NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/ Helping Hospital and Medical Group Executives Lead and Manage With Confidence Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:50:47 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cropped-1-32x32.jpg NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/ 32 32 112612397 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 [...]

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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. 

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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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Pursue One of These Part Time Nonclinical Hospital Jobs https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/nonclinical-hospital-jobs/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/nonclinical-hospital-jobs/#respond Tue, 18 Mar 2025 12:49:49 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=58788 The Path of Least Resistance - 396 In this week's episode, John describes the most accessible nonclinical hospital jobs and how to pursue them. These hospital-based roles—physician advisor for utilization management and physician advisor for clinical documentation integrity—present relatively low barriers to entry while offering flexible schedules and meaningful work that leverages a [...]

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The Path of Least Resistance – 396

In this week's episode, John describes the most accessible nonclinical hospital jobs and how to pursue them.

These hospital-based roles—physician advisor for utilization management and physician advisor for clinical documentation integrity—present relatively low barriers to entry while offering flexible schedules and meaningful work that leverages a physician's clinical expertise in new ways.


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 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.
  • 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.

Breaking Into Hospital-Based Physician Advisor Roles

John explains how physicians can position themselves for utilization management positions, where they'll help determine appropriate patient care status and educate colleagues on insurance guidelines. This role involves reviewing cases to ensure proper resource utilization while maintaining quality standards.

He recommends specific resources, including books like “Hospital Guide to Contemporary Utilization Review,” and organizations such as the American College of Physician Advisors. He also suggests gaining practical experience by joining hospital committees focused on case management or denials.

Building Expertise in Clinical Documentation Integrity

The clinical documentation integrity advisor role focuses on ensuring accurate medical documentation to support proper coding, appropriate reimbursement, and quality metrics.

John outlines practical steps physicians can take to prepare for this career path, including connecting with coding specialists, studying CPT guidelines, and engaging with professional organizations like the Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists. He emphasizes how this position can significantly impact hospital operations while allowing physicians to use their clinical knowledge in a less stressful environment.

Summary

Both physician advisor positions provide excellent opportunities for physicians to transition gradually from clinical roles while maintaining involvement in patient care at a systems level. These positions can begin as part-time commitments of just a few hours per week and potentially grow into full-time roles, making them ideal for physicians seeking work-life balance or testing nonclinical waters.

Additional resources and networking opportunities can be found through organizations like ACPA, ACDIS, AHIMA, and annual events like the SEAK Nonclinical Careers Conference.


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 396

Pursue One of These Part Time Nonclinical Hospital Jobs

John: I want to provide a brief overview of two part-time hospital physician advisor jobs that you might want to consider if you've decided to expand your options and begin your transition away from direct primary care for whatever reason. I’m addressing these two because they overlap quite a bit. They're both based in the hospital setting, generally started part-time, and can later become full-time jobs. There aren't a lot of barriers to starting such a position, and if you're already working in the hospital environment, it's really not all that difficult to do.

So, these are the two positions I'm talking about today: the physician advisor for utilization management and the physician advisor for clinical documentation integrity. Just so we know, using this term "physician advisor," sometimes these are called medical directors. Now, if you're doing utilization management for a large insurance company or other healthcare payer, they're typically going to use "medical director" for that position as the title. In the hospital setting, it's typically called a physician advisor. It's a part-time job that could start out as little as one or two hours a day, but they might also use that medical director moniker as well.

If you're already working in the hospital in a variety of inpatient settings, you could easily start doing one of these jobs if your organization has a need for it. So, when I talk about this kind of topic and about transitioning, I do like to generally talk about some other things to prepare us to make this kind of transition.

So, the first thing I want to do is mention some of these items and talk about how to get into the right mindset. What happens typically if you've been working clinically full-time and now you're thinking of making this change? It can be difficult because of some limiting beliefs or even some myths that we have internalized that I want to talk about right now. I'm not going to address every one of these; I actually have addressed this in other presentations. As a reminder, let's just go through two or three of these.

So, the first thing is that this is going to be a difficult process because all I know is medicine and I don't have the necessary skills to begin a new career. Here’s what I have to say about that issue: especially for these jobs, having completed medical school and residency, maybe a fellowship, you really already have a lot of demonstrated valuable skills and abilities. Okay? So whether it's focus and concentration, lifelong learning commitment, organizational skills, teamwork, analyzing data, and formulating a plan, you have a lot of background in the necessary sciences, including biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, epidemiology, etc. You're good at writing, lecturing, and speaking, teaching, and mentoring. You've done leadership oftentimes in your roles. You're great at decision-making, and you have a lot of other qualities that make you an awesome employee in general. So those exist, and these two jobs don't really have a lot of requirements for additional skills. So they lend themselves to being learned on the job. You will learn some new skills for this new career, but they'll be learned on the job. And since you're already a lifelong learner, it's going to be quite straightforward for you to do that.

The second belief sometimes is that you're wasting your medical career if you pursue a nonclinical job. The thing is, once you become a clinician, you actually have reached a plateau, and there are dozens and dozens of other jobs that you can only do after becoming an experienced clinician. It's like saying that you're wasting your training as an attorney if you decide to pursue politics or to become a judge, or you're wasting your training as a nurse if you decide to become a nursing home administrator. An administrative job is a business position, but yet you have that background as a clinician, which is very helpful for many important, fulfilling careers. Having a medical degree and board certification is a prerequisite to even being considered for that new career. So it's not wasted training. Chances are you've already applied your training in that venue, and now you want to move on to something bigger and better. In some cases, oftentimes it even pays more and has more responsibility, particularly when you're taking a leadership role.

Number three that I want to talk about is: you know, my family, my friends, colleagues, and other people I know will be disappointed if I leave clinical medicine for a variety of reasons. You think that they might not really understand it, and maybe they'll say something that makes you think that. But the reality is, particularly if you're burned out or unfulfilled with this job, it's not really satisfying you doing this clinical work. You know, everybody in your life that loves you just wants you to be happy, fulfilled, and working in a career that brings you joy. That's really the ultimate goal. Many of us think that taking care of patients is the way to do that, but for whatever reason, sometimes it's just not true. So I don't think the people that are important in your life are going to sit you down and try to convince you not to remain in a job that's tedious, unfulfilling, or producing anxiety or is unhealthy.

I know the financial aspects will be a concern at times, but really, ultimately, that shouldn't be the thing that stops you because there are a lot of positions that will equal your current financial reimbursement or compensation, and yet with less stress and more joy in doing that very job. I think that shouldn't hold you back either, unless you can find there's something simple to change in what you're doing clinically to make it more palatable that I think you should continue to move forward.

Now, there are also some caveats that I want to mention to you. Some of these are pretty obvious, and don't be offended if it seems like I'm being too obvious, but let's see here: first, no matter what job you're doing, continue to do it with excellence. Okay? So just because you're burned out or you're feeling like you're going to have to change jobs or something like that, don't sort of quit while on the job. Don't become lazy or try not to become overwhelmed and just indifferent. Your current employer and colleagues will be asked to comment on your dedication, integrity, ability to work with others, accountability, etc. If you've already started to pull away and not keep up that high level of performance that you probably are used to doing, it can harm you because it may take you a while to get that first job. Particularly, even if you're going to stay with your current employer, hospital, or health system, then that might be something that puts the hold on it, particularly if you somehow have been becoming more vocal about how unhappy you are. So try to keep everything at that level of excellence and just move forward with trying to make the change.

The second caveat is you must try to gain some experience in your new career even before applying for the new job if you can. Notwithstanding what I said earlier that these jobs are open to you already, but every little bit of information and understanding of the role you're going to step into will be helpful. And so if that means volunteering somehow, you can do that. Two areas we're talking about are utilization management and clinical documentation integrity. They usually interface with the medical staff and clinics face-to-face when you're dealing with the topic and also in committees and subcommittees that deal with the results and try to come up with plans for improving things. You can usually volunteer for one of those committees and understand the lingo better. You can meet some of the people that are currently involved in that. Sometimes you can get a little bit of experience in a nonprofit board of some type, some steering committee. So think about that.

That's the second caveat. The third is that it's always great to use a mentor, find a mentor, engage a mentor, and interact with them. Now, when I tell you about mentors, I'm always talking about something that's pretty low-key, not a lot of time. I've had mentors in my life who didn't even know they were mentors—just someone I would meet with briefly or run through, you know, briefly for five or ten minutes, ask a question, get the answer, and then use that information to help me figure out my next steps. So it's helpful to have multiple mentors and just use them judiciously to help point you in the right direction. Obviously, this mentor should usually be someone who's doing the job that you're thinking about moving into.

And so, you know, that's just the third bit of advice. The fourth is that there's probably some book or course that can help you in the process. You know, on these topics, for these two exist, and I'll talk about resources where you can find those in a minute. Fifth, there are usually places, getting, you know, kind of building on the fourth one, there are usually specialty societies or associations, professional organizations that have more resources that I'm also going to mention later.

So that's given. And then the sixth thing is that sometimes when you're doing a nonclinical career, it's helpful to have some kind of a blog or a podcast or something. I mean, as an example, if you're becoming a medical writer, then, you know, if you can create a platform where you're writing regularly and you're sharing some of that for free, in addition to posting things that maybe you've sold that you've done as a medical writer, that could be awesome. In this situation for doing these two, I would say the main thing is to get a good LinkedIn profile. You probably could find your first job directly on LinkedIn without even engaging a headhunter or something like that. You know, particularly after you've already done the job at your current organization, if that's how you choose to move forward. But having a really completed LinkedIn profile, which is something I've talked about in the past, can really help people reach out to you and actually recruit you directly off of your LinkedIn profile as long as you put in there some of the experience that you've already gotten that applies to the job that you're looking for.

So, let’s start then with the first position, and that’s as physician advisor for utilization management. So, to summarize, in the hospital setting, again, you can do this kind of job for an insurance company, but in the hospital setting, it's a little different. It's quite direct with the providers; the physicians and NPs and PAs are taking care of patients in the hospital. So basically, the physicians who are leading the patient care will need help in determining the appropriate care status—outpatient versus inpatient, for example—and work with other team members to decide if continued stay is warranted. Warranted means meeting guidelines, specific guidelines that say that they should either go or stay. They need an intermediary like you, the physician advisor, to help educate on that and to actually answer questions directly on this patient that we're considering right now.

So, you can do teaching too, where you help clinicians understand CMS and other payer rules. And that's around the appropriateness of testing and invasive procedures. Like, you know, if somebody comes in for heart failure and you've got them 90% better, is it appropriate to do a colonoscopy? Well, that can be hard to justify. That's a pretty obvious example, but you don't want to be doing those things because you really want to try to keep that admission as short as possible while using the minimum resources so that the hospital actually has a bottom line.

There are full-time and part-time positions doing just what I've described. Most of those job descriptions will say that you need to be residency trained, board certified, with five or more years of clinical experience. Sometimes they have a preference for primary care, but not always. And they may even say that they want a current hospital staff member.

Now, I'm going to read you a typical job listing for this. They don't all look exactly like this, and this is a very shortened version of it, but just so we're clear, let me describe that: Candidates have a strong clinical background with excellent communication skills and leadership abilities. The role of the physician advisor of case management services requires the review of other physicians' cases, their plan of care, and resource utilization. Case study can be necessary for various reasons, including patient outliers, i.e., extended stays, utilization review issues, reimbursement issues, or quality concerns. The physician advisor will work with hospital administration on all campuses and clinical committees as requested to develop processes and guidelines to improve quality of care and value, or the outcomes divided by the cost.

So, that is a short version of a typical job description.

