this is specific to physicians as well as the state that they practice in, I actually order medications directly from the manufacturer. Every physician should know that they can do that for their people. You can create an account. I use Andameds. You can create an account if you have a DEA number and you can order medications directly to you. Right? So my blood pressure pills can be maybe $10, $15 for three months. My cholesterol pills, all my statins, they don't cost a lot anymore. They are all pretty much generic. I can get three months for $10, $15. Now I even put up a little markup there. That's with my little markup. So it's even cheaper than that. You understand? So that is another benefit. I have people that are in my practice that are making money off of me.

John: In what way?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Because I'm saving them so much you're saving them.

John: Right. Yeah. Do you find that your patients are maybe on fewer meds? I see a lot of docs that basically every visit they come in, they're adding another med because of a side effect or something. So.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, so that's an excellent question. I think once again, as a primary care or family medicine physician, also with that geriatrics training, right, that polypharmacy world is a nightmare. So when people do have access to their own physician and when they, what I like to do is check in on people once a month. That is my way of practice. My way of practice is about lifestyle medicine, which means I hold people accountable for how they sleep, what they eat, what they drink, how they move physically, what their mental health is, how their relationships are, because that is your base and foundation of healing.

So that's how I do my practice. But with direct primary care, you have the freedom to create it the way you want. There's nobody over your shoulder telling you to meet metrics, right? That's all gone. You create it. I have colleagues that literally have office spaces where they might have put a kitchen in there, classes about nutrition or yoga studios or have contracted with people to do such, right? It's what you want it to be. It doesn't just fulfill your patients' souls, it fulfills your soul, right?

So my onus, like I was saying before, that physicians, we are chosen. We're not made, we're chosen. And the current sick care model in our country has taken that away from us. And so people need to know that there is still a way to practice the art that you were chosen to do. And this is not just for primary care. I have specialists that have jumped on this as well. You know, we have direct specialty care now. It's a little more complicated when you have to do procedures, unfortunately. But there is a way for your members who don't have health insurance to actually bring on DPC in their worlds as well. And that's called a health share plan. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. Health share plans are perfect with direct primary care.

So the perfect health care model right now, I'll tell you, is a health share plan, which was started by the Christian faith once upon a time where people put money into a pot. So it's not faith-based anymore. There are several companies now that are doing this. And basically what they do is they take the onus of the catastrophes that happen, right? They work well with DPCs because they know we take the responsibility of preventing things from happening to them. So with the combination of a health share plan, a DPC and an HSA, which you can pay for your health share plan, which actually, you know, your money working for you, is honestly the ideal model of care in the United States when it comes to healthcare. Hands down.

John: Sounds awesome. Yeah, I think I did hear a podcast where someone was talking about like a crowd share kind of approach the pool for the big things. But I know one of the things my listeners are probably wondering about, like what is your day like practicing like this?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: So, I think for me, I am very, very outside the norm because what we have to do when we start a direct primary care practice or any type of business is you always have to first go back and evaluate what your needs are when it comes to your financial situation, your family, things of that avail. I have very, very, very, very, very little needs. So my overhead is non-existent. It's non-existent. I don't have a ginormous office space. Yeah, so I actually found one of my colleagues in a women physician medical society group that I'm a part of that when I approached this group and told them, hey guys, I'm done, I'm doing my own thing, one of my colleagues was amazing. She's like, I've got a huge office, like a huge office space, because she does infusions in a rheumatology clinic. So she has nothing but space. She's like, come rent one of my rooms. That's what I do.

So I literally pay her for a room. I don't need an office. I don't need front desk. I don't need any of that stuff. I can take my own blood pressures and weigh people myself for goodness sake. So I actually rent space from her. I go into the clinic once a week. My practice is very tiny. And that's because that's okay with me. That's what my needs are. So I have like a boutique practice is what I'd like to call it, right? I have about 150 people and I know them by name. I know their husband's name. I know their wife's name. I know their kid's name. Cause that's the kind of family medicine practice that I wanted to have.

So that's my practice. What my day looks like, it can vary. Honestly, I do a lot of telehealth because remember I told you that I like to hold people accountable. So we will jump online based on their needs or their times as to when they had that availability. I go into the office, like I said, once a week because I'm tiny. So I go into the office once a week and that's when I do the hands-on stuff that I need to do. The rest of it, honestly, this is my office. Is here.

John: I can imagine you see someone texting you or calling you. Well, you know in your head already who that person is. If they're on meds, probably. With that number, can, especially the people that have, maybe they got a chronic illness. And you said a lot of it's preventive as well. Do you feel like you're gonna stay at this about the way things are now? You gotta pretty much...

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, I think for me, my goal is just 200. That's my sweet spot. 200 is my sweet spot and then I'll tap out. And like I said, I have colleagues that have 400, 500 people. They've got this, you know, this whole beautiful office space they're paying $5,000 a month for, you know. But remember, our price point is also different for each practice, depending on what your needs are again, and how you actually construct that.

When I first started, I based it on age. Um, and now, um, and I also was doing a lot of house calls. Unfortunately, Nevada did something to us where our med mal practice, our legislation kind of messed us up. Um, they, they removed the cap on our med mal. So it's not, it's not for me anymore to, do the house calls thanks to the legislators. Uh, so anyway, um, I was doing that at one time too, because like I said, you can make it anything you want it to be. Now I've just had a flat fee. So I have a fee for my individuals, have a fee for my couples, and I have a fee for families. Listen, I charge $150 a month. That's it. I live in Las Vegas. If you go out onto the strip and have a couple of cocktails and a dinner.

John: Yeah, that's it. So what's the mix now then? I mean, is there a certain of the, you know, because you're talking about full spectrum from children all the way to seniors. Is there certain mix? Lot of women's health, lot of more middle healthy younger people.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah. So, that's an excellent question. I have everybody from the CEO to the Uber driver, right? The CEO, because their access is very important to them when they need something now, they have to have it now, and the Uber driver because they can't afford the nonsense that's out there. So there is no discrimination. It is affordable.

So the difference between us and Concierge is that Concierge was once upon a time created for that access too, but they charge a large sum upfront and then they still bill your insurance. It's a double dip. So I'm not sure how they get away with that because with Medicare and things you can't. That's the difference between direct primary care and concierge. And concierge, sometimes they don't do all the other stuff of offering the labs and all these other things because they're going to bill your insurance and go through that fee for service model. They don't have the other things that are, I think, beneficial or options. They don't give people options, I think. So that's the biggest difference between us and concierge.

There was a time when I was interviewed by a local TV station and she said something about, well, it's cost prohibitive. You know, we are only taking care of people that have money. And I will dispute that all day, every day, because once again, I live in Las Vegas. So my fees, I think, are very affordable, very fair. And It's not the right concept or the right argument to even have with anybody when it comes to that.

John: You know, when Like where I am, our deductibles are so high that if my wife needed an MRI or an x-ray, I would just go outside the system and go directly to the freestanding clinic and get it done anyway.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, sure. Cash pay it. And that's the other point is that we have forgotten that cash is still king. Um, so if people have insurance, can they do direct primary care? That's a major question that I get. Absolutely. Absolutely. Insurance doesn't take care of you. We do.

John: Right.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: When is that conversation going to be had? They do not take care of you. If anything, we are fighting them. If people are not paying attention to the world, we are fighting them every day to get you what you have been paying for every month. And every year it goes up. My fee for service family, every year Medicare goes down. We are the only profession that our salaries get docked every year. Right? That's a whole different conversation. That's because we are not part of the government and legislation. More of us need to get into that world if we're going to have any kind of change. We absolutely have to be a part of the legislator's lives and, you know, We should be in it ourselves. We should try to be elected officials ourselves. That's the only way is that if we are not at the table, we are going to be on the table. That's what's been happening every single year, especially in our state. So, I mean, that's a different conversation to be had. But once again, direct primary care, you don't have to worry about that.

John: OK, let me ask you this. Many years ago, I started my own practice. And this was not DPC obviously. Yeah, and I had to hire a ton of people and I haven't heard you talk about any employees. So do you have anyone doing anything at this point?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: What would I need them to do?

John: I don't know- I know the memberships they pay monthly or you know, but somebody might have to remind them. I don't know.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yeah, like QuickBooks. QuickBooks does my recurring billing? Doximity sends my faxes for free. I prescribe, I pay a yearly fee for my prescriptions. I'm primary care. I'm primary care.

John: Do you remember with your colleague that you talked to initially, Jimmy Hawks, I guess it was, Hawks?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Hawks, yeah.