So, let's talk about some real practical things you can do other than being a good medical provider right now at your current institution. First thing, the first step is to see if you can get your hands on a copy of the "Hospital Guide to Contemporary Utilization Review" by Stephanie Daniels and Ronald Hirsch. This thing is probably at least five, maybe even as long as ten years ago, originally published. I think there are multiple editions. But this is a good guide. So, this is what I mentioned earlier. There may be a book that can be very helpful. I think it's relatively expensive. I looked it up recently, and it was like $170 for a new copy, but you might be able to find a used copy or you might go to your own hospital and say, "Hey, do you have a copy of this thing?" Because the utilization management department might have it. And it can be helpful to read through it; it gives some of the background behind doing utilization management and affecting things like length of stay and how to move people through the system. And also, you know, what needs to be documented.

If possible, here are some other steps you can take. Join your own hospital utilization or case management committee if one exists. Get involved with denials management, maybe even in appeals. You may not be able to appeal another physician's case, but if you have a case that becomes denied and you know, normally you hand that responsibility over to the UM department, you could try and at least be involved in the appeal in your case, particularly, you know, if you're talking about an online or telephone appeal, live appeal, and you can learn about what's important in the terminology.

Again, I'll reach back to what I said earlier about a mentor. So, look for a mentor that's currently working in utilization management, possibly the current medical director or physician advisor for your case management. Establish that relationship and just talk with them a little bit over time. Again, don't make them feel like you're trying to own your success. You want to just chat with them, get their advice on how they got into this and are they aware of any really good resources that they found to be helpful?

Here are some of the resources I think that are no-brainers that you can get into right away: You might look at the resources in the American College of Physician Advisors. You can find them at acpadvisors.org. It's the American College of Physician Advisors. You can just Google that if you want. And they have all kinds of research sources written. They've got lectures and conferences that they do every year. I think sometimes they might even have some kind of certification. When I last looked, I mean, there were at least six or seven tabs on their website for resources for their members. You can get involved directly, and there's probably publications that you can get from them as well. And I don't think the membership fees are all that high.

When I've talked to other people about this, they always bring up the Seek Annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference because usually they have at least one speaker talking about this one, utilization management for sure. Sometimes they also have somebody talking about the second topic for today, which is the CDI or clinical documentation improvement. If you want to get really into it a little bit and understand how people use guidelines, what the guidelines look like.

Oh, by the way, to find the Seek Annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference, it's usually in October, and you can find it at nonclinicalcareers.com/conference. That's a link that I created from my website. So if you go to nonclinicalcareers.com/conference, it should bring you to the Seek Annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference. It's spelled S-E-A-K. It doesn't stand for anything in particular, but it is in the Chicago area every October, and they've been doing that for about 15 or 16 years.

You can get a copy of the Milliman Clinical Guidelines. That's one set of guidelines that UM nurses and others who are doing reviews of charts for purposes of, you know, utilization management and continued stay and so forth. That's what they use. They use Milliman Clinical Guidelines. There's InterQual guidelines as well, I believe, but the Milliman seems to be more commonly used, and you can find that at mcg.com.

And then there's an organization called the American Academy of Professional Coders. Now, when I talk to UM people and when I was doing this job as a physician advisor, I don't think I ever saw that organization or heard of that organization. But if you go to aapc.com for American Academy of Professional Coders, there are resources there that you can access, and it gives you again some of the basic nitty-gritty about becoming a physician advisor for utilization management, benefits management, and so forth.

All right. So now I want to move to the next one, which is this physician advisor for clinical documentation improvement. Well, now we call it clinical documentation integrity. And basically, if we want a short description of this, it is as follows: Physicians in this position will need to learn about appropriate coding and documentation guidelines, either in the hospital or outpatient setting, and help teach other physicians about coding and interact with them on specific cases to make appropriate changes to coding if necessary. Full-time or part-time positions are available.

Now, this one, you know, there's a big motivation to do well on this because the coding is what leads to the reimbursement. It also leads to the quality of care as observed by other people because a big part of coding is to capture pre-existing conditions, complications, and so forth. And if you find things that are present on admission and document those appropriately, then they won't be counted as a complication later on. So if somebody is admitted with some problem, let's say pneumonia, and then they develop diabetes or hyperglycemia and then they get a coding for diabetes during that stay. Now, we all know that it's probably pre-existing, but if it's not put in as a present on admission, then it's going to be counted as a complication. And that's a bad thing that can affect your reimbursement at the hospital.

They usually are going to be looking for someone who's residency trained, board certified, with five or more years of clinical experience. The typical job listing will sound something like this: As the CDI physician advisor, the PA will act as a liaison between the CDI professional, HIM (which is Health Information Management), and the hospital's medical staff to facilitate accurate and complete documentation for coding and abstracting of clinical data, capturing severity, acuity, and risk of mortality in addition to DRG assignment.

So, that's what you're going to see, and you're not going to see requirements for a lot of formal training. What they might look for is more experience. Now, another comment I want to make, kind of a caveat, at any time you're looking for a job and you're looking at job descriptions is that keep in mind that a job description is the new employer's attempt to get absolutely 100% of things they could get in the best possible circumstances. So, they almost never get a person that meets all those so-called requirements. And so you have to try and tease out whether the requirement they're listing is absolutely mandatory. Like, for example, they might say they want someone with five years of experience and at least two years doing a CDI. Well, what if you have four years of experience and you're only doing one year of CDI? These things are all flexible, and you have to learn how to tell the difference between something that's absolutely required as opposed to something that would be nice to have because most of this will be learned on the job.

Okay, so here are some advice for steps to take. Number one, you might get a copy of the CPT Professional 2025, which is the CPT manual that's put out by the AMA every year. Now, it's expensive, and you know what? Things don't change that much. So if you can get an old copy of the one from 2024 or 2023 or 2022, a lot of the rules will be in there; it'll be exactly the same. It's just the fine details change from year to year in terms of the definitions of the DRGs and the weighting and things like that. So just try and get a copy of that, and you can probably borrow the old one from your current CDI group and go from there.

If possible, these are some actions you can take now to position yourself: If there's a CDI team, see if you can join as a volunteer or go to some of their meetings. Spend time with the coding specialists in the Health Information Department. When you talk about coding and documentation, not only do you have yourself as a clinician doing the documentation part of that, but you have the nurse documentation specialists. And maybe some paramedical staff, you know, that aren't nurses or physicians. And then you have the billing departments, whether it's in a clinic or at the hospital, what you would call the Health Information Department. They have experts in coding and documentation. They're the ones that do the final coding on the charts.

They're usually not a nurse, but they usually work so closely with a nurse and the physician advisor to get things right. Sometimes they're in a big hurry and they don't want to take the time to do that. So you have to help set up systems where you can quickly respond when they have a question. Because again, the more accurate it is, the better off the hospital is and better paid the hospital is.

Okay, so you're going to try and just start mingling with those people. You're going to identify a mentor that's currently doing this kind of work, clinical documentation integrity, and maybe the medical director if there's a medical director in the hospital doing this, or there might be somebody who's over that in a large medical group. It's totally different coding in the outpatient and inpatient side, so you might want to end up specializing in one or the other, but most of the time, what I'm talking about are the physicians who are working for the hospital to do this job.

And then you're going to also complete your LinkedIn profile, just like I mentioned for the last position, and try and focus and list your experience and documentation and coding in the hospital setting. No question comes up on LinkedIn all the time is, "I don't want to scare away somebody, or I don't want to tip my hat, my hand, so to speak, that I'm thinking of leaving and looking for this job." So sometimes you can do a LinkedIn profile that's somewhat generic. That's focusing on your professional activities, and you know, you might put in there all the things you've done clinically, and then maybe a paragraph that talks about what you've done from the standpoint of documentation and coding and understanding how it works because all clinicians need to do this anyway. But if you focus on it a little bit more, then a recruiter is going to be more prone to notice and actually reach out to you on LinkedIn and say, "Do you want to talk about maybe looking for a job?" And it could be even a headhunter who maybe doesn't even have a job for you right now, but when they notice someone with that kind of profile, then they're going to reach out and position themselves to be ready to tap you when the time comes.

Some of the other resources which would be very helpful would be the American College of Physician Advisors, which can be found at acpadvisors.org. I think this is the same one that I said earlier. It's good for both utilization management and for clinical documentation improvement. So that's a repeat. The Seek Annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference is another repeat. Every October, you have a two-day event with a pre-conference and post-conference, so there's a lot of activities going on. You can look that up.

There is something new here: the Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists. It's a hard one to remember; it's kind of a tongue-twister. The Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists, known as ACDIS, can be found at acdis.org. Lots and lots of resources there. You can join even before thinking about doing this in a way, see if there's information in it that sounds interesting to you. And then when you do think about moving forward, then start accessing some of those. I think that one has training and even certificates, things like that.

The other big one is the American Health Information Management Association. Now, this is multi—actually, both of these are multi-professional, I guess. There are nurses, there are physicians, there are health information management workers, there are all kinds of people in both of these: ACDIS.org and the American Health Information Management Association, which is called AHIMA, A-H-I-M-A. A lot of people refer to it as AHIMA, and it's at ahima.org.

And then I've seen one mentioned several times in the past called the National Association of Physician Advisors. When I last tried to access it, it would not let me link up because of a fear of some kind of lack of security on the website. You know, some of these old websites are not really good at preventing, you know, issues with people trying to steal information and so forth. So if you can find the National Association of Physician Advisors, that might be useful. Otherwise, the other four places I talked about would be helpful for you.

But, so that's basically what I had to say about these two nonclinical positions. Again, they start part-time, they can eventually go full-time. There's a lot of jobs out there. There's lots of resources, and you can maybe find a job where you're doing 50% clinical, 50% one of these, or go 100%. There's a lot of flexibility. And if you're in a big metropolitan area, there's probably many jobs around that would be at other institutions within driving distance.

And so that's why I talk about these quite frequently. I've always had a lot of—not my most of my nonclinical jobs were in the hospital setting. These also can lead to getting a BPM or a CMO job because if you think about it, the Chief Medical Officer at a hospital is responsible for typical things that go that include these: utilization management and length of stay, quality improvement, clinical documentation integrity, which goes directly into quality improvement, and then informatics a lot of times. And so if you're involved with any of those four, it's a good starting point. And ultimately, if you end up looking for a job as a CMO, which usually pays more than a primary care clinical position with about 20% less commitment of time each week, that's an awesome job. Payments for CMOs are quite high. You're going to have to learn about all four of those plus a lot of other things.

And my usual advice for that is go to the AAPL, which is the American Association for Physician Leadership. And you can get a lot of those, which it wouldn't hurt to start that now while you're doing these other jobs or thinking about doing these other jobs. And they do have some specific courses, actually, at the AAPL, which are kind of introductions to the areas we're talking about today.

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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This OB Doctor Snagged A New Technical Writing Job – A PNC Classic from 2020 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/new-technical-writing-job/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/new-technical-writing-job/#respond Tue, 11 Mar 2025 11:56:56 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=54784 Interview with Dr. Kaci Durbin - 395 In this week's PNC Podcast episode, Dr. Kaci Durbin describes her journey from obstetrical hospitalist to her new technical writing job. Kaci received her medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine. She completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of [...]

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Interview with Dr. Kaci Durbin – 395

In this week's PNC Podcast episode, Dr. Kaci Durbin describes her journey from obstetrical hospitalist to her new technical writing job.

Kaci received her medical degree from the University of Illinois College of Medicine. She completed her residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Louisville Hospital. She later completed an MBA while in practice at Southern Illinois University.

In addition to board certification in obstetrics and gynecology, she holds a certification from the American Medical Writers Association.


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, with over 650 graduates. And, unlike other programs, which typically run 1 – 1/2 to 2 years, this program only takes a year to complete. Recently, Economist Magazine ranked the business school #1 in the world for the Most Relevant Executive MBA.

While in the program, you'll participate in a company project, thereby contributing to your organization. As a result, the University of Tennessee PEMBA students bring exceptional value to their organizations.

Graduates have taken leadership positions at major healthcare organizations. And they've become entrepreneurs and business owners.

By joining the University of Tennessee physician executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills needed to find a career that you really love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office by calling (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.


She was employed at a private practice for 5 years and then transitioned into OB hospitalist work. During her time as a hospitalist, she began part-time freelance medical writing, creating CME materials, needs assessments, manuscripts, and presentations.

She then worked as an independent contractor for a CRO. This Contract Research Organization later offered her a full-time position as a technical medical writer.

How To Transition to Her New Technical Writing Job

Kaci became dissatisfied early in her clinical career. She tried out several nonclinical side jobs while working clinically. And she discovered that medical writing was a popular option for other physicians. So, she decided to pursue a career as a freelance medical writer.

She joined the AMWA and became certified. To help create her freelance business, she took Emma Hitt Nichol’s medical writing course

After the course, Kaci contacted CME companies and landed several freelance jobs. Then she stumbled across technical writing and worked for a CRO as a freelance technical medical writer. That led to a full-time job with the CRO.

I think, once I got a couple clients and I started writing for them, it snowballed from there. Then they would refer me to someone else. Another job would come up.

Now she mainly writes clinical trial protocols and clinical study reports. Kaci enjoys helping to design clinical trials. She continues to do occasional freelance medical writing.

Resources for Medical Writers

Kaci mentioned important steps for aspiring medical writers to follow:

  1. Add a profile on AMWA.
  2. Include “medical writer” and related terms in your LinkedIn profile.
  3. Create a website with examples of your writing.
  4. Join and engage in pertinent Facebook groups.
  5. Search job listings on the Look for Zebras website.
  6. Search for jobs on the Virtual Vocations website.

SUMMARY

Kaci determined early in her clinical career that she didn't enjoy that work. She began exploring other part-time jobs. She obtained an MBA, thinking that she wanted to go into hospital leadership. However, her early experiences did not support that idea. She discovered medical writing and loved it. Then, she pivoted from CME writing to technical medical writing and found her niche.

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 This OB Doctor Snagged A New Technical Writing Job – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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It’s Time to Start a Direct Primary Care Practice https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/direct-primary-care-practice/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/direct-primary-care-practice/#respond Tue, 04 Mar 2025 12:41:44 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=54663 Never Bill Health Insurance Again - 394 In this week's episode, John explains why physicians should consider starting a Direct Primary Care Practice or DPC-style practice for specialists. He presents DPC as a viable alternative that allows doctors to reclaim their autonomy, improve patient relationships, and create a more sustainable practice model without [...]

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Never Bill Health Insurance Again – 394

In this week's episode, John explains why physicians should consider starting a Direct Primary Care Practice or DPC-style practice for specialists.

He presents DPC as a viable alternative that allows doctors to reclaim their autonomy, improve patient relationships, and create a more sustainable practice model without the administrative burdens of insurance billing.

This growing healthcare delivery model offers challenges and significant rewards for physicians willing to take a more entrepreneurial approach to medicine.


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 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.
  • 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 DPC Practice Model

DPC offers physicians freedom from traditional insurance billing through a subscription-based payment model where patients pay monthly, quarterly, or annual fees directly to their physicians. With approximately 2,500 practices now operating across all 50 states, this model allows doctors to maintain smaller patient panels (typically 400-600 patients).

This enables them to spend more time with each patient (30-60 minutes per visit) and provide enhanced access through telemedicine, email, texting, phone calls, and home visits. The elimination of insurance paperwork and billing cycles creates a more efficient practice with significantly reduced administrative overhead.

Building a Successful DPC Practice

Starting a DPC practice requires careful planning, including:

  • developing a business plan,
  • selecting an appropriate location,
  • establishing pricing structures, and
  • implementing effective marketing strategies.

While initial startup costs typically range from $40,000-$100,000, practices generally reach break-even with 250-300 patient members. Once established, DPC physicians commonly earn between $280,000-$500,000 annually while enjoying greater control over their schedules and practice style.

This model works particularly well for primary care but can also be adapted for certain specialties focused on chronic disease management.

Summary

Physicians interested in exploring the DPC model can find extensive resources at DPCFrontier.com and through the My DPC Story podcast with Dr. Maryal Concepcion. While transitioning to this model requires planning and initial investment, it offers a path to greater professional satisfaction, improved patient relationships, and the opportunity to build a valuable asset.


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 394

It's Time to Start a Direct Primary Care Practice

- Never Bill Health Insurance Again

John: Let's get to today's topic of discussion. Recently, I've become more and more interested in DPC as a solution to the unfulfilling corporate employment and its lack of autonomy, the lower pay, the long hours, and the interference in the physician-patient relationship. I've been doing a lot of research on this and a lot of reading, and I want to explain today why I think you should really consider developing your own DPC practice.

Now, this is for those of you who have been employed with a large system or a large group and you're thinking, "Okay, I'm burned out. I need to go into something completely nonclinical or unconventional." And really, I'm starting to believe that DPC practice is one option for you to consider.

It has some barriers and some caveats that I'll explain in a moment, but it's really a way to recapture the joy of practicing medicine and seeing patients, if that's really what you want to do.

What is a DPC practice? Hopefully, most of you have heard of it, but a DPC is direct primary care practice, a model where patients pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee directly to their primary care physician, rather than relying on traditional insurance billing or really relying on insurance as a payment method at all.

If you think about when you get rid of the insurance involvement in care, you really enable a physician, yourself, to spend more time with your patients. You're getting paid at the beginning of each month or each quarter. There's no collections, there's no billing, there's no sending overdue bills to a collecting agency, and you don't have to hire the staff to focus on things like coding and documentation and billing and so forth.

It really takes away a lot of the headaches and frees up time to spend with patients and also reduces your documentation time and other things. So let me just give you a little background.

DPC model began showing up around the early 2000s, and over the years, it's begun to catch on and building up steam and growing. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act recognized direct primary care as a viable healthcare delivery model, allowing DPC practices to compete with other more traditional settings, traditional not insofar as like from 50 years ago, but traditional as of the last 20-30 years. And now there's, I think, about 2,500 known DPC practices in all 50 states across the country and in Washington, D.C. And so, it seems to be growing and there's much more interest in it.

One of the questions that people have when they first get involved with this and start thinking about it is, "Well, look, if I'm doing this, can we still use Medicare for DPC? And if not, well, then how's that going to work? Because so many people depend on Medicare, and it's hard to convince them to switch over to a DPC model."

Patients can continue to use Medicare when they're involved with a DPC, but it would be for anything not happening in the physician's office. In other words, you could still use it for hospital care, expensive testing, inpatient visits, imaging, prescriptions, things like that. It's just that when it comes to the day-to-day ongoing chronic care and treatment of acute illnesses in the office, everything can be put under this new type of model.

Most DPC physicians do opt out of Medicare because they really don't want to have to interact and meet all the requirements for any kind of a Medicare payment. So you're best to just opt out, although there are some exceptions. If someone has chosen Medicare Advantage, then there may be network restrictions and so on. There may be some challenges. And these are all things you have to figure out before you set up your first DPC practice.

Now, I'm going to pause here and say, what's the best way to approach this from the standpoint of, is this something I can go into right after residency or fellowship? And probably not, because it would take a lot of planning. You'd have to spend the last year of your residency or fellowship thinking about how you're going to do the DPC, learn about marketing, put aside some money or arrange to borrow some money to set up the practice. I think it has been done. But to me, it makes more sense, you're fresh out of residency as let's say, a primary care doctor, and you would go to work for a hospital system or a large group, get a guaranteed salary, have them help pay off some of your loans.

But you would have this idea that maybe in three or four years, you're going to go out on your own into this kind of a practice, which has more flexibility and a better lifestyle. And so, one of the things you want to do early on then as you're looking at those contracts is you want to think about, well, if I want to leave that practice and maybe pick up some of those patients in my new DPC practice in three or four years, what do I need to do to plan for that?

And that's where an attorney comes in and looking at your contract. Can you get rid of the non-compete that will prevent you from moving away from that practice to a new practice and take some of the patients with you? Even if you can't take away the patients, like there might be a limitation on marketing to those previous patients, you still want to have the ability to actually set up another practice without too much of a restriction.

If you have a six-month non-compete and then you can open your doors in six months, that's not too bad. If the geographic limitation is within driving distance, so you really want to have an attorney help you think through that when you're signing your first contract as an employee. So that's really all I'm going to say about that.

But to me, you start out when you're first on a residency or fellowship, it's good to have continued interaction with other physicians in your specialty in a controlled environment where you don't have to worry about all those things that we're talking about.

But then once you're out three or four years, you should feel confident to start your own practice if that's what you want to do. Now as an aside, I'll say right now there are DPC practices which are quite large where the physician is actually employed in a DPC practice, but I'll talk about that more in a minute.

Let me review again the key features of a DPC practice. There's no insurance billing, period. Patients are paying monthly, quarterly, or annually. Sometimes employers are the ones paying. If you have a large employer or medium-sized employer that would like to provide for the care of its employees and there's not a lot of good primary care nearby, you can sometimes get the employer to pay for some or all of this on a membership or subscription basis because it keeps the employees at work. And some companies are really facing problems with employees constantly being injured or sick and you can work with employers to address that issue.

But most DPCs, I think the majority are actually just taking care of patients, usually within either like a family medicine or internal medicine or pediatric type of practice where you might focus on just a certain age groups, pediatric age groups or some might focus on adults in the middle ages and then sometimes senior practices.

But the nice thing is you get the flat membership fee. You're not billing patients. You can usually have a panel of no more than six or eight hundred at the most, so you can spend more time with your patients. 30 to 60 minutes per visit is often quite doable. And a lot of the benefit too is the improved access in non-traditional ways. So phone calls, using email, telemedicine, just messaging them on your telephone and even sometimes home visits.

And that all enables you to reduce the expenses in the office and really help people more quickly. And most DPCs have openings pretty much within one to two days as opposed to a two or three week backlog of patients. And then in that situation, again, the patients are much more happy with the longer time you spend with them and the fact that they have improved access and they become very secure with that kind of arrangement, much like concierge medicine, but obviously done in to meet the needs of chronic conditions as opposed to concierge, which usually focuses on acute things or just some carve out a particular type of specialty. I could belabor that, but I think it's really a nice model. Income is usually pretty good, and I'll get into that in a minute.

What are some of the potential downsides? The main one is that you have to create your own business, your own new practice from scratch, and it takes a while to plan. You have to learn some new things, perhaps, in terms of how to run a business. If you're doing high paying procedures, that doesn't lend itself to any kind of prepaid monthly payment as opposed to fee for service. And you have to learn how to market yourself so you can build that panel. You want to get to two, three, four hundred as quickly as you can.

And so, the biggest barrier basically is that up front investment and need to do all this planning, find a place to work and hire at least one person maybe after. You can start with just yourself when you only have five or ten patients, but once you start to get more and more and you're doing some marketing and they're starting to sign up, then you'll probably need at least one staff. But it's really pretty limited, one or two, if you're doing that kind of DPC.

Now, you could do another thing, and that would be to look for a practice that already is employing physicians and you would be an employee, but it would still have some of the advantage of a DPC if it's set up that way, because you'd have your own panel and you'd have some coverage. And again, the lifestyle would be better and you wouldn't be filling out a lot of paperwork. And even the charting is easier because you're not doing charting just for the sake of billing.

All right, let's go in a little deeper about this DPC model. I've kind of described the basics, and if we're thinking about starting a practice like this, you have to think about different things. You're going to have to actually create a business plan. Now, a business plan is just a document. It can be relatively short. It says, what do you plan to do? Who's your intended audience or patients you're going to recruit? What are you proposing to charge? Do a pro forma and engage an accountant and say, okay, well, if this thing grows in a certain way, let's say we're picking up so many patients per month for the first year, how quickly can you get to 200 or 300 patients, let's say in a basic internal medicine DPC practice? What can we expect in terms of all the expenses that will be covered during that first year and then in an ongoing basis?