John: Hawks, yeah. Now he has a different practice. He has some employees or minimal?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Yes, because he's huge, right? So he actually had somebody answering the phones and he had. He had nurses to assist him he needed. And he's a male, so pap smears and things like that. He needed to have somebody of that avail. But yes, so if you grow, obviously you know what you can and can't handle. But come on, like I said, we're used to 1,000, 2,000. I can handle 150. And so that's another question that my colleagues will ask me. And then the other one is, you feel comfortable giving people your phone number? Yes. Absolutely.

John: Yeah because its doable.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: It's peace of mind. When they have peace of mind, they will respect your time even more. I am so close to some of my members that my father passed away and they even came to his funeral. That's what it was about. That's what it is about. That's what I pride myself on because that's what I've created. It's something that fulfills me too. You know, we are always giving, giving, giving, giving, and we need to take back.

John: Yeah. I'm going to have a couple more questions for you, but first, tell us what your website is and maybe your LinkedIn profile.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: So LinkedIn is just my name. A-T-I is my first name. My last name is H-A-K-I-M-I, Hakimi, M-D-M-B-A, and I'm on LinkedIn. And then my practice is called Vegas Direct Primary Care. The website is VegasDPC.com. And I'm also on Instagram. I'm trying to learn that world a little bit. I'm on Vegas Direct Primary Care on Instagram as well.

John: OK. I'll put that in the show notes too and the emails that I send out. Let's see, questions. So what if someone's listening now? Are my listeners, maybe they're looking for other things and they hear about this? What's kind of the first or second step they should take if they really want to learn more?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: So the first step you should take is get online and look up direct primary care in your city. Find one of us. Find one of us, reach out to us, make yourself known that you want to do this. They also have, we also have, you know, there are professional associations with direct primary care as well. There's something called DPC Alliance and there's a couple of OGs that have been doing it for a while, Dr. Paul Thomas, things of that avail, that are also very helpful. But if you get on Facebook and get on that DPC docs group, that is one of the places that I initially started going on and doing my own research. And you will find that we are a very supportive community.

I didn't find that in the fee for service model. I found it a little bit competitive and I don't know why because we have 2 million people in our city now. There's plenty to go around. So that was the other uncomfortable thing about fee for service. But I think that those docs are just so stressed, right? And so they weren't as receptive. I'll tell you something else. I did look into taking on insurance when I first started. They weren't going to deal with me. Insurance will not deal with you if you're a one person show. They want groups now to come on because they want to negotiate paying you crap. Yeah. So that's another reason that I had to go direct primary care. They weren't willing to even bring me on. So, you know, that was the other thing. And thank God they did not.

John: It's worked out great. Okay. Last question. You know, I have listeners and they are calling me sometimes and email me about, well, I'm miserable. I just can't stand it. I have this corporate medicine BS is from birds and I'm, should I retire early? Should I go look for a job in pharma? Why should I do what you're doing?

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Because it will save your soul and you deserve better. And you have worked so hard to be where you are. Stop working for others, work for yourself. Don't let the corporate systems, the private equities. They don't give a crap about us, you guys. And they will never. That is what they are made to do. We can't blame them. Their model is about the bottom line. Their model is about making money. Now, if you choose to work in that environment, you are going to be a slave to their model. That's all it is to it. And this is not disrespect to any of these things, to anybody or corporations. It's not disrespect. It's just how that model works. It's not made for any of us, honestly, I don't think.

It's not humanly possible for you to see 40 and 50 people. And I even have residents that are coming out saying that they're giving them two to 3000 and they're already thinking of looking for another career. We went to school for so many years. We jeopardized things and sacrificed our lives to be who we are. Don't let them take that away from you. Listen, I did clinical trials. I was a PI for things. I did all of those things. There is nothing as fulfilling as being a physician with all due respect to I don't know if you're still practicing, John, but I mean, once you're ready to retire, that's fine. But don't let anyone else take it away from you. This is the way to go.

It's not hard, you don't need an MBA. Please, I mean, my number is online. If you get online and see my number, call me, text me, I'm totally happy to help. We all are, honestly. I'm in Vegas, that's fine. You can emulate this model everywhere, right? It's absolutely reproducible. And it's not hard, you guys, it's not hard. I did a whole thing for the Small Business Association about how to start your own practice, but it's even easier with DPC because you don't have to deal with all those insurance things and having this number and that number and coding and billing and none of it doesn't matter. That's not what we were trained to do. We went to medical school. We didn't go to billing school. We didn't go to coding school. You don't need to do that. Just be a physician and make a difference. That's what you're meant to do and you can do it. Get out. DTFO.

John: All right, that was fantastic. I really appreciate you, you know, sharing your experiences with us. I think it's gonna be great to look at. I love this. All right. With that, I'll say bye.

Dr. Ati Hakimi: Okay. Thank you, John. And let me know how else I can help.

Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.  

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How One Monthly Adjustment Will Secure Your Investment Portfolio – A PNC Classic from 2020 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/secure-your-investment-portfolio/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/secure-your-investment-portfolio/#respond Tue, 06 May 2025 11:13:37 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=64057 Interview with Dr. David Yeh - 403 In this week's podcast episode, Dr. David Yeh explains how a simple monthly adjustment can secure your investment portfolio. David is a practicing physician, speaker, author, investment advisor, and founder of The Wealthy Doctor Institute. He is also a Registered Investment Advisor. He is an alumnus [...]

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Interview with Dr. David Yeh – 403

In this week's podcast episode, Dr. David Yeh explains how a simple monthly adjustment can secure your investment portfolio.

David is a practicing physician, speaker, author, investment advisor, and founder of The Wealthy Doctor Institute. He is also a Registered Investment Advisor.

He is an alumnus of Cornell University and New York University School of Medicine. Following medical school, he completed residencies in radiology at SUNY Stoney Brook University Hospital and Nuclear Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Health System. And he is board-certified in Radiology and Nuclear Medicine.


Our Sponsor

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The UT PEMBA is the longest-running and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
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  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Invest Wisely and Secure Your Investment Portfolio

After discussing David's background, he quickly describes the basic principles we should apply to long-term investing. The most basic way to invest wisely is to adopt an approach that limits losses.

Having a plan, even a simple one-rule plan such as dollar-cost averaging, gives you an edge over investors who have no plan. – Dr. David Yeh

According to David's analysis, the best outcomes come from following a plan, reviewing your portfolio, and applying adjustments monthly. Focusing only on trying to identify winning investments does not work.

Writing His Book

David explains the process he used for writing and publishing his book, The Busy Doctor's Investment Guide. With the assistance of his publisher, Advantage Media Group, he was able to capture his idea and complete the book quickly. Its staff helped him to organize the content and teach readers how to invest wisely.

The book is clearly written and highlights several loss-mitigation strategies to help you secure your investment portfolio. It also covers the basic principles that every investor should know. One chapter is devoted to investor psychology.

Preparing for a Career Pivot

David recommends focusing on the basics when preparing for a career pivot. There will likely be a temporary reduction in or loss of income at some point. So, it's best to be debt-free. And you should have a sufficient emergency fund and capital for living expenses, based on the projected time needed to complete your pivot.

If starting a new business, a business plan and financial projections must be prepared. You should double the estimated time to break-even and expenses during the first year. An overly optimistic business plan has sunk many small businesses.

Wealthy Doctor Institute

Today, David still practices part-time radiology. He considers himself semi-retired from clinical practice. He also runs his business, Wealthy Doctor Institute, and manages an investment fund. His philosophy is to be a coach to his clients and to be transparent in how funds are invested.

Summary

Dr. David Yeh successfully balances two careers: medicine and investing. In this week's interesting interview, we learn how he accomplished it. And we've identified a resource that you may use to help you secure your investment portfolio.


Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


 

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

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Get Astonishing Results From Your Job Search Using These Tactics https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/astonishing-results/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/astonishing-results/#respond Tue, 29 Apr 2025 11:34:26 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=64010 Combine Planning, Accountability, Mentorship, and Support - 402 In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John describes 5 tactics that incorporate proven psychological principles to produce astonishing results in advancing your career. Drawing from both personal experience and years guiding hundreds of physicians toward new professional horizons, he reveals why written career roadmaps [...]

The post Get Astonishing Results From Your Job Search Using These Tactics appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Combine Planning, Accountability, Mentorship, and Support – 402

In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John describes 5 tactics that incorporate proven psychological principles to produce astonishing results in advancing your career.

Drawing from both personal experience and years guiding hundreds of physicians toward new professional horizons, he reveals why written career roadmaps paired with strategic accountability relationships create exponential momentum. These proven tactics work whether pursuing hospital leadership, industry positions, or entrepreneurial ventures—providing a clear framework for transforming vague aspirations into concrete results.


Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program

The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build a nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.

His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.

For more information, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/mlconsulting or arminfeldman.com.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Strategic Planning

John unveils the importance of creating a written career roadmap before embarking on any professional reinvention. Rather than vague aspirations, he advocates for articulating a precise mission and vision statement paired with SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-limited). Using his journey from clinical practice to hospital Chief Medical Officer as an example, John demonstrates how writing down specific commitments—from joining strategic committees to completing leadership coursework—creates clarity and momentum.

This documented framework serves a dual purpose: propelling forward movement through concrete milestones while providing a filtering mechanism for new opportunities that might otherwise derail progress. The written plan becomes a compass that prevents costly detours and ensures every professional step advances the bigger career transformation.

Astonishing Results Using an Accountability Architecture

The four acceleration strategies John shares focus on creating an external support structure:

  1. finding an accountability partner for regular check-ins,
  2. developing strategic mentor relationships,
  3. investing in professional career coaching, and
  4. joining a mastermind group—a circle of peers pursuing parallel goals.

Drawing from personal experience facilitating physician mastermind groups, John explains how this collective approach exponentially accelerates results through shared wisdom and mutual accountability. The episode concludes with John considering launching a specialized mastermind specifically for physicians targeting hospital C-suite positions—leveraging his 15 years of CMO experience.

Summary

Rather than leaving career transitions to chance and incremental progress, John outlines a structured approach combining clear written objectives with strategic relationships that create momentum. By implementing even a few of these powerful tactics, physicians can dramatically accelerate their path to more fulfilling professional opportunities while avoiding the common pitfalls of career transformation.

Want to Accelerate Careers?

Given the success of my previous MASTERMINDS, John has been thinking of developing a new Physician Career Mastermind. It would be different in 2 ways from what he has discussed today:

  • First, it would be focused exclusively on helping those of you who wish to pursue a hospital management career as CMO, COO, or CEO with a focus on achieving Top 100 Hospital Designation.
  • Second, this would be a paid Mastermind to help cover the costs of preparing and planning each meeting AND to provide an incentive for members to prepare and fully participate in every meeting.

If you’re interested or if you think John should start this new Mastermind focused on hospital management careers, please send an email with your feedback to john.jurica.md@gmail.com.


Links for Today's Episode

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 402

Get Astonishing Results From Your Job Search Using These Tactics

John: Today's just me. And I remind you today of five effective ways to accelerate your job search. Each of them relies on psychological principles that help to keep us focused, maintain accountability, and avoid becoming distracted or complacent during our search. All right, well, let's just get started. Here are the five tactics that I found to significantly expedite the process that we're talking about today. I know they would have helped me immensely if I had used them from the beginning while I was making my career transition. And these are tactics that will help you to pursue almost any non-clinical career, side hustle, or new business startup for that matter.

So let's just jump right into it. Number one is develop a written plan. Now, if you're a business owner starting a new business, of course, you're going to have a business plan. Well, with your career development, you should develop and write a plan. Think about and write down your personal career focused mission, vision, and goals. And you're going to use SMART goals using the S-M-A-R-T of SMART to indicate that the goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time limited. So I have to have a deadline. So if you use those SMART goals when developing your plan, then you are going to be much more successful in achieving what you're planning to achieve.

So you want to start with a broad brush and answer these questions for yourself. What is the mission and vision for my career? What is my ultimate goal? Maybe there's steps in between. What steps do I take to get there? And what deadlines will I set for myself? I think it helps to give examples. So here's what mine might have looked like. If I had been more intentional when I was transitioning from part-time medical director to full-time hospital chief medical officer. Here's an example. My mission is to work in hospital management at the executive level. My vision is to pursue a career that provides more freedom, allowing me to express my passion in the areas of quality improvement, continuing medical education, medication safety, and hospital operations that result in tangible improvements in patient outcomes. I think that pretty much covers what I wanted to do as I set out on this journey.

I will start by joining the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee and attending the Quality Improvement Meetings and by chairing the CME Committee immediately at my hospital. So I actually had been offered a job to be the chair, so that's why I mentioned that. I will join the American Association for Physician Leadership and complete at least three management courses by the end of this first year. I will prepare a resume and schedule interviews for a hospital management position at least once a quarter beginning the second quarter of next year. So I'm really specific about what I'm going to do. And my goal is to be hired for a management job by the end of next year. So they're smart goals. They're measurable. They're very specific, and they are time limited in many cases as you noticed.

One of the benefits of writing down your mission and vision is that it helps you to make decisions about new opportunities that come up or new demands on your time. So if you're on this mission and on this journey to have this career transition, somebody might ask you to do something, they might ask you to join a committee or take on some new work, and you really should look at your plan and your vision and mission and say, is it aligning with that or not? And if not, I'm sorry, but it doesn't align with my current plans for the next six to 12 months.

By comparing possible new activities and projects against your plan, you'll be better able to determine if the additional work is aligned with your mission, vision, and goals and eliminate those that aren't. I recall volunteering for several committees. It took me down a rabbit hole that really delayed my career transition and just took up a lot of time. Again, this plan should be written, should be reviewed and updated regularly, and you need to keep on track and make sure that you're staying on track and taking the steps that will get you to that ultimate goal.

Now, the remaining four tactics I want to talk about next are helpful for assuring accountability. And actually the final three also add some potential guidance and advice to the mix. So while you don't have to follow all five of these tactics, actually the more that you do, the probably the better off you will be.

So the second step to consider is to find an accountability partner. This would ideally be someone who is also interested in pursuing a non-clinical job. You can meet weekly or biweekly, face to face or remotely, and discuss your plans, your progress, and your challenges. You'll keep each other accountable to commitments that you make at each meeting so you can both keep making progress forward, keep moving forward. Remember the mantra for accountability, doing what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, how you said you would do it. So your partner will help you to hold yourself to the new commitments you make and thereby expedite your search. It's very easy to skip a week or not make a phone call or not really work on this plan to change your career.

Okay, number three would be to find one or more mentors. A mentor is someone who's a step or two ahead of you, has succeeded in the career that you're pursuing, or has expertise in an area that you're weak in. So a mentor is not a paid coach or something which we'll talk about later. A mentor is an informal relationship, again, generally with someone who's doing what you would like to do or at least on that path to what you want to do. And the mentor simply needs to be willing to answer a question, help you avoid big mistakes, and just point you in the right direction from time to time.

I've had several mentors over the years and most of them didn't even know that they were my mentor. One was a physician working as a full-time chief medical officer, and I occasionally called him or I ran into him during a break at a conference or something, and I would ask his advice, ask him how it's doing, and did he have any suggestions for some of the steps I might take to follow in what he had already accomplished. The other was the CEO of my hospital and we went for years where I didn't report to him. I was still working as a physician, but I would occasionally get his advice and let him know that I was interested in pursuing a career in administration as an executive and what his advice was for advancing my career. And it was very helpful.

And you know, the thing I remember is to use mentors sparingly and to help focus and direct your efforts. But don't become a burden by, you know, bothering them too much or trying to make them responsible for your career success. That's again, not really the role of a mentor. A mentor should see it as something that is not onerous or overwhelming and not time consuming for them.

Well, the fourth one I want to list today is to hire a career coach. Now, physicians for some reason have an aversion to getting coaching, I've found for the most part, but a career coach, a business coach, an executive coach. These are all very often sought after types of professionals because they have a lot to offer and they accomplish some of the things mentors and accountability partners do. Plus they usually have deep experience in the area that you're thinking about pursuing.

So by working with a coach, you're going to have access to someone who has devoted their, like their attention to you, their career to you. In other words, that's why they're there. So they're definitely getting paid in most cases, and they are going to feel responsible for helping you move forward. And they'll help you to identify your strengths and weaknesses and define your interests and help you clarify your goals and work through self-limiting beliefs. And then they'll actually help you formulate more and more specific plans on how to get from step one to two, to three, to four, and so forth. They'll provide practical advice about where to find jobs that might align with your career goals, vision, and mission. In some cases, they might actually have relationships with recruiters or companies that hire physicians for these non-clinical positions.