You have to estimate those things and try and work out a pro forma of how you're going to go from losing money at the beginning, which obviously, if you have no patients, you're going to have some expenses and no income. The income is going to ramp up over time. You're going to be doing a lot of marketing.

When's the break even point? When's the point when you can start taking a salary? When's the point where you have to hire one or maybe a second employee and so forth? You need to spend some time thinking about the location. You can get creative and share space and really try and minimize the cost of your lease and the overhead associated with the clinic location. You have to choose an electronic health record and patient management software, that kind of thing.

Again, you're going to have to work on your pricing model. From what I read, typically children, you're going to charge $25 to $50 per month. Adults, $75 to $100 per month. For young ages, let's say $18 to $39. For older adults, maybe $100 to $125. And then when you get above age 65, probably $125 to $150. If you're in an affluent area, you may be able to get up as high as $200 for the kind of special service that you're going to be providing as a direct primary care practice.

With the children, I had a guest on. He was really on my show to talk about a new product that he had developed that he was selling. It was a software to help run and market a DPC practice.

But he did note that the charges for children depend a lot on the vaccine. So if you're getting newborns and those up to 18 months, three years, and they're going to receive a lot of vaccines, you have to make sure that you include that, consider that in your fees. As they get older, of course, all they're getting is routine checkups with almost no lab tests and no vaccinations.

And so that's where that price can get quite low on a monthly basis just to see them once a year for their physical, assuming they don't have any chronic illnesses, which would be not that common in a pediatric practice.

You're going to have to build that panel. You're going to have to set up a website, learn a little bit, pick some social media sites that will help promote and market your practice. You want to do community outreach where you're doing things live at health fairs or visiting local businesses and networking and doing some education in the community, which will get your name and your face out there.

And then in some cases, you might partner with an employer, as I mentioned earlier, which would be a way to try and keep the workforce healthy, especially when there's a lack of primary care in the area.

Staffing can be an issue only because you just need to decide how many staff you need, what they're actually going to do. But again, the requirements are much less than in a traditional practice. You might have six staff supporting a single physician with the billing and the scheduling and so forth. But when you're in a DPC, you're probably going to get along with one or two at the most to begin.

You're also going to have to set up your finances. The payments are coming in regular, so you're kind of prepaid. When you're doing it monthly, you're actually getting paid at the beginning of the month for each patient. And so you can very quickly see what it's going to take to break even. And then as you continue to grow, start becoming profitable. Some of the startup costs, I'm just giving you gross numbers, but you could probably start it from $40,000 to $100,000 overhead for that first year if you include the lease, the medical equipment, all the supplies, malpractice insurance, EHR, billing software.

Again, it's really just making sure that the membership fees have been paid. Marketing website and office supplies. Most break-even practices occur or reach that level when they've got about 250 to 300 members. Actually, you can kind of keep in mind. Now, I'm sure there are multiple books and courses and things that you can take to help walk you through this process. And I will be putting some resources at the end of the show notes. I'll mention it right now by going to nonclinicalphysicians.com/direct-primary-care-practice.

I think I've given you enough to get some idea what we're talking about and really start thinking about this. The other question that comes up from time to time is, can physician specialists build a successful direct primary care practice? Well, obviously, it's not a direct primary care practice, but it's a DPC style practice. And sometimes, yes, it can be very successful. The model needs a little bit of modification depending on what you're doing, but the model can be used by specialists for high demand specialty services and sometimes for employer contracts.

Let me give you some examples for this. For example, cardiology. Well, hypertension, heart failure, arrhythmia, sometimes there's chronic ongoing disease management for that. And cardiologists could carve out part of their practice following that kind of model in which they're getting a membership type payment every month or quarter. Now you have to, again, revisit this issue of can you do that. You can't do that for Medicare patients, obviously, if you are still a Medicare provider.

Now, if you've decided to focus on just those under age 65, then you can just leave Medicare and just do that part. And again, as I mentioned earlier, the patients can still access their Medicare for the other parts of their care. But if you're going to do outpatient only and chronic disease management, you could do this model. And it might even be possible to mix both, but I think you really need to check with an attorney or do some more research on that. Obviously, endocrinology, you can do diabetes care, thyroid disorders, hormone therapy, dermatology, concierge type of practice, only prepaid rather than pay as you go.

It takes probably a little more research, a little more aggressiveness to figure out how this would work as a specialist, but it can be done. And I think the pediatric side wasn't one that grew a lot initially, but it seems to be catching up now because a pediatrician that I spoke with says they're trying to figure these out, these problems out and how to handle the injections and immunizations. And it can work out quite well.

The marketing is a little different for a specialist. You're probably going to market to your referral base rather than directly to patients, although you could do both. There are examples out there. There's a cardiology DPC that is charging $150 per month per patient for unlimited consultations and quick access to the doctor and stress tests and EKGs on a regular basis and being very successful. Dermatology, cash-based clinic with a $300 initial consult and $150 per follow-up. And it's mostly for cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers and laser therapy.

I think there's a practice out West and one of my guests was doing in which she was seeing psychiatric patients on a DPC style of practice, prepaid membership type of care rather than the episodic and fee-for-service with insurers.

I think that that's all I have to say about the specialty side of things. It can be quite lucrative and it also, again, brings you closer to the patients and much higher satisfaction for both practitioner and patient.

Should a specialist consider this? Yes, if you specialize in a chronic disease management or cash pay procedures, should work okay. And you'll get less insurance hassle and more direct patient interaction and can be quite lucrative. Now, if your specialty requires hospital-based procedures, then it's probably not going to work out. And if you typically rely heavily on high insurance reimbursements for high cost treatments, then again, it probably won't.

I think this could be a solution for some of you to sum up here. If you've been in practice, if you're unhappy, if you have no objection to being involved in the business side, you can start your own DPC practice, I kind of like it because I think we know that in general, people who are the most successful financially in life are usually those that own a business.

You can get some high salaries and specialties and even becoming a nonclinical physician, a CMO at a hospital or something like that. But at the end of the day, when you retire, what you have is your retirement savings and whatever investments you've made with that money. But when you have a practice, you can grow that practice. You can hire other medical providers. You can leverage your own care with APNs and PAs. You can hire more physicians eventually if necessary to make it work. You could bring them in on as partners.

But at the end of the day, then you can sell that practice or sell it to your partners or get bought out. And in addition to the earnings that you've made, which are going to be quite positive. Again, I didn't say specifically, but it's very common for a DPC with a mature practice to be earning anywhere from $280,000 to $500,000 per year as a primary care. And specialists can do even better than that with a combination type of practice. That's why I encourage that if you have any inkling that that's something you think you can manage. You can hire an accountant and an attorney to set things up. Make sure you jump through all the proper hoops.

You can get someone to help you plan the business, but you need to be working and either having a lot of money saved up to start this thing or continue to work part-time and cut down on your traditional practice as you begin to accumulate patients. And then if you've got a hundred or so, you can cut those ties completely.

Most of the time, most DPC primary care doctors are going to have anywhere from 400 to 600 patients. And you can earn a lot more getting to 700 or 800, but then again, the lifestyle begins to suffer. If you want to learn more about starting a DPC, it will require planning, investment of time and money. But if you're successful, you'll find that you're much more satisfied, your patients are more satisfied, and you'll be able to make a very good income while enjoying a wonderful lifestyle.

Tell you right now that if you go to DPC Frontier at www.dpcfrontier.com, there's a lot of information there. There's been a lot published on this in the literature and there's a weekly podcast called My DPC Story with Dr. Maryal Concepcion. Since September of 2020, she's been doing a weekly podcast. There's lots and lots of success stories in that podcast. I will add more resources for you to look at, again, at www.nonclinicalphysicians.com/direct-primary-care-practice.

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 It’s Time to Start a Direct Primary Care Practice appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources/#respond Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:36:19 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=54584 Help for the Struggling Physician - 393 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John shares his selections of the most valuable resources for physicians pursuing a nonclinical career. From comprehensive courses to specialized training programs, these curated resources help doctors navigate their career transitions more effectively. Whether you're just starting to [...]

The post Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Help for the Struggling Physician – 393

On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John shares his selections of the most valuable resources for physicians pursuing a nonclinical career.

From comprehensive courses to specialized training programs, these curated resources help doctors navigate their career transitions more effectively. Whether you're just starting to explore alternatives or actively preparing to make a change, these tools can save you time and prevent costly mistakes in your career journey.


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.

Valuable Resources for Career Exploration

John highlights several core resources that provide foundational knowledge for physicians considering new careers. His Nonclinical Career Academy offers approximately 30 courses covering various career options, with both one-time purchase and monthly subscription models available.

For those just beginning their exploration, free resources like the Five Career Guide and the 70 Nonclinical Careers Checklist provide valuable starting points, helping physicians understand the breadth of opportunities available and specific steps to pursue them.

Specialized Training for High-Demand Opportunities

For physicians interested in specific high-demand fields, John recommends targeted resources like his Medical Science Liaison Course and Dr. Gretchen Green's Expert Witness Startup School. These specialized programs offer step-by-step guidance for entering lucrative fields that can either supplement clinical practice or provide a complete career alternative.

Dr. Heather Fork's LinkedIn for Physicians and Carpe Diem Resume Kit help doctors effectively position themselves for these opportunities through professional branding and resume development. Dr. Paul Hercock will teach you the essential principles of Medical Device Regulation and applied literature review, providing you the skills and knowledge relevant to a career in medical devices in the Medical Affairs Affiliate Program.

Summary

All resources mentioned in this episode are available through the links listed below, with many offering free or low-cost options to begin exploring new career possibilities. For ongoing support, physicians can join the weekly Nonclinical Physician Q&A sessions held every Thursday at 2:30 PM Eastern. Those interested in receiving regular updates about these and other resources can sign up at nonclinicalphysicians.com/dailyemail.


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 393

Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities

John: As I mentioned a minute ago, today I'm going to share some of the free and paid resources that you might find useful. Some are freebies that I created, others are paid courses that I or a colleague have created to help you on your career journey. They include a few written resources, other in video format, and one that's actually a recurring live event. I'll describe each one, explain if there's any cost involved, and I'll read off the link to where it can be found. And of course, to make it easy for you, I'll place all of these links in the show notes for today's episode. So let's just jump right in.

Here are some of the valuable resources for doctors exploring new job options. This is actually not everything I've ever promoted or shared with you, obviously, but these are some of the major ones. I'll start by telling you about my academy. It's called the Nonclinical Career Academy. It's found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca. It has about 30 courses and lessons. Some are single videos, some are multiple. And it has a pretty good cross section, especially if you're just getting started, overviews and introduction to certain topics that maybe you're not familiar with, certain careers, certain side jobs, and forth.

And then there's a fair number in there to talk about how to work in the hospital environment as a medical director and a VP and the CMO And forth. So there's a lot in there. And actually, if you're, if you join the NCA as a member, you get access to everything and you don't have to go through everything.

And when you sign up, there is a little bit of an instruction there about how to navigate the different courses that are available, depending on your interests. So you can look at that. You can do a one-time purchase where you get everything forever. And even as I add things like new courses, which I haven't added many in the past year, but I am still putting out weekly Q&A sessions, which could get added to that about once a month. Those are short 10, 15, 20 minute Q&A sessions where I address one particular aspect of one particular career or approach to pursuing a new job or things such as that.

You can get that for one price, or you can do a monthly membership. That monthly membership currently is at $57 a month. And that's there so that you can get in there and just spend two or three months, four months really intently going through it and then just dropping off. Or you've got the one-time purchase so that those fees don't continue forever if you're taking your time.