And the physicians I've spoken with who have used a coach have been very happy and delighted with the outcomes of their coaching. And in many cases, they consider it to be the turning point in their career journey. Because it really makes it real that you're sitting face to face or on a Zoom call or something discussing your career. What have you done so far to make it better? What do you plan to do in the next week or two and so on and giving you advice about how to do interviews, how to search, things like that. So that's what career coaches can do.

Now number five is another very powerful thing to do and that's to create or to join a mastermind group. Now it's been said that you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you spend time with people that are overweight and don't exercise, you're probably going to up being overweight and out of shape. If you spend most of your time with people that exercise constantly and follow their diets and are attuned to maintaining fitness and health, then I guess that's probably what you're going to be doing as well.

And a mastermind group is like an accountability partner on steroids. And by the way, sometimes I just call it a mastermind instead of a mastermind group, but both terms are used. Now, if you want to create such a group, identify two to five colleagues who are all striving for similar goals and talk to them, set this thing up, say, "Hey, we're going to meet every two weeks or every month." on a regular basis, perhaps monthly. For the first meeting or two, you'll get to know each other, including each other's career goals and steps you've already taken.

Then each meeting, you'll focus on one or two members with the other members asking questions and keeping the person in the hot seat accountable for plans they had previously agreed to implement, for steps they said they were going to do, for research they said they would get finished. And so there's a huge amount of accountability plus the other members will share what they have done. And since you're all doing essentially the same thing, which is trying to move your career forward and pursue a new job, then they're going to have done things that will be successful or not so successful, and they'll share that with you. And you're going to share the same results that you've gotten with them.

There many books that provide good description of masterminds, including the one that Define the Term was written by Napoleon Hill called "Think and Grow Rich," but there's many more contemporaneous books on this topic as well. And remember that by getting together regularly, you'll keep each other accountable, you'll help each other think of new approaches to advancing your careers, and accelerate the pace of change.

Now, many mastermind groups don't cost anything to join, but there are paid mastermind groups facilitated by a knowledgeable expert or coach. I've personally facilitated two formal mastermind groups of physicians that were not paid for. It was just something we all agreed to do. And of course, I was facilitating most of the time because I have this experience in physician career transition. But there were regular meetings. I think we were doing a monthly in two different groups. They were very successful in providing support, sharing advice, maintaining accountability. And accelerating the members career transition. So I mean, I think the members really did get a lot out of it. They were very good about trying to come to each meeting and come prepared and we would have assignments or things that we would expect at follow up meetings. So that's where the accountability came in.

So those are the five tactics that I wanted to talk about today. I think I've spoken about some of these things in the past. So let me just summarize the five tactics briefly here that will expedite your search for a new career. So develop a plan complete with your career mission vision and smart goals. And the SMART is that acronym that talks about what kind of goals to do. Get an accountability partner. Find one or more mentors, especially those that are doing the thing that you plan to be doing in the future. Sometimes LinkedIn can be helpful for that if you don't have anyone locally that you can run into or spend five or 10 minutes with. Hire a career coach. That's a big step. That's usually a paid thing. But it's very effective and it really shows a commitment on your part. And finally, number five is create or join a mastermind group.

You don't have to use all five of these tactics. You can start with the ones that make the most sense. The more that you do use though, the more likely you're going to quickly shift gears and find that fulfilling career that you've been looking for. Developing a plan is an important first step to expedite the search. The other tactics add accountability, some add expert advice and guidance. If I had had a plan like this earlier and used the other tactics more effectively, I'm sure my career transition would have been much smoother and quicker.

Now, given the success of my previous masterminds, I've been thinking of developing a new career, a physician career mastermind. But it would be different in two ways from what I've discussed today. First, it would be focused exclusively to help those of you who wish to pursue a hospital management career eventually as CMO or COO or CEO for that matter. So rather than hitting just any non-clinical or unconventional career, I would probably focus exclusively on hospital management, since I was a CMO for 15 years, that would be my perspective. And of course, I worked extensively with the COO and CEO when I was in that role.

Second, this would be a paid mastermind to help cover the costs of preparing and planning each meeting. And also making it paid provides more incentive for members to prepare for and fully participate and attend in every meeting. So I don't think I'm going to be doing any free sort of masterminds in near future. So I would like your feedback though, if you're interested or even if you think I should start a new mastermind focused on hospital management careers, because maybe you know somebody that's interested in that or that would be helped by that then please send me an email at john.jurica.md@gmail.com you know with your feedback on what we've talked about today and advice and whether you think I should start planning this new mastermind focused on hospital management careers. It'd be very helpful for me again. I've toyed with it for quite a while. I've done some research and I continue to look into it, and again if you can send me a note at john.jurica.md@gmail.com either with negative or positive feedback, I'd really appreciate it.

Before we go, I'll remind you that you can download a transcript of today's episode and links to resources that were mentioned today by going to the show notes at nonclinicalphysicians.com/astonishing-results/. If you appreciate today's presentation, please leave a five star rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify and share it with a friend so we can get some more listeners out there. But that's it for today's show. I hope to see you here next Tuesday morning for another episode of the Physician Non-Clinical Careers podcast.

Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post Get Astonishing Results From Your Job Search Using These Tactics appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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See Her Massive Professional Rebirth From Intensivist To Coach – A PNC Classic from 2020 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/intensivist-to-coach/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/intensivist-to-coach/#respond Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:20:22 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=63679 Interview with Dr. Jessie Benson - 401 In this week's PNC Podcast episode, John presents his conversation with Dr. Jessie Benson, who describes her transition from critical care specialist and intensivist to coach. During her journey, she became a homesteader, musician, and professional artist after practicing anesthesiology and critical care medicine for 10 years. [...]

The post See Her Massive Professional Rebirth From Intensivist To Coach – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Interview with Dr. Jessie Benson – 401

In this week's PNC Podcast episode, John presents his conversation with Dr. Jessie Benson, who describes her transition from critical care specialist and intensivist to coach. During her journey, she became a homesteader, musician, and professional artist after practicing anesthesiology and critical care medicine for 10 years.

Jessie received her medical degree from West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine. She then completed an anesthesia residency at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a critical care fellowship at the Cleveland Clinic.

Jessie spent the first 3 decades of her life chasing achievement and approval. Her life was marked by perfectionism and a fear of failure and rejection. Through dedicated self-work, she broke free from this way of thinking. That's when she really started living.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes, all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

A Coach, Musician, and Professional Artist

After practicing anesthesiology and critical care medicine for nearly a decade, Jessie took a leap of faith in 2014. She left medicine to build the life of her dreams.

She now lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia on 5 ½ acres of heaven. Jessie’s days are filled with doing what she loves. She works with life coach clients. She creates and sells her beeswax and oil paintings as a professional artist. And since building her house, she now lives the life of a homesteader each day.

I just knew it wasn't the life for me, and so I decided I wanted to have a different life and that's what I do now.

In addition to developing her artistic impulses, she brought music back into her life. She began playing the cello, sometimes performing for others.

Shifting from Intensivist to Coach

Jessie has steadily grown her coaching practice to a vibrant one. In addition to meeting with her one-on-one clients weekly, Jessie leads workshops and retreats. The culmination of this work is her Brave Is Beautiful Circle, a year-long immersion program helping women connect with their authenticity and creativity and “find their brave.”

Jessie's Journey Didn't Stop There

Art and music weren't all that Jessie fell in love with. In preparation for her transition, Jessie completed yoga and meditation training and certification. Then, she traveled around the U.S. in an RV, hiking in many state and national parks. This helped her to select a location to settle down and begin her new life.

After her traveling journey, she started her life coaching practice. In her practice, she focuses on what she calls barrier beliefs. These are the obstacles to moving forward productively. Ultimately, that led her to develop her year-long coaching program. In it, she integrates much of what she has learned over the past several years. Now, she is super excited about her Brave is Beautiful Circle program. 

Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jessie Benson discusses why there is hope that each of us can find a more balanced life. Since leaving medicine, she now spends her time as a life coach, musician, homesteader, and professional artist. She now loves her life. And she encourages all of us to follow our own path to a more balanced and authentic life, whether in medicine or not. But it requires effort and commitment, and sometimes some coaching.


Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 401

See Her Massive Professional Rebirth From Intensivist To Coach - A PNC Classic from 2020

- Interview with Dr. Jessie Benson

John: Dr. Jessie Benson, life coach, artist, and homesteader. Welcome to the PNC podcast.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Thank you, John.

John: This is going to be fun.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. I'm very much looking forward to it. I've been excited all week.

John: You know, my audience just loves hearing stories about physicians who have successfully transitioned to whatever it is they transitioned to. So just to give a little preview for the listeners, we're going to hear about homesteading today, we're going to hear about art today, we're going to hear about coaching and some other things in between. So that's why I knew I had to get you here and really get into some of these topics.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Well, I'm very much looking forward to sharing my journey because it has been so much fun.

John: The other thing I like to share with people when I have guests on here is inspiration and hope. Just from what little I know about you, I get the feeling that you really enjoy what you're doing, you feel very balanced. You're doing different things, and to the extent that there were things in the past, maybe, that weren't so great ... which I don't know anything about, but it just sounds like you where you are now is fantastic. So we're definitely going to want to hear what led to your transition, because you are a physician. You're still a physician. Obviously, we're always physicians, but you're not doing medicine anymore and so this is going to be good.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. I definitely love my life a lot more than what I call my medicine years, for sure.

John: Okay. Well then, without any further ado, then why don't you tell us about that? You were practicing for almost 10 years, and maybe just give us a little snapshot of what was going on and what prompted you to transition to what you're doing now.

Dr. Jessie Benson: So I practiced anesthesiology and critical care medicine. I was board certified in both and I did practice both, and I had been caught up in this cycle of chasing approval and achievement year after year, and my thing was A's. So chasing A's through grade school, high school, college, and so when the adults in my life said, "Go to medical school," seeking approval, I said, "Okay," and so I went full force. I was first in my med school class. I was best fellow at Cleveland Clinic, and eventually about 10 years ago, I realized that that life of approval and achievement was empty and I wasn't really enjoying it. I loved helping people, but the life ... I just knew it wasn't the life for me, and so I decided I wanted to have a different life and that's what I do now, and it wasn't just that easy. I had to overcome a couple of things. One of them was perfectionism and one of them was fear of rejection and failure. And so 10 years ago I was able to make a lot of progress in those areas and that's when my new journey began.

John: So I think we want to kind of get a kind of picture of how that looked. Some people ... I've had the occasional guests tell me, "Well, I just stopped doing what I was doing and just took six months off or a year off to figure it out." Others said, "I did a lot of soul searching and really a lot of research before I decided to leave medicine and I kind of tapered off and then converted and did something else and then something else, and now I'm where I am now." So kind of walk us through how you actually made that ... what were those kind of steps in between?

Dr. Jessie Benson: So mine was about a four year journey from ... from that moment 10 years ago, when I really decided to start having a good life, when I decided to start doing what I love, and that became art, that became music. I picked up playing cello. That became sprint triathlons. It became anything I wanted to do because I no longer only did things I thought I was going to "Get an A in." I actually started following my heart and doing things for fun, and so that was maybe 2011, '12, '13, '14. I became a professional artist. I was selling my art in galleries and at shows. I was playing cello professionally with a guitarist, and I just looked at my life in early 2014 and I said, "Medicine is keeping me from the things I love." I couldn't schedule concerts. I couldn't commit to shows because we had to pick our vacation a year in advance.

And the schedule wasn't good for me and neither was the mental and emotional drain on me, and so I paid off my $250,000 med school debt in March of '14, and so that was really the last string tying me to the career, because I knew I really needed to pay that debt off before I left to do something different, and I did, and then three months later, July 4th weekend in '14, I gave a six months notice to my practice and enrolled in life coach school because I had learned about it and realized, this is what I want to do. I want to work with people, helping them create lives that they love, and so I finished. My last night was December, 2014 in the ICU. I actually brought my cello and played for the nurses and the respiratory therapists and the patients. So it was a really wonderful last night of being on shift as a physician, and since then, I haven't looked back. People say, "Do you regret it?" Not many, no doctor, but other people will say, "Do you regret it?" And I say, "Absolutely not. I am truly living the life of my dreams and it gets better every day."

John: How did you get exposure to the life coaching? Where did that come up?

Dr. Jessie Benson: So I was reading an article when I was still full blown in medicine and it talked about what they do, and I realized, this is what I do for people. I listen to them. I inspire them. They come back six months later and say, "That thing you said that time in the locker room, I want you to know the difference it made in my life," and I realized that I could actually do that for living, not just in the locker room between cases. I could actually dedicate my full life to those moments with my clients, and so I researched schools and I picked one that was one of the original ones, and it was in Florida and then virtual, and I enrolled and actually started before I even finished medicine. I started in '14 while I was still practicing, my training.

John: All right. Yeah, one of the things I think several of us on the podcast have remarked on over the years is that one of the things about coaching is it kind of has all the good stuff that you do as a physician or a clinician and none of the bad stuff, the long call and the long hours and frequent call and what have you.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Absolutely, and I tell people, I get to help people, but I don't have to worry about life and death. Because as an anesthesiologist, responding to codes, responding to airway calls on the floor, taking care of patients in the ICU, that threat of death, even in a routine case, was ever present, and it weared on me, and now I get to help people feel better and I don't have to stress about that.

John: No, I think we forget that some ... I mean, I've talked to physicians that they don't even realize how stressed out they are because of those kinds of minute by minute decisions. Some are life and death, some it's just onerous, just paperwork that never ends and knowing that if you don't do it, it's going to be sitting there tomorrow and someone's going to be unhappy. I mean, all these things just are there and we kind of take it for granted, but if you step back and think about it, it can be quite painful and not even know it, and it's good that we realize it and decide how we're going to do something to change. Now some people can adapt and they love it. They love the intensity and they love the decision making like that, but I feel like most physicians, in 10 or 20 years, they're kind of worn out and need to do something else, but some of us learn that quicker than others, but we still need good physicians out there, don't get me wrong.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Please, don't all leave. But yes, for me, this is a more relaxed quality of life for sure.

John: And I think we're all entitled to that, and as I've said before, I mean I think all physicians are sort of part of one big family and we want each other to have great lives. So we're going to come back to the coaching later, but I want to talk about these other things that are interesting to me and I think to the listeners. So I want to hear about how you develop this whole interest in art, and maybe throw in your music, and then also this concept of homesteading. So you can go wherever you want with this.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Okay. Well I will go in chronological order.

John: Okay.

Dr. Jessie Benson: So art, I always enjoyed art and I always appreciated others' art, and even would support other artists by buying their work, but when I was still in that perfectionistic, A seeking mode, I just was unwilling to try. I wasn't willing to try anything, even if I thought it would be fun, because I was afraid I would fail, and I didn't feel like I could endure what I considered failure. So when that lifted, about 10 years ago, I just went and tried every art that I could. I tried charcoal and watercolor and oil paint and acrylic and sculpture and clay, and I loved all of them. And then one day I was at an art show and saw an artist who made her paintings out of beeswax, and I said, "What is this surface?"

And she said, "It's encaustic, it's beeswax," and so I went and bought everything. This is still while I was a physician in practice, and set up a place in my house for my home studio and just started creating. I bought two books and I did everything in those two books, and nothing looked like I wanted it to look. I wanted fine detail, and so the idea came to me for the technique that I do now, which is an original technique, and this is where I melt these wax and paint it on a board, and then with a very fine tool, I carved intricate nature drawing. So bird's nests or birds or trees, and then it's still just the wax, that light colored wax, and then I oil paint my lines and then the drawing comes to life and then seal it. And so in '13, that inspiration came to me and that's what I've been making and selling since.

John: Yeah. So, and we're talking about the art now. You have a website specifically for your art, is that correct?

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. It's my name, Jessie Benson Fine Art. So jessiebensonfineart.com, and I'm actually having a show ... I have occasional shows. You can kind of check back in and see virtual shows that I have yet, but I do a lot of commissions, actually, which are custom pieces. Someone might have me make one to honor a sister's wedding or the passing of a loved one. So a lot of my work is custom.

John: How do people find out about that? I mean, how do you develop clients in that particular part of your ongoing career?

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. So a major part that people find out about me is I was doing shows across the Eastern US, like Florida all the way up to Pennsylvania, and weekend shows that you might see in your own town, where artists set up booths for the weekend, and I gained a lot of exposure that way. And I still have people who will email me years later and say, "I saw you at this show. Will you make me a piece?" Or, "What do you have right now that you're selling?" And so that's a main way, and then I'm in galleries, and so folks will go into galleries, they'll see my work and they may not see something that they want there, or even if they do, then they'll get my contact info and email me for a custom piece.

John: All right. Well, somebody might track you down just for your advice on how to expand their art exposure.

Dr. Jessie Benson: I absolutely will help, because there are definitely tips, for sure.