Now you can use for the monthly membership a code FIRSTMONTHFIVE. That indicates that you can get your first month membership for only $5. And you can look around and make sure it's right for you before continuing your membership. You can always leave, if you're on the monthly membership, you can leave at any time. That's the first thing I wanted to mention. It's been there for several years and I am still adding some content to that, and there can always be more in the future.

The next one is my free Five Career Guide. Now that's a 19 page, I think. Yeah, I think it's kind of like an eBook, 19 pages or so long, and it's free. And you can get that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/freeguide. You see a pattern here, right? All these are going to be nonclinicalphysicians.com/ some keyword. This one's nonclinicalphysicians.com/freeguide. It's all one word. It's a 19 page eBook.

It's one of the first things I put together. It provides advice for pursuing a career as a physician advisor for utilization management, as a physician advisor for clinical documentation integrity, which most hospitals have these days, as a medical informaticist, as the VP for medical affairs, which definitely is a step up. Those are all obviously in the hospital setting. And then I also added one which is very commonly pursued and is very popular, and that's how to pursue being a medical writer.

On each of these topics, there are some multiple resources, really. I'll look through the first one here and kind of tell you, this is kind of what how I've broken it down. I'm talking about the supporting circumstances, which might help you get into one of these, the typical job listings, the steps to take, and then some useful resources for each of those five. And that's a good starting point if you're interested in one of those jobs. Now, if you're not interested in that, and you're talking about something in pharma or in health insurance or life insurance, or who knows, then this would not be all that helpful.

Then let's step to the next one. Again, this is one I produced several years ago, and I keep adding to it. It's called 70 Nonclinical Careers Checklist. It's the 70 Nonclinical Careers Checklist. It actually has 73 specific unconventional and nonclinical jobs for physicians on it. So it's growing. I think I've caught all the major ones. And it can be found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/70jobs. You have to give your email address to pick this one up and the previous one as well.

But in this one, it's a list. It's about three or four pages long. It's got 73 specific unconventional and nonclinical jobs for physicians. And most of them, the vast majority of them have some kind of a resource listed that goes along with trying to get this that would support your ability to learn more about it, and maybe to even find some resources to pursue that particular job.

Most of those resources are either a professional organization, or some other useful website that will provide support for you as you narrow that list down to one or two or three, and start working on how you might pursue that job.

All right. The next one is actually a course. It's one single course within the Nonclinical Career academy that I mentioned earlier. And it's very popular because it's a type of job that's very popular because pretty much any physician can pursue it. And it is a segue into the pharma industry. If you don't have any other way in, you don't have a background in research or anything like that. It's a course called Build a Rewarding Lucrative Career as a Medical Science Liaison. And you can find that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/MSLcourse. That's all one word.

This one does have a price tag. I think this is probably the most expensive on this list. It's a little bit under $400 unless sometimes I do specials. But as I said, it's a popular job. And by going through this course, you'll learn the proper lingo, you'll learn where to look, you'll learn about all the resources that I've identified for helping anybody become a medical science liaison.

You could be in an unhappy, unfulfilling job that you're starting to really burn out from. And by going through this course and implementing the things in there within six to eight months, you'll be ready to apply for your first job as an MSL. That's something that's been out there for several years.

And then speaking of courses, here's a course by someone other than myself. And it's one I've been promoting recently. It's closed right now for membership. However, this one is reopened at least twice a year. And this is called Expert Witness Startup School. It's at nonclinicalphysicians.com/ewcourse for expert witness. This is Dr. Gretchen Green's very popular course for becoming an expert witness consultant.

I'm not going to go into great detail here. But if you're in clinical practice, and if you're not averse to working with attorneys, it could be very fun for those that are in the right frame of mind. The course is excellent. It's extremely popular. It consists of four weeks with content for each week and then live sessions with Gretchen, a lot of supporting materials. And if you are thinking, "Okay, I'm a little burned out here", what you can do sometimes is start to do witness, expert witness consulting. And it generates enough revenue that you can cut back on your clinical time to the point where you might be doing I'd say 10 or 20 hours a week of expert witness startup, expert witness work, and then cut your clinical down by at least 20 hours, you'll still end up making a lot more money because the expert witness work is much more lucrative.

I throw that out there because it's been around for over five years. Several of my followers have taken the course and I know that hundreds of other physicians have taken it and successfully started their own expert witness consulting business.

All right, the next two actually are resources that have been created by Dr. Heather Fork. The first one is LinkedIn for Physicians. For many, many careers that you might pursue, whether clinical or non-clinical, a LinkedIn profile is important to create and to maintain. And you can try and struggle through setting up your LinkedIn profile by yourself. And LinkedIn does a fairly good job of walking through it.

But this course by Heather Fork is really a comprehensive LinkedIn course specifically for physicians. It tells you in there how to build your LinkedIn profile so that you'll be attractive to people out there looking for physicians with certain skills and physicians interested in certain types of side gigs and or moving into a nonclinical or unconventional clinical job. If you don't do this right, you can be lost in the mix. But if you have a good LinkedIn profile, as Dr. Fork recommends, it's very useful and very effective for finding those jobs.

Now, the link for this is nonclinicalphysicians.com/linkedIn. That's actually one of the affiliate links that I have on this list. That means that I get a small commission for sending you to her. The same is true for the Expert Witness Startup School and for Dr. Heather Fork's other course, which I'm going to describe in a minute. It doesn't affect the course cost, whatever it is, at whatever level that Heather's asking. It's exactly the same. It's just that because I can send her someone perhaps that she couldn't reach by herself, I get a small commission for that.

It's definitely the best course for learning how to use LinkedIn for physicians. There are other courses out there for the general public, but she even gets into how to network using LinkedIn and specifically as it relates to physicians networking for nonclinical careers. So, it's extremely helpful.

The next one, again, is Dr. Heather Fork's Carpe Diem Resume Kit. This is really an awesome course for creating a really excellent resume. When you're looking for an unconventional or nonclinical job, you usually don't use a CV. You use a resume. It's structured differently and it does take some skill in putting a resume together. And her course walks you through the process and it consists of digital guides and video tutorials, templates, skills builder exercise, because there's certain types of words that you should use. And she goes through and kind of explains the types of words to use, keywords and so forth.

She has actual samples of resumes and a whole lot more in that. That's called the Carpe Diem Resume Kit. And this one can be found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/resumekit. And again, very reasonably priced and will really help you to get that resume in a position where it's going to clearly meet the needs of the company that's recruiting you and the headhunters that are looking at your resume and including all the keywords and other things that make a resume stand out from everybody else's.

All right. The next one is another course called the Medical Affairs Associates Program. It's found at nonclinicalphysicians.com/mantra because it is produced by Dr. Paul Hercock at Mantra Systems. And that's in the UK. This one is rather unique. It's a medical affairs training course suited to physicians and other medical and scientifically trained professionals looking to explore certain jobs in the medical device regulation industry in the UK and then the EU.

Paul Hercock has been on the podcast two or three times. Several years ago, there were some new requirements put in first in the UK and then the rest of the EU where there are medical device regulations. I think that was in 2002. Paul created this short course to teach you how to understand the regulations and how to help to support that. And partly because he hires people to do that. Even if you're in the US, you can do this for Mantra Systems. And for a small price, you can take the course. And then once you've taken the course and demonstrated that you understand the MDR and associated regulations, you can then apply for a job at Mantra or elsewhere for that matter. Again, that one is not an affiliate. There is a price, it's a very small price for what you get out of it. I would recommend you check it out at nonclinicalphysicians.com/mantra.

Well, those are the main ones. But the last one I want to mention before I go, and I do usually promote this on my website and in my podcast episodes, but we're still doing a weekly Nonclinical Physician Q&A. Those currently are being held every Thursday at 02:30 P.M. Eastern, 11:30 A.M. Pacific. I'm in central time. I'm basically logging on at 01:30 in the afternoon on Thursdays, my time. And we hit almost every single week unless I'm traveling or something.

You can access that going back to that nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca and looking for the Q&A sessions themselves, which you can sign up for only $5 a month and you'll get three to five posts a month with particular Q&A related to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers. In fact, another way to access that directly would be go to nonclinicalcareeracademy.com/p/weekly-qa. I'll put that link again in the show notes, but nonclinicalcareeracademy.com. You go there and just scroll down to through all the courses and you'll see the Weekly Q&A and you can sign up and then for very nominal fee, you'll have access to those. And then you can actually join us live for the Q&A.

Probably the easiest way to find out about those is to go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/dailyemail, and you'll be sent emails on a regular basis. They won't be daily, however. Again, that's nonclinicalphysicians.com/dailyemail.

That's it for the free and low cost resources. I wanted to mention today, I'll probably do another episode like this a few months down the road with some of the other resources that I've come across over the years. But for all of today's links and a transcript of today's interview, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources.

If you like these interviews, then please leave a five-star rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, such as Apple Podcasts or Spotify and also you can share it with a friend.

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 does not affect the price you are charged. 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 Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Exploit Your Medical Knowledge In New Ways https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/exploit-your-medical-knowledge/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/exploit-your-medical-knowledge/#respond Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:26:49 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=52645 Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 2 - 392 On this week's episode, John posts Part 2 of his interview with Dr. Robert Cooper who explains how to exploit your medical knowledge in new and profitable ways.  Picking up from Episode 391, Dr. Cooper dives deeper into nonclinical consulting opportunities, including disability [...]

The post Exploit Your Medical Knowledge In New Ways appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper – Part 2 – 392

On this week's episode, John posts Part 2 of his interview with Dr. Robert Cooper who explains how to exploit your medical knowledge in new and profitable ways. 

Picking up from Episode 391, Dr. Cooper dives deeper into nonclinical consulting opportunities, including disability file reviews, expert witness work, and medical necessity reviews. He shares key insights on how physicians from all backgrounds, including primary care,  can enter these fields, optimize earnings, and avoid common pitfalls.


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 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.
  • 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.

Navigating Disability File Reviews

Dr. Cooper provides an insider's view of disability file review work, emphasizing the importance of choosing ethical companies and maintaining professional standards. He discusses how to identify legitimate opportunities, appropriate compensation rates, and ways to avoid common pitfalls in this field.

Most importantly, he stresses that specialists and primary care physicians can succeed in this area, making it an accessible option for many doctors.

Exploit Your Medical Knowledge with Multiple Revenue Streams

From expert witness consulting to continuing medical education teaching, Dr. Cooper demonstrates how physicians can create diverse income streams while maintaining professional integrity.

He emphasizes the importance of delivering quality work, understanding market rates, and being selective about opportunities. His experience shows how combining various consulting roles can provide financial rewards and professional satisfaction.

Summary

Physicians interested in exploring consulting opportunities can learn more through Dr. Cooper's Website or by connecting with him on LinkedIn. His approach to combining clinical practice with strategic consulting work demonstrates how to maintain independence and avoid burnout while maximizing earning potential through ethical and professional side gigs.


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 392

Exploit Your Medical Knowledge In New Ways

- Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 2

John: Well, let's go back to another one then. I think that's one that you've been doing for the most amount of time and have spent the most cumulative hours on, and that's the disability file reviews. So how did you find that? Did someone point you to it? Were you just searching around the internet? I mean, how did you find that? What should we do if we're interested in it? Because I have looked into this a little bit myself. And I'll just say, as a family physician, they're usually looking for a specialist. I mean, there's a lot for neuro and physiatrists and that, but I know they're out there for primary care at times when they just need the general. So any tips on that? What's it like? How long does it take? We'll kind of do that first, and then we'll move on to the next one.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Sure. The first gig, I think, was through the New England Journal of Medicine. Like I said, I answered that in the New England Journal of Medicine. Small company, I went out and learned how to do it, and they trained you to some degree—not terrific. And I started doing it. I like it because it's almost like taking raw materials, right? Looking through a file like a detective and trying to figure out what's going on. What you're trying to do is determine the level of impairment of a claimant—we call them claimants. There's terminology involved, but you have to know what you're doing when you're going through this. It's a method for actually sorting out the file, figuring out where it is, where the pieces are, how to put it together, and the different components.