John: All right. Well, I'll put the link to that website in the show notes. We have some others to talk about. So to go from there, chronologically then, the other things.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. So then the next thing was cello. It was really just music in general, but especially cello, which is the instrument that I've actually trained on. Again, loved music my whole life, but unwilling to try. The story of my life up until 10 years ago, and then I was at a music festival with my friend and she saw her friend playing cello and I said, "Oh gosh, can I try your cello?" And he said, "Sure," and as soon as I touched that instrument, I knew that I would do cello. Everything in me said, "You are going to play cello," and so I went right away ... I was still a physician then, practicing. I went and rented a cello from the local string shop, and within six weeks I had already found a teacher, was dedicated and decided to buy my own cello, which is a substantial investment, and went with my cello teacher, picked it out. My cello's name is Grace, and just love playing cello. I've played at shows and I play on my own and house concerts. So cello's a big part of my life only because I was willing to try.

John: Now do you have people you that you tend to play with or do things with other than your own ... you said, I think maybe before we started the episode, the interview here about maybe doing something with a guitarist or something else?

Dr. Jessie Benson: When I was in Raleigh, which is where I lived, I knew a lot of people who would play music, and I would duet with any instrument that would be willing to duet with me. So I have played duets with trombone, with banjo, a female banjo player that was a vocalist, with guitar, with piano. I was basically in this place of anybody, let's play together. Yes, so definitely I duet with people, and then also just play at home for myself.

John: Yeah. We definitely need to practice for sure, but it's fun to ... it's just playing. I play the guitar poorly, but playing is just fun. It's just something you just want to do and could probably spend hours, depending on your mood and all that.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Absolutely. I love to play outside when it's raining. When I'm covered to play during the rain, just it's a beautiful. It's a wonderful experience to share, playing music.

John: Well, I do talk about sometimes doing the bluegrass thing on my guitar. Now, guitar players and bluegrass are a dime a dozen. So what I always encourage people ... Anyone in the Chicago area that plays banjo that's listening to the podcast, get in touch with me because I could really use someone like a banjo player or a mandolin player or a fiddle player for that, any of the above.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Banjo is such a wonderful instrument to duet with, for sure.

John: Yeah. That's great. Okay, so we're going down this path. So you're getting into the cello after starting your art. You're doing both of those things and he thought, "Well, I don't have enough things to be interested in," so what's the next thing?

Dr. Jessie Benson: So I fell in love with both of those things, art and music before my last night that I described in 2014, and then in '15, I got my yoga teacher training, meditation teacher training, life coach training and certification, and then when all that was finished in late '15, I went on an eight month trip around the US in an RV, hiking many state and national parks, and at the end of that, after looking at many different communities, wondering if this is where I want to spend the rest of my current life, and I decided I wanted to settle in a little place I'd heard about called Floyd, Virginia, and I went to college at Radford University, which is in Virginia, and Floyd had this reputation for being the sweet little arts and music town. I never visited, but it stuck in my mind, because 20 years later I pulled that 40 foot RV up into a nearby town and went and explored Floyd and said, "Okay, this is where I want to live."

And so three weeks later made an offer on property and two weeks later owned it, and that's when my homesteading journey began, and what homesteading essentially means ... and I actually call myself a hybrid homesteader, but what homesteading means is to essentially try to do as much as you can for yourself. So it's this idea of reliance, and so what that looks like in my version of homesteading is the biggest project has been designing and helping build my house, and so when I got this land, it was basically land and a pond and a well, and now it's my dream home, my art studio, and still the pond, which is beautiful, with a half built dock, which is not finished yet, because that's what homestead life is, just a series of projects in different states of completion, and all of that took work. So just from designing my house on a piece of paper with a pencil, to getting the building permit, to meeting with the engineer to confirm the framing plan.

I had to learn building code. I had to learn so many things, and my cousin is a builder and he led the way and I helped with so much of it, and that's what homesteading is. So that's the house, and then for me, it's also growing my own food. I try to grow as much of my food as I can, and then I do things like bake all my own bread, make my own pizza crust, which is my personal favorite, and then just tend the land. Need cut down, trees need cut off around the edge of the pond. Just land takes constant maintenance, and homesteading is doing that maintenance as much as I can myself, and it's fun.

John: Okay. That's awesome. Now this is what happens typically, because I'm an introvert and when thinking about questions as you're talking, I have to go back, and my guests hate this when I do it, but you had gotten really involved in yoga, the coaching and meditation certifications, I think and those things, then you went on the RV trip. So was the RV trip mainly to look around geographically? How much of the planning for what you were going to do occurred ... well I'm assuming it did during that process as well. You were kind of figuring out how to put those things together?

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. So the main reason ... although in the back of my mind, I was thinking, "Well, I might find a neat community," because I did downsize my belongings when I left and I did put my house on the market. So what I knew was I'm not going to live in Raleigh anymore and that was it. I'm going to be a life coach. I'm going to keep doing art and music. I'm not going to live in Raleigh, and then it was blank slate from that point on, and so as I traveled those eight months, it was mostly just to have fun. I had been in this regimented, constricted environment, as much as any employee ship is, and I just wanted to be free. I just wanted to see the country. I just wanted to feel what it felt like to hike a new place every two or three days, to wake up and see new scenery. I just really wanted that, and so, yes, I was considering a community, but more, I just wanted to have fun and have an adventure.

John: Now, one of the things that some of the physicians on the podcast talk about is this feeling, kind of this pressure they get from their families or friends or people like, "Well, what are you talking about?" Was there any kind of pushback on that when you explained to whoever, your cousin, the builder, whoever, "Hey, I'm just going in my RV for six to eight months."

Dr. Jessie Benson: No, the people in my life, I'm very fortunate that they have this philosophy, if you're happy, I'm happy, and in fact, of everybody .... and I told, of course, everybody in the hospital, and I was there for six months, because I wanted to give them plenty of time to replace my specialty, and of everybody who over those six months knew I was leaving, everyone was just happy for me. There was only one physician who asked, "Well, really what are you going to do?" But everyone else was just happy for me, and I think too, a part of it was ... and more than one said, "I wish I could do it," and I would say, "You can," but it was total support, thankfully.

John: That's good. That helps. That helps. You're not fighting those battles of trying to explain yourself to people that don't understand. So let's see. I think I want to now hear more about the coaching, because I'm sure that has evolved over this period of time from where you started, and so how did you ... because I think for some physicians, this is really an attractive career, coaching. It's got all the good things about being a physician, as we said earlier. So yeah, how did you start coaching? What kind of coaching and how has that evolved over time?

Dr. Jessie Benson: So I chose a school that had a very comprehensive approach, as opposed to say executive coaching. I wanted a really comprehensive approach to coaching and to be able to meet a lot of different needs for a lot of people, and so that was the training I received, and then when I first started having clients, post training, post certification, that was what I did. I just would coach different people. I'd coached physicians. I would coach people from other professions. I would coach men. I would coach women. I'd coach them about their jobs, about their relationships, just really getting a feel for who I wanted to work with and what was most enjoyable to me, and when I first was coaching, it was very project management oriented. Let's figure out what you want to do, let's figure out the steps to get there, and let's do them, and that still has tremendous value. Of course, if we want to get somewhere, we need to know where we're trying to get and how to get there.

But since my practice first started several years ago, it has become much more elegant. I focus a lot more on beliefs, what I call barrier beliefs, the obstacles for why we don't do things, our fears, because we ... just like you said, people might want to leave medicine, but their family might be giving them a hard time. So focusing on those things and focusing on the action steps, but always making sure that the beliefs are in order before the action takes place. Yeah, and it's been pretty much one to one coaching, so private coaching, and then I've done some retreats and workshops where I incorporate my coaching with my yoga teacher, with my meditation teaching, and then what I'm doing now is something I'm super excited about, and it's a year long program for women and it's called Brave is Beautiful Circle, and it's a program where I help women find their authenticity and their creativity by doing what I call helping them find their brave, and it is the culmination of everything that we've been talking about since we've been on this interview. I incorporate my own personal experience of leaving medicine, I incorporate art challenges, I incorporate other types of creativity challenges, mindset challenges, one-to-one coaching, group coaching. So it's everything I love about coaching in one year long program.

John: Very nice. It's a good spot to put the websites in here. So you do have jessiebenson.com, which probably points to the app, but then you also have braveisbeautifulcircle.com, which is specifically for this year long process of coaching and learning.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. Yeah, www.braveisbeatifulcircle.com is where folks can just learn about the program. If they want to just learn about me and coaching in general, the jessiebenson.com, but as you mentioned, there is a link to the circle on jessiebenson.com.

John: Okay. So I'm going to get back to that in a minute, but I have to go backwards, as usual. At the beginning of your coaching ... this is a question I get a lot, and everyone goes through a training and they're certified and now they're kind of feeling like they're ready. They have to get clients. So I guess a couple of questions. One is, were you doing sort of some free coaching? Is that part of the process of learning to be a coach? And let's say at that very early stage, how did you get the word out? Where did you go to find clients?

Dr. Jessie Benson: So the answer to your first question about whether doing free, yes. During training, especially the program that I did, there is a lot of free coaching so that I can learn how to do it. I actually had to have, with my clients' permission, my calls recorded and then we would play them for our fellow students and our instructor. We would critique each other in a kind way, and so, yes, I did lots of free coaching. Then once I had my training and certification, then I took paid clients and it was all word of mouth, because I was in this large hospital and everyone knew what I was leaving to do. Some people would say, "Well, when you start coaching, I want you to coach me." I'd say, "Okay, I'll let you know when." So I had this kind of running list, because I did make it known this is what I'm going to do, and I didn't do that to get clients. I did it because people wanted to know what my journey was going to look like and I shared it, and so from the get go I had this pool of word of mouth client, and then word of mouth led to more word of mouth. So I actually didn't do any marketing my whole coaching practice up until now, when I'll start sharing about my circle, because that's a larger group of people, but it's just been word of mouth.

John: Now, the coaching that you started doing and have been doing for the last few years before the annual type of program or the year long program, what does that look like? How often do people usually get coached? What are they trying to get coaching for? How long does their coaching relationship usually last? It's kind of interesting to hear about those type of thing.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes, and so for all of my clients, no matter what they're coming to me for, I do a little free 30 minute thing to make sure that it sounds like what they want is something I can help them with, and then how I offer coaching as something that they want. So once we do that initial, then I do a two hour ... well, one to two hour, just depends ... life review session, and this is where we go through the nine fears of someone's life. So finances, work, relationships, rep, all those areas, and I have them rate their fulfillment on a scale of one to 10. So I get a snapshot and so today of what their life fulfillment in every area of life in this moment, and then we go from there.

And so right now I'm working with someone who's writing a book, and so we went right to career and contribution, because I already knew that person came to me ... she already came to me because she's writing a book and she wanted to support during that journey, and so we launched off from there, but we could just as easily have launched off from relationships or from self-care, like physical body care or mental care. And so from there, from that life review session, that's where the coaching happens, and then I meet with almost all of my clients 30 minutes every week, and I have one that we meet 30 minutes one time a month, but everybody else is 30 minutes a week, and then you asked how long is the relationship? It just depends. And so I have one person I've been working with for three years now. That person's been through career changes, from being employed, to being a consultant, to a relationship, to a new state, all sorts of wonderful life changes.

Another person I worked with a few weeks ago, her friend gifted her three sessions and she was having writer's block. Another author, separate author. I got a couple of authors at the same time, and we did those three sessions and we found out the root of her writer's block. She felt so lifted in this burden that she didn't even see, because that's what the help of the coach is. When we're in our own thing, we cannot see it, the idea of fish feel water, and when another set of eyes comes in, it's like, "Isn't this thing bothersome?" "Oh, that thing. Well, gosh, I hadn't even thought of that." So we did that in those three sessions and she had a really good result. So it really just depends.

John: Okay. Cool. All right. Well, I want to spend the last few minutes talking about the Brave Is Beautiful Circle. So, I mean I looked at the site and kind of the description and so forth. Now, have you been doing a version of this already? Or I this a brand new thing? Why don't you tell us a little bit about that.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yes. This is my coaching dream come true. So I sat down, when I started thinking about once my house was finished ... because I've been working on this house for four years with my cousin and it is finally finished, finished. I had this wellspring of time. I thought what do I want to spend it on? And I thought, I want to finally do my coaching circle I've been dreaming about. So this is a brand new program. I'm going to start enrolling people now, and I am centering it toward women, and especially female physicians, because that's a group I understand. I am a female physician. I've lived the life of a female physician. I understand the unique challenges, and so that's the focus of the group, and it'll start in the fall. If someone signs up, they'll start getting one to one with me, but the group coaching will start later in the fall, all the different kinds of group sessions I mentioned to you. So that is brand new and I could not be more excited. I was thinking, when I sat down to design it, I thought what would I have wanted 10 years ago when I was trying to break free from perfectionism, from fear of failure, from fear of rejection? And this is it. And so that's the program I designed.

John: Okay. So this is actually a good time. So we're kind of ramping up to the group sessions. Right now you're starting with the solo, the individual. So yeah, we'll definitely put the link in there and let people know about it. What else do they need to know? You said particularly women, especially physicians, just dealing with, like you said, the perfectionism, maybe the unhappiness, the disenchantment or whatever it might be.

Dr. Jessie Benson: So the main two things that someone will get from this program is connecting with their authenticity and their creativity. So, things like learning how to say no, setting boundaries, excellent self-care, getting over that concept of giving for everyone else and leaving nothing left for oneself. So all of that authenticity work, and then the other half of it is creativity. So whatever that means in the woman's life, if it's music, art, cooking, but to start tapping into that living life with this sense of adventure, the sense of creative expression.

John: Very good. All right. Well we're just about out of time. So this has been really inspirational. We can't necessarily learn in 30 minutes how to become an artist, a cellist, a homesteader, a coach, but I think it's giving people hope that you could be ... I mean, you were in an intense career. I mean, intensivist, anesthesiologist in the CCU or ICU, and here you are 10 years later and very pleased and have tried a lot of different things, and so I think that's very inspirational, and so listeners, if you feel like you're trapped, there's no need to be remained trapped. you can move on, and it doesn't mean you have to leave medicine either. We're not saying that. We're just saying that we should be more intentional about what we're doing and we should be able to find a life that brings us joy and balance and fulfillment.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Absolutely. There is absolute hope in having a balanced life, whether you choose to stay in medicine or not, because leaving medicine is not for everybody, but I absolutely feel like someone can stay in medicine and still enjoy life.

John: Very good. Well with that, I do want to remind everyone to maybe go to jessiebenson.com. That's one place where you can at least see the coaching. I think maybe ... do you even talk about the art there, or you point them even to the art?

Dr. Jessie Benson: I don't think I do, John.

John: Well, we know the jessiebensonfineart.com is a place, but there'll be links in the show notes. So I just want people to understand that they have options and maybe follow a path similar to what you've done. So I'm really happy that you were able to come on the podcast today, Jessie.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Thank you so much for having me. I've loved it.

John: I can't imagine where you're going to be 10 years from now. The arc had been so steep here, I don't know.

Dr. Jessie Benson: I don't know either, but I am excited to find out.

John: All right. Well then we'll have to touch base again and find out where you are down the road.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Yeah, episode 500.

John: Yeah, oh my gosh. I better be retired by then, I don't know. All right, Jessie. Well, with that, I'm going to say thanks again, and we'll be in touch sometime in the future, but I'll just say goodbye at this point.

Dr. Jessie Benson: Thank you. Bye.

John: Bye bye.

 Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

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Unlock the Hidden Value of a Senior Care Business https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/hidden-value/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/hidden-value/#respond Tue, 15 Apr 2025 13:20:23 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=63695 From Conception to Sale - 400 In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John shares the inside story and hidden value of his wife's senior care franchise business.  Marking his 400th episode milestone, he provides rare insights into the business lifecycle—from startup costs to growth patterns to pandemic challenges to eventual sale—all through [...]

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From Conception to Sale – 400

In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John shares the inside story and hidden value of his wife's senior care franchise business. 

Marking his 400th episode milestone, he provides rare insights into the business lifecycle—from startup costs to growth patterns to pandemic challenges to eventual sale—all through the lens of a healthcare professional's transition to entrepreneurship.

Through Kay's real-world example, John illustrates how physicians frustrated with high-stress clinical roles can achieve both financial success and lifestyle freedom while leveraging their existing medical knowledge in a new business venture.


Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program

The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build a nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.

His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.

For more information, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/mlconsulting or arminfeldman.com.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Healthcare to Business

John's wife, Kay, transitioned from respiratory therapist to senior care franchise owner, illustrating a powerful path for healthcare professionals seeking more control and better work-life balance. Her background in healthcare provided valuable insights into patient needs and facility operations, while the franchise model offered crucial support systems for a newcomer to business ownership.