I have not found really good training in this, honestly speaking. I took a course in it, but it didn't help me—I had done it before. So I think really providing nuts and bolts is important. I worked for three companies, but there is another way to find it. I'm not gonna mention the specific companies, but I will say that NAIRO—N-A-I-R-O, the National Association of Independent Review Organizations—has companies on there. Now, here's the important thing. Here's the important point for viewers: don't be undersold, okay? A lot of these companies are paying rates that are ridiculous.

What's happened in the disability world, unfortunately, is that they're moving a lot of stuff in-house to do full-time physicians come on board, and they're taking it away from some of that. I found that that's happened over the last five years. I told you before, I worked 10 hours a week for a major insurance company as an independent contractor. So I was doing that in addition to the other vendor companies. It was just a lot of work—10 hours a weekend. But I learned a lot from doing it. Then they stopped that and moved it in-house. So you have to be careful.

There are companies out there who ghostwrite reports. I'll just tell you that what they do basically is—they write the whole report up, and you just sign it. And they pay you very little money to do it. They're trying to save money. That is something you want to avoid. Okay, I won't mention any specific companies except to say that you don't want to do that. You want to really be legitimate about this. This is important. If you're doing this kind of work, it's important to be fair and impartial and to look at the work and come up with a conclusion that's reasonable. And that's what they want, actually—insurance companies want. Unfortunately, they're constrained like everybody else financially, so they're looking to cut corners. Unfortunately, that doesn't work too well when it happens.

So you have to be careful what you're getting yourself into. It's very important to pick and choose who you're working for carefully—not just in terms of what they're paying but also if they're ethical and so forth.

John: So does it seem like that's one of the things that's sort of changed since you've been doing this, right? I mean, heck, you started probably doing this before the pandemic, and then the pandemic hit, and everything's going online. Any other observations about what we should look for or not look for when looking for disability evaluation file reviews?

Dr. Robert Cooper: I mean, a reasonable rate is reasonable. I mean, I don't want to go into exactly what I mean. The ranges generally are, just to give you a range, I mean, $150 to $200 an hour is reasonable or over that. Some companies—I mean, I've not settled for $50 an hour or $25—I mean, it's ridiculous. Some companies that are actually coming into play, I would just walk away from them. Again, walk away. Instead of walking away, they get in trouble with that.

I will make a comment about something you said, John. There are a lot of family physicians doing this—general physicians. It's not actually—it’s just as much general physicians as there are actually specialists doing this because you need to have a holistic point of view of some of these patients. They look for this, and they want somebody to go through everything, all the problems, and come up with a conclusion. So, it's very much driven by primary care, family medicine, and internal medicine. In fact, the whole segment of that, in the company I worked in, was for that. So, you could do that.

You could also use this, by the way, any of these things, as a segue. I mean, mine is the expert network consultant, but a segue to get into full-time work. If it is what you choose to do and say, "Listen, I just don't wanna do clinical medicine anymore. I have to determine this is not for me." I mean, unfortunately, that's what happens sometimes. It's nothing—somebody's choice.

You could use this because many of these companies will ask you, "Have you had any work before? Have you done this before? Have you done disability file review? Have you done medical assessment review before?" Yes, I have. I've done, you know, X, Y, and Z, and this is what I've done. "Okay, great." And they'll interview you. This is why people have a problem getting in at the ground floor if they want to convert to full-time. If that's what they choose to do, it's because they don't have the experience. This is a way to get experience.

John: One of the things in my little research I've done on this topic is looking at Social Security disability file reviews. And that one seems to be a unique animal. Have you ever done those for Social Security? I think they have different companies specifically that only do SSDI-type reviews.

Dr. Robert Cooper: I have a friend that does that for endocrinology. But the problem is they don’t pay well. Private insurances, the vendors, the ones that deal with private insurance, pay much more. So it's not uncommon to get about a third or a half. She actually looks at me and says, "Oh my God, you're getting that kind of thing for doing it for the vendors? That's ridiculous, I'm getting nothing." And so I don’t, and I get those rates back, and they come back to me. And then, you know, people come to me and they'll approach me all the time. Today I had three of them approach me. "Would you like to do some work for us?" And I just look at it and say, "It's not worth it for me to do what I make." It’s not gonna do it. And I think once you get to the point where you're comfortable doing this, you’re gonna realize that and say, "You know, I’ve just not." It’s better to walk away.

John: Well, that’s good to know. I’ll just stop even trying because it’s been difficult to get any information on the SSDI ones, but they don’t pay well. What’s the point? Are there other types of chart reviews? This one, I get this question all the time. I know, for example, that state medical societies, you know, they have quality reviews. Those are pretty few and far between. But any other types of, you know, more or less paperwork, file review, based on your clinical knowledge that you've done or that you know of?

Dr. Robert Cooper: The medical necessity ones are good ones actually too, because they could be quick sometimes. Unfortunately, they don’t pay as much as the disability ones. But some of the private vendors will pay fairly well for a medical necessity review. The big thing about— I didn’t talk about this—but the peer-to-peer phone calls, those can be challenging. So you have to have a thick neck about you, particularly when you're doing a peer-to-peer for a medical necessity review. But I worked full-time for the insurance company. Every day was filled with these peer-to-peers. And eventually, after about two or three months, I said, "Uh-uh, no more." I went back to clinical medicine because I just didn’t want to. I was just... But doing it on a part-time basis, you know, and calling up, you can conduct these, and it's an act of doing this. You have to have a knack for doing this and calling up, but it’s a challenge sometimes. Because physicians are generally, you know, not going to be amenable. You know, they’re frustrated and upset. You’re calling them up and telling them that you're going to deny something or you don’t have the adequate information, and they're gonna come back at you. But there’s a way to handle yourself in both these things. And that includes disability file reviews too, because there’s peer-to-peer for that as well when you're calling up the attorney position. So you get that a lot too. So you have to be willing to do that. Some people are, some people aren’t. And just handle that. I mean, everything has its pros and cons. Every one of these things, okay? So you have to kind of take the good with the bad when you're doing it.

John: Well, yeah, I guess, you know, each person has to sort of assess what they’re good at, what they’re interested in. You know, I’m a meticulous person. Maybe that helps in certain situations. Maybe it doesn’t help in others. I was going to also ask your opinion, switching gears here, on some follow-up on—you've been, in the past, an expert witness, which, you know, as you mentioned earlier, in the field of endocrinology. But what advice would you have for physicians who maybe are still working, you know, part-time, thinking about entering that field?

Dr. Robert Cooper: It’s a good field. It’s very lucrative. I mean, it’s not uncommon for somebody to charge upwards of up to a thousand dollars an hour in some cases for some specialties. I mean, it sounds great, but it has its problems too. I mean, you have to have a thick neck. I mean, just sitting in the seat I'm in right now—I told you last week, I had a deposition. I was deposed actually on a case. I have another case that’s going on that I’m getting subpoenaed in. I might have to travel to a different state—it’s a criminal case that spun out of a civil case. I mean, I’ve never had that happen before in the years I’ve been doing it, but I mean, these things happen, and they can be disruptive to practice. They can be disruptive to doing it. You have to have a contract in place. I mean, all these things are important. They're not something that you just kind of throw yourself into. And you have to be able to carry yourself well to be able to do that.

I mean, writing an expert report is very important. I mean, SEEK has some courses on this, how to do it. There's a great book on that too, but I think also being coached—like, how do I write a report? How do I put one together that's going to make sense, that's going to flow? Because the better your report is, the less chance you're going to be deposed or put to court because it's going to settle most of these cases. So you have to learn that. It's the kind of thing that you learn as you go along.

So again, you need to enact this—kind of figuring out what is the best way to put a good report together, different stages, learning a little bit about law and how it works, and the evolution of a case. How do you get deposed? When you get deposed, how do you handle yourself during a deposition? How do you handle yourself during a trial? These are all things to consider because if you screw up a couple of times, you're not going to get asked again to do any cases.

So it's all about putting your hands into one thing. You know, I always step back and say, "You know what, I want to do a good job. I really do, as an expert witness." But if, for some reason, something out of my control happens—and it does sometimes—that I get looked upon or frowned upon negatively for whatever reason, I have something else to fall back on. I can do other work. I don't have to throw myself into one particular thing. That's how I always look at it. I still want to do a good job.

John: Let me ask you this, because this comes up, I think, in others I’ve spoken with who are looking to get more and more into expert witness consulting. I guess, marketing themselves—how do they find clients or attorneys? Do they just come to you when you've done this just because of your local notoriety? Or do you have a process for trying to get visibility for some of these attorneys who are looking for help?

Dr. Robert Cooper: First off, you have to be careful with that. If you start listing yourself all over the place, that's going to come up during deposition. It came up last week. "How many directories are you in, Dr. Cooper? How many times do you do this? What are you doing?" Because they're looking for people that are hired guns and trying to nail them on that. So actually, I don’t list myself in anything except SEEK. SEEK is the only directory I list. I’ll make a little plug because they’re a good company.

I just had somebody call me right before I got on the phone with you, saying, "You know, the spam call—it wasn't a spam call—it was somebody trying to get me into a directory." I just quickly got them out of there. "How much money is it going to cost me? What is it going to do?" I really don't have a need to list myself in 16 different directories. I've never really found it to be helpful.

I think the best thing is word of mouth. When you do a good job, the next thing that happens is the next attorney tells somebody else about it. Then they call you and say, "You know, you worked with my friend on a case, and I want to work with you too as well. I've heard that you are pretty good. You're responsive, you get back to me, and you're available."

I think calling people—like if an expert, if an attorney calls you—you need to get on the phone with that attorney the same day, within an hour or two. Get on the phone and respond to that attorney, saying, "What's the deal?" And also, you're interviewing them too. You don’t want to get involved with any type of attorney who’s not doing anything ethical. Everything has got to be ethical. It’s got to be impartial. You don’t want to come across as somebody who’s biased during a case.

These are all things you learn as you do it. There’s a way to conduct yourself. It’s very, very important. You don’t just jump into these things—you have to know what to do to provide a good product.

John: I think that particular one—the expert witness—it’s a good combination because you're acting as a physician, as an expert, as a professional, but at the same time, it’s a business if you decide to continue doing it on a regular basis. So you have to know about those resources, like the SEEK list of available consultants.

And again, there are places where you can learn—SEEK included—that, you know, maybe give you a little advice on how to prepare for these things. And if you're doing your first deposition, that kind of thing. So that's always been interesting to me.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah, oh, sure. It's a very interesting thing. I mean, I've done probably over 100 cases in expert witness work over the last 10 years. And I would say that I've had everything from somebody having a terrorist attack and blowing up the pituitary gland in our country and having me testify in that to, you know, hypoglycemic episodes in jail and things like that. I've had cases like that. I mean, it's so fascinating. It really is. You find yourself like a detective. Many times, I've come back to an attorney and said, "You know what, you don't have a case here." They don't want to hear that, but you don't have a case. You have to be honest, very honest with your attorneys that are coming to you. Very ethical and very honest. This is very important, any of the work you do.

John: Well, they might not like to hear that, but better that than they waste tens of thousands of dollars and find out at the end that they don't have a worthwhile case at that point.

Dr. Robert Cooper: That's right.

John: All right, well, have there been any of these other side gigs, consulting types of things, and reviews that we haven't learned yet from you, any others, examples, or have we kind of covered the majority today?

Dr. Robert Cooper: Well, there is another thing I do—I love actually too. I teach actually, I teach at a, there's a company called MCE—I'll just be specific I guess about that. Cause I teach that once a year or twice a year, they have me fly out somewhere and teach primary care and I love it actually. I really enjoy it. We have about 150 people there sometimes and it's on it, usually it's on endocrinology review for primary care. And I've enjoyed that. I've had two stints in Disney world already.

John: Oh yeah?

Dr. Robert Cooper: Where I've gone out there and done that. And I love having people respond back and ask questions.

John: So that's just like a continuing education for physicians?

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah, that's right. That's right.

John: Okay.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Another part of this that we didn't talk about actually, too. Maybe we should at some point. Maybe we've done now. Locums. Locums are a way to freedom, actually, too. And I think I've done that. I've done a lot of locums work in the past. I don't now. I'm permanent. But it's some of the best freedom you can get. And if you're like in this position right now where you're kind of considering, like, I think I would just say to your viewers, if you're in a position where you say, "Oh my God, I can't go back to work," and you have that feeling in your stomach on Sunday night, like I've had a couple of times, think back for a second and say to yourself, "Hey, why do I feel that way?" That's the first thing—introspection. Why do I feel that way? Is it something that I could change in the environment I'm in first that could actually make things better? Or, if it's not, is it a different environment clinically that I could be in? Or do I need to figure out a way to integrate this other stuff maybe into place that I could do it so I could cut back on that? Because I don't think it's all or nothing.

I see people at SEEK when I taught this year. They come up to me at lunch and say to me, they sit down—we have like a group of, like, I have 50 people sitting next to me—and they say, "How do you kind of get away from this?" One physician came to me and said to me, "When I was pregnant, I was sitting on my bed. They were giving me an epidural, and the administrators were coming over to me, saying, 'Look at the computer at the CMR, at the letter on medical records, and go back to the records.'" And I said, "I can't believe that." She said to me, "How do you function in that environment? This is what I'm going through," she said. "I have to find some relief," she said, "because I don't have a break ever." I find that so difficult to deal with. I mean, you have to be able to practice. Medicine is a great field to be in. It's a great thing to be a physician, regardless of what specialty you're in. But I think you have to do it on your own terms. You can't have that plugging and deal dread and stuff. So that's the important point, actually, too.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And... You shouldn't put up with being burnt out and frustrated and unfulfilled for too long. You can do it for a little while, but you don't need to put up with that. Because really, as you said earlier, physicians, they have a lot of information, a lot of knowledge, skills, and it's all very valuable if you can leverage it to your advantage.

Dr. Robert Cooper: I think the thing about locums, I was going to say before, just to get back to that for a second, we used to think of locums as being outsiders. But the truth of the matter is that locums are actually becoming sort of the norm, almost.

John: Right.

Dr. Robert Cooper: That's not a great... I mean, it's getting competitive, actually, to get a locum position or something like that. Because there's a shortage of positions, people are looking. But there are some great companies out there that do locums kinds of activity, a call, and they can really provide you with some great experiences to do it, too. I mean, it may not be for everybody, but it's a way to sort of break away.

John: Yeah, I think if you're feeling desperate, you might as well consider everything and narrow it down, maybe, to what fits best. But locums and part-time work and consulting and telemedicine, you know, is another option.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah, right.

John: So, let's see. So, you told me that you like to help other physicians learn this stuff. You're teaching at SEEK and other places. So, let's see if someone would want to get a hold of you, learn more about what you've been doing, and get some help. I think you are on LinkedIn, is that correct?

Dr. Robert Cooper: That's right. I have a website. You have it there. RJCmedicalconsulting.com.

John: Okay. RJCmedicalconsulting.com. Okay, go ahead.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Correct, correct. I'm looking at some point maybe in... I actually developed a course already for leveraging medical. I haven't done it yet. I'm looking to see if there's any traction, if people want to take it. And when I get a critical volume of people together, I might do that, actually, too—online or in person at some point. And I, you know, all these topics, I think, as I mentioned before, preparation and learning how to do it is very important. So, you know, you could direct them there to that website, and certainly, they can.

John: Yep, I will put those links in the show notes, along with a transcript of our whole conversation. And yeah, maybe they should reach out and at least maybe follow you or connect with you on LinkedIn and then look at the website for more information.

Dr. Robert Cooper: The other thing I haven't done, but if anybody is interested, if they want me to come out and give a lecture at one of the meetings, either a keynote or something else on this particular topic, I'm happy to come out there too. So I'll just ask you that.

John: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I'll mention this. I haven't talked about this in the podcast much, but when you talk about these opportunities and sort of the non-clinical side of things, most of the time, it still qualifies as CME. So, some of these organizations can actually give you CME credit for it because it's something that supplements your practice. And, as I think you have said in the past, you know, like when you're doing expert witness work, you actually become a better physician. To prepare for that, you have to. So, that's all good stuff for CME.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Absolutely right, absolutely right. And even expert network consulting stuff—you learn things. And things that you wouldn’t know are coming—ARE coming and are the wave of the future. And it really keeps you up to date on what’s happening. It makes it diversified. So it gives a different meaning to going in every day and seeing patients.

John: Exactly.

Dr. Robert Cooper: When you're doing it.

John: Exactly. All right, well, I think we're pretty much at our time now. So I want to say thank you very much for joining me today, Robert. This has been great. And I think the listeners will really appreciate all the wisdom you've shared with us today.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Thank you for having me on. I hope that reaches people and hopefully, we can help them.

John: I'm sure it will. All right. Bye now.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Thanks, John.

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How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part Time Consulting https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/part-time-consulting/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/part-time-consulting/#respond Tue, 11 Feb 2025 11:51:46 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=48230 Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 1 - 391 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John interviews Dr. Robert Cooper, an expert at part time consulting. Robert is an endocrinologist who has mastered the art of combining clinical practice with lucrative side gigs. He shares how he doubled his clinical [...]

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Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper – Part 1 – 391

On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John interviews Dr. Robert Cooper, an expert at part time consulting. Robert is an endocrinologist who has mastered the art of combining clinical practice with lucrative side gigs.

He shares how he doubled his clinical salary by dedicating just one day a week to nonclinical work while maintaining his medical practice. His experience demonstrates how physicians can maintain independence through strategic part-time consulting opportunities.


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Building a Diversified Medical Career with Part Time Consulting

Creating a balanced portfolio of clinical and nonclinical work requires strategic planning and a willingness to explore various opportunities. Robert advises against putting “all your eggs in one basket” and encourages physicians to maintain independence through multiple revenue streams.

This approach includes carefully selecting opportunities that value physician expertise appropriately and being willing to walk away from undervalued propositions. This strategy provides financial benefits that help prevent burnout and maintain professional satisfaction.

Maximizing Value in Consulting Opportunities

Expert network consulting offers physicians unique opportunities to leverage their clinical knowledge for substantial compensation, often matching expert witness fees. The key to success lies in providing quality insights while maintaining professional boundaries and understanding market value.

Robert emphasizes the importance of proper preparation, effective communication skills, and setting appropriate fee structures that reflect a physician's expertise. Working with multiple platforms and maintaining strong professional boundaries helps create a sustainable consulting practice.

Summary

For physicians interested in exploring consulting opportunities while maintaining clinical practice, Dr. Cooper's experience provides a practical roadmap through his work with expert networks, disability reviews, and medical necessity reviews. By delivering quality and demanding appropriate compensation, physicians can create rewarding side gigs that complement their clinical practice.

Dr. Cooper actively shares his expertise by teaching at SEAK and he welcomes connections through LinkedIn for those interested in learning more about these opportunities.


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 391

How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part-Time Consulting

- Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 1

John: Today's guest is a specialist as a practicing physician, but I bring that up because in the world of physician non-clinical careers, I consider him sort of a generalist because he's done different side gigs and actually some things that are clinical and unconventional clinical. And so he's worked so many numerous side jobs that they're very interesting. And I thought, well, this is going to be really good because doing this kind of helps you avoid burnout. It's interesting, keeps things interesting. You make a little extra income and there's lots of opportunities for physicians. With that, welcome to the podcast, Dr. Robert Cooper.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure being here, both an honor and a pleasure. I can tell you, I listen to your podcast all the time and it's my favorite thing to do on the treadmill when I'm listening. I've got some great segments there that I've listened to and learned from too as well. So I'm happy to be here contributing. Thank you so much for having me.

John: I love that. I love that. But I think you have a ton to share and maybe some of the things I don't know if you found all these things yourself, or maybe there was something mentioned by one of my guests. It doesn't really matter. This is all going to be helpful. And I'm really happy to have you here to tell us about some of these things. So let's start by just introduce yourself in terms of who you are, what you do, mainly your clinical background, maybe, and clinical work that you've done through your career.

Dr. Robert Cooper: I'm a regular doc. I'm an endocrinologist. I started my training in New York. I trained at Albert Einstein in the Bronx, went on to do a residency at Long Island Jewish, then went on to do a fellowship at Long Island. And I have an entrepreneur spirit about me. So when I finished my training, I was the first endocrinologist out in the Hamptons.

And I enjoyed that, but having your own practice is very difficult these days, even then. When I first started medical school, I had no idea of managed care. I came in because I wanted to be, I actually wanted to be a family doc and I wanted to have people come to my house and set up a shingle.

I went to a very expensive medical school as I said, and I am still paying back my loans, but anyway, but I enjoyed, I enjoyed medicine to this day. I know my son is a medical student. He's a fourth year medical student now, finishing up his rotations and actually going for the match. And he's asked me many times would you go into medicine again? I said, absolutely. I think this is a great time to be in medicine. I actually despite what people say and the naysayers, I love what I do. I love practicing. I love seeing patients, but I like doing it on my terms.

That's the key thing here, John. When I was out in practice, I then got recruited to Western Massachusetts to a place over in Western Massachusetts to run the fellowship there. And I did it the traditional way. And I was in academic medicine and so forth. And there was issues and things like that. And I've been in different places in Western Massachusetts. About 10 or 15 years ago, I looked at, well, I'm not going to go any further. I want you to ask some questions.

John: No, tell me what happened then. Something changed at that point. Practice was okay. It was good. It was fun, but what happened?

Dr. Robert Cooper: It's always been good. But I think I answered an ad actually to do disability file reviews in the New England Journal of Medicine for a company, a small company at that point, so small that my son actually went out to Maine actually. And we went to dinner with the CEO of the company actually. And he still remembers that this day he's 24 years old now. And I started doing disability file reviews at that point. I learned how to do it. You have to learn how to do this stuff. It's very important to learn and to produce a good product. You can't just get thrown in there.

I think there's something I had to learn on my own over years. And that was my first real stint towards nonclinical medicine. And then I learned other companies and I learned how to do it well. And at points in time, I've taken other nonclinical responsibilities as well. That was my first break in to nonclinical. But what I like about it is that I could do things, as you said, in combination. The key to this whole thing, I think, and this is a little words of wisdom if you're going for practicing 30 years, is not to put your hand into one thing. I always say, I taught at SEAK as you mentioned before at SEAK. And when I put my hand, you put your hand into one thing, I tell the audience, it gets chopped off your hand.

And that's true of clinical medicine. That's true of being all in full time sometimes. That's true of being an all in employed as an insurance person. That's true as being all in you do it in little bits of pieces of each thing, actually, too. It makes the best thing because nobody has complete control of you. You have control of yourself. It's on your own terms. We as physicians are very independent people. That's why we went into medicine to begin with. And then now what happens is that all of a sudden we're being controlled. And we don't like that. I don't blame anybody for doing that.

And the problem is as you pointed out, I said before about burnout. And I hate to see physicians burn out. We have a shortage of physicians right now, a shortage of primary care, a shortage of specialists. I would like to see people remain in medicine, quite frankly, but to a certain degree. it's not for everybody.