Starting in their basement with minimal overhead, Kay gradually built a thriving operation providing non-licensed caregivers to clients in homes, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes.

Growth and Ownership Options

The business followed a classic S-curve growth pattern: slow initially, then accelerating as reputation spread and referrals increased. Despite the pandemic creating significant challenges, Kay's business demonstrated remarkable resilience, rebounding strongly and becoming attractive to buyers seeking a turnkey operation.

For physicians considering this path, John outlines four distinct approaches: starting a franchise or non-franchise business or purchasing a franchise or non-franchise business. Each option has different requirements for capital, time horizon, and expertise. The franchise model offers particular advantages for healthcare professionals with available assets but limited time to build from scratch. Similar principles can be applied to Direct Primary Care practices, providing comparable autonomy with even more direct application of clinical skills.

Summary

In this milestone 400th episode, John Jurica reveals how physicians can leverage their healthcare expertise to build profitable businesses through the lens of his wife's senior care franchise journey. His insider's view of business growth, pandemic resilience, and eventual sale provides clinicians with a concrete blueprint for escaping burnout while building substantial wealth outside traditional practice.


Links for Today's Episode

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Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

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First Find Your Zone of Genius Then a New Career – A PNC Classic from 2020 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/find-your-zone-of-genius/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/find-your-zone-of-genius/#respond Tue, 08 Apr 2025 10:00:15 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=63647 Interview with Laura Garnett - 399 On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, you will learn how to find your zone of genius with performance strategist, speaker, and author Laura Garnett. Laura works with CEOs and executives to identify their unique genius and purpose and leverage them in their daily work. She [...]

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Interview with Laura Garnett – 399

On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, you will learn how to find your zone of genius with performance strategist, speaker, and author Laura Garnett.

Laura works with CEOs and executives to identify their unique genius and purpose and leverage them in their daily work. She has consulted with organizations such as Google, Pandora, LinkedIn, and 15Five.

Before launching her own company, New York City-based Garnett Consulting, she honed her marketing, strategy, and career-refining skills at companies like Capital One, American Express, IAC, and Google.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Find Your Zone of Genius

Laura Garnett released her most recent book, Find Your Zone of Genius, in 2020. Shortly thereafter, she joined us to define the phrase and help us identify our own Zone of Genius

During the conversation, Laura explains several other concepts from the book that will truly help anyone on their career journey:

  • How to find our innate talents.
  • Why is our purpose more important than our passion?
  • Why finding support is usually preferable to obtaining advice.
  • How your core emotional challenge determines your purpose.

Apply Your Genius

Laura explains why you should read Find Your Zone of Genius first, as you begin to apply your genius. Once you understand the concepts and start the process of self-discovery, you can then move to her comprehensive first book, The Genius Habit.

Getting into your Zone of Genius is possible for everyone, and I promise it makes work exhilarating. In the ideal scenario, you actively use your genius and feel the impact of your purpose at work. – Laura Garnett

Additional Resources

After reading her books, you may still encounter barriers as you attempt to discover your unique talents and apply your genius. You can then work through her free resources. If that is not sufficient, there are several levels of formal coaching to consider. All of these can be found on her website.

Summary

Those of us driven to find a new career often do so because we are not currently working in our Zone of Genius. The first step in addressing that issue is to identify our genius and purpose. To move into a new career without identifying these features of personality is to invite another unhappy job.

Once we discover our innate talents and purpose, we can identify our Zone of Genius. Then, by aligning our job with it, we will wake up each morning excited to go to work. 

Links for Today's Episode

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Disclaimers:

*Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post First Find Your Zone of Genius Then a New Career – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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How To Beat Damaging National Practitioner Databank Reports https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/damaging-national-practitioner-databank-reports/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/damaging-national-practitioner-databank-reports/#respond Tue, 01 Apr 2025 13:14:51 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=63609 Beyond Credentialing Barriers - 398 In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John describes how to overcome damaging National Practitioner Databank reports that can interfere with a job search.  This topic is based on a question from a listener. The physician was concerned that NPDB entries were limiting his ability to land a [...]

The post How To Beat Damaging National Practitioner Databank Reports appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Beyond Credentialing Barriers – 398

In this episode of the PNC Podcast, John describes how to overcome damaging National Practitioner Databank reports that can interfere with a job search. 

This topic is based on a question from a listener. The physician was concerned that NPDB entries were limiting his ability to land a new clinical position. And he was looking for strategies to overcome this challenge.


Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program

The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build a nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.

His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.

For more information, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/mlconsulting or arminfeldman.com.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Understanding the Impact of NPDB Reports

John describes his analysis, based on an understanding of the requirements of the NPDB for reporting:

  • potential employers that are required to query it,
  • those that may or may not choose to do so, and
  • those unlikely to do so.

He lists several employer types that may query the Databank, yet be more lenient when evaluating a potential candidate. He then lists situations in which a databank query would be unlikely.

Minimizing Damaging National Practitioner Databank Reports

With these considerations in mind, he suggests several possible options to pursue as an employee and several practice options that would require starting a practice. The least costly of the practice start-ups would most likely be a cash-based business.

A Direct Primary Care Practice, Weight Loss Clinic, Med Spa, or similar business, in which the need to bill health insurers is eliminated, generally requires fewer staff and no expensive billing software, and eliminates NPDB inquiries from insurers. 

Summary

Physicians facing credentialing barriers can explore several alternative clinical career paths. If the physician has addressed the issues that led to the reports, there are several clinical practice options to consider as an employee or as a business owner if the physician prefers not to leave clinical medicine. If that is no longer a viable option, then a shift to a nonclinical position may be warranted.

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post How To Beat Damaging National Practitioner Databank Reports appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Popular Home Based Careers You Will Love – A PNC Classic from 2020 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/popular-home-based-careers/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/popular-home-based-careers/#respond Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:50:47 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=59918 Eliminate Your Commute - 397 On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, John runs through the most popular home based careers for physicians.  He starts by explaining why home based careers are so attractive. Then he describes the benefits and challenges of each one. Our Sponsor We're proud to have the University of [...]

The post Popular Home Based Careers You Will Love – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Eliminate Your Commute – 397

On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, John runs through the most popular home based careers for physicians.  He starts by explaining why home based careers are so attractive.

Then he describes the benefits and challenges of each one.


Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon CodeFIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Why Work from Home?

There are three main benefits to choosing a home-based career:

1. Convenience

When you work from home, you’re able to handle household responsibilities. Navigating childcare or adult caretaking responsibilities may make this type of career necessary.

2. Cost Savings

Eliminating your commute means you’ll save time, and reduce gasoline and auto maintenance costs, saving you thousands of dollars each year. And the time not spent commuting can be spent working and enhancing your income.

3. Flexibility

Home based careers offer the most flexibility. Though some require working 8-hour days, most will allow you to choose your hours. And you might be able to work from anywhere in the world, even while traveling. Or at odd hours, if you prefer.

Popular Home-based Careers

Here are the factors to consider when seeking one of these popular home based careers:

  • Chart Review: Performing chart reviews can be done for utilization management, disability and worker’s compensation assessments, expert witness consulting, clinical documentation, and quality improvement. You can work anywhere that has access to the Internet and phone service. Some jobs require work during regular business hours.
  • Medical writing: As a freelancer, you must set up your own business, and find work, initially. But once you develop relationships with several editors, you should be able to generate regular income, working from anywhere in the world. You must have the self-discipline to meet regular deadlines.
  • Telemedicine: This is an especially flexible career. You must ensure that you are working with a reputable company. You can start by supplementing your income by moonlighting. And you need to take the necessary steps to manage your liability exposure. You can boost your income by working when other physicians are not working, such as during weekends and holidays.
  • Consulting: If you're a consultant working from home, you will likely be freelancing, rather than working for a large consulting firm. You may have to do some traveling and speaking to build your authority and market yourself. But once you get started, most of your business can be done from home.
  • Coaching: Coaching is similar to consulting. But the term is usually used with life, health, wellness, and business coaching of individuals or small groups. It can be face-to-face, but remote coaching is much more common. You must choose a coaching field based on your personal expertise, or obtain formal training, and possibly certification.

Summary

Home based careers offer a great deal of flexibility. There are several attractive options to consider. The income levels might start out at the lower end of a clinical salary. But busy coaches, consultants, writers, chart reviewers, and telemedicine providers will experience improving revenues as they streamline their businesses and increase their customer or patient base. 

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.


Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post Popular Home Based Careers You Will Love – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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