But I think at some point also in time, if somebody could combine the nonclinical and leverage that as well and stay in clinical medicine, we'd be all better off as well as the person, maybe if they wanted to be and the population at large.

John: Absolutely. That's actually one of the reasons why I wanted you to come on, because I've seen this before where still being in clinical, but maybe cutting back a little bit, doing other things to give you that feeling of autonomy, give you that sense that, okay, you're not if this company goes out of business, if this hospital closes, I'm not going to have a job. And it also helps prevent burnout because it's just the variety and the interest. And I think there's a lot of advantages to it. I'm interested in hearing more. Why don't you run down a list, maybe without going into any depth, just in some of the things you've done over the years, even some of those things, maybe that you're not doing any longer.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah. I'll outline the four things I think I do the most of, and some of it fades in and out. It depends. The thing I do, I mentioned before, disability-followed consulting. I've done that both with the vendors, part-time basis. I've also worked as an independent contracting physician for a major insurance company, 10 hours a week. And that required a little stress. You have to understand something else. I just want to step back for a stressful situations because it can be just as stressful as clinical medicine.

You want to step back and look at this and how much you could take on and so forth. And so I did that, that medical necessity reviews is also part of file review. And that's also something that I've enjoyed doing through vendors. I also worked full-time for a short period of time for an insurance company doing that as well. I didn't care for it too much. I can tell you, it's my own personal thing, but I just say, it's not peaches and cream that people would say, come on sometimes.

That's another end of it, the whole thing. I've done all, the thing I really like doing, and I've done more recently is expert network consulting. That is a wonderful way to do it. People don't know about this. I've gotten into in terms of providing expertise to nonclinical people, Wall Street people, in a way that provides just public information to platforms, but not getting specific about the platforms, but I it is something that is very lucrative. It pays almost as much or as much as expert witness consulting, which I've done also, another one of my things.

I find it to be very fascinating and I love teaching. To me, teaching is teaching fellows and residents in the past. Here, I'm actually teaching people that are brokers or people that are actually doing, or they're sometimes scientific people trying to develop a drug and diabetes or something. I'm an endocrinologist, so I'm doing that. And you could teach people how to, but basically any specialty can do this really, as long as you're doing a little bit of practice most of the time, I think, and you could combine this.

And I can tell you, I will say to you this, that with the nonclinical stuff I did, I told you before, I have a son in medical school who has a huge tuition in Boston and a very good school. I doubled my salary clinically as an endocrinologist last year, last two years doing this, working four days a week, full time. And one day a week doing the nonclinical stuff. If that's your avenue is to get in and make more money and you don't necessarily want to cut back your clinical stuff, that's okay too so you can do that. And it's been really great that way too.

You have to know how to do these things. It doesn't come just with sitting down. We didn't go, we didn't just get put into an exam room and have to examine patients. We went through years of training and residency and so forth, the same thing here. You'd have to know how to do it. You have to know how to be coached, what to do, and kind of how to come up with a good product.

People want a good product like anything else. And when you have to produce that good product, they keep coming back over and over and over again, and they'll pay you what you want, quite frankly.

I think having that, I tell my son who's graduating. I said he's going to go on and do a residency. And I said even if you didn't have that residency, you should have, I'll finish it and do it. But just having that degree, the fact that we went through what we did is, you mentioned this many times on the podcast I've listened to before, being a physician and having that amount of knowledge and be able to pick up on things, we're in a perfect position to do all this type of consulting.

And so, the thing is that doctors don't realize is they're in demand, not just clinically, but nonclinically. They're in huge demand, but they undervalue themselves. This is an important point. And this is another Cooper point.

Number two, I'll just say, it's this, walk away from an opportunity that doesn't pay, that undervalues you. People gravitate to these opportunities that I find disgraceful, actually, in terms of what they do. And that can be any breadth of thing, of the things I'm talking about. Walk away. It's more important to walk away, actually, and not get the opportunity, but to take the opportunity and undersell yourself. Very important point that I've learned.

John: Yeah, I think there's nothing wrong with trying different things. But as you said, if it's not really going to be worth the time, because our time is probably our most valuable asset other than our medical knowledge, then you just should move on or take the time back and spend it with your family.

Dr. Robert Cooper: Exactly right.

John: So let's see, why don't you pick one of those? I'm interested in everything you've said so far, but the expert network consulting, how did you personally find this? Is there any ideas you can give us in terms of how to locate some of those? And then what is it you need to know to be able to do? What are they actually looking for based on what you've done so far with that?

Dr. Robert Cooper: They're looking for people who practice, who have some sort of basis, but actually could even do it without practicing. They had knowledge of the scientific basis behind it, some consults. You get these surveys sometimes that come to you through, I guess, a company called Sago or Schlesinger or other companies like that.

I don't want to go into specific companies, as I said before, but I could certainly talk about that individually with the guests that want to do that. But I think that you get these companies that will approach you sometimes and ask you for your expertise, spend an hour or so. In fact, before I got on the line with you today, I spent three hours downstairs working on three different consultations, three different ones today, because I'm "off" on Fridays.

I was working on that, but really, it's just phenomenal in terms of that. So how did I come into this? All of this is really, things just come to me, I think, somehow. When you put yourself out there, that's the key. I have a LinkedIn page and I'd like myself open to opportunities. People will come to you and they see your profile, but the most important thing is when they come to you is being receptive, A. B, providing a good product. When you're on the phone with an hour with somebody coming on that's asking you about a diabetic product or something, or asking you about the sensors or something for how you feel about this different sensors, you want to provide insight into what you do.

We all know this already. I don't have anything non-public. The key thing you have to worry about with this is that you don't want to provide anything that's non-public. That could be construed as you get arrested for doing something like that or have really a problem. So you want to provide all public information that you're not from clinical trials or anything, but I don't know anything non-public. Most of us don't. We're not involved in clinical trials. We just do what we do each day, but that's what they want to know about.

These platforms, expert network platforms are looking for people. They keep asking me, can you refer somebody an endocrinologist, another endocrinologist? I get things that sometimes are outside my field of expertise. I never take anything that's outside my field of expertise. I will not feel uncomfortable with that. I will not do it. I will pass up on it. That's important actually not to do that, but I will go on and I will refer people sometimes to it. I've never actually gotten a commission for doing it.

If you refer people and they actually do consults, you can actually get a commission for it, but I've never actually seen anything like that, but that's okay. But anyway, I think you could get, there's multiple different platforms that are out there that you could look up and research, expert network platforms and do it. It's not perfect.

There are downsides to it. I taught a course at SEAK last year on this, and I think they're making that, they're a good organization, SEAK, and they're making it available too. I think they recorded me part of it, but I think they're making it available as well. But I also have my own course that I've taught already at SEAK.

John: Well, let me ask you this thing just to dig into it a little bit. When I'm online, I've had a LinkedIn profile for a while. And then again, the email addresses get out there, but are you saying that of the expert network consulting platforms, most of those coming through LinkedIn? Do you ever get just blind emails coming in?

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah, I do get blind emails coming in from different companies I even heard about before asking me, I've heard that you do this kind of work. Are you interested in joining our platform? Are you interested in doing a one-off consult? The nice things about these one-off is that you don't have to really, but I do prepare for it. There is a way to prepare for it. I wouldn't say I didn't prepare for it. And I could certainly go into elaboration about that in terms of looking at investor conferences. I find myself sometimes looking at that more than I do scientific conferences on different drugs and things like that. So I do prepare for it.

I want to provide a good product when I get online for an hour. Because if you spend an hour and you don't provide anything, I don't think anybody's going to want to come back to you again. It's like anything else. Even the expert witness work, you want to provide a good product when you're going through that. Disability file reviews, anything.

I think that it's important to prepare and to be ready for it. You also have to have a certain mindset when you do these consults. You have to be relaxed. I think the best investment you can make is to buy a headphone, a head jack, just to put it on because it frees you up and you can look at the computer at the same time. You want to get information. That sounds like a simple thing. I think it was a few dollars to buy the headphone investment for me.

But that was a very important thing. I'm not fumbling with the phone when I'm doing it. These are little tricks that you learn as you go along that you wouldn't know about. How do you conduct yourself? How do you continue to keep the conversation flowing? That's an important asset to have that. If you just stay still and don't elaborate or know something and don't talk about it, you're not going to get that across and you're not going to get the best outcome. So I think that there's a way to train people how to do this, I think, to some extent, to make them more effective.

John: Let me ask one more question about this and then we'll move on. I've never participated in that kind of thing, but I always kind of get the sense that from the invitation, sometimes it sounds like it's a one-on-one conversation. Other times it sounds like it's kind of a panel. For the ones that you've experienced, what is it like? Is it just getting on a Zoom call with somebody? Is it more of a multi-person call?

Dr. Robert Cooper: It's all the above. The ones that are multiple ones. Sometimes I'm actually listed as, I do a lecture actually, where I'm lecturing to a group of investors actually. For that, I charge more money for that. I actually have rates that I charge. And that's another thing. I'm not going to go into that now, but I would tell you that I do that and I charge more and I charge a minimum of 60 minutes. That's another important point. I don't prorate it because I don't want to be on a line for 15 minutes and waste my time when it's an hour I could be getting from somebody.

There's a whole series of things I've learned, how to maximize your time and your profitability when you're doing this. But it can be, I actually had times when I've actually had to travel New York City or Boston, I live in Western Massachusetts, to do something.

I always tell the story at SEAK when I'm there, that they had me, it's a funny story actually. They had me actually go to Boston to do, I think it was Sago or one of those companies, to go to Boston to insert into a dummy, a device for diabetes. They had me come there and they were actually paying $1,500 to do this plus travel for an hour's worth of work. Think about that for a second. That's not uncommon, by the way, to have that happen. I got this thing and I went and traveled into Boston. I'm sitting there, there's a one-way mirror actually on this place that I'm working on. I'm trying to put this thing and I was a cardiology fellow before I became an endocrine fellow for a couple of months. A little bit manual, not that disastrous. I'm trying to put this device into the dummy and I can't do it. I'm putting it in the wrong place. They must've been laughing at me behind the mirror. I can guarantee you.

And then they came out and I said, oh my God, they're not going to pay me because I didn't do anything right. They came back and they handed me a check and they said to me, that's exactly what we wanted to know, Dr. Cooper. We wanted to know how to put it in. We wanted to figure out whether endocrinologists were capable of doing this. That was the whole point of this. Thank you so much for your help. And they handed me a check.

John: Interesting. They learned they have to change it if they're going to involve an endocrinologists I guess.

Dr. Robert Cooper: That's right. But they're looking to learn. Exactly.

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The Secret Power of the Subconscious Mind https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/subconscious-mind/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/subconscious-mind/#respond Tue, 04 Feb 2025 13:56:26 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=46477 Interview with Dr. Sanj Katyal - 390 In this podcast episode, John interviews Dr. Sanj Katyal, a radiologist turned mental health expert focused on the power of the subconscious mind. Dr. Katyal describes the use of rapid transformational therapy (RTT) to address modern mental health challenges, particularly in children. As a physician and [...]

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Interview with Dr. Sanj Katyal – 390

In this podcast episode, John interviews Dr. Sanj Katyal, a radiologist turned mental health expert focused on the power of the subconscious mind. Dr. Katyal describes the use of rapid transformational therapy (RTT) to address modern mental health challenges, particularly in children.

As a physician and certified therapist, he shares insights on accessing the subconscious mind to create lasting positive changes, drawing from his experience helping physicians and families navigate mental health challenges in today's digital age.


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Understanding the Subconscious Mind

Sanj explains how 95% of our thoughts and behaviors originate from the subconscious mind, shaped by early life experiences. This understanding is crucial for addressing deep-rooted issues through RTT, which can achieve significant results in just 1-3 sessions by accessing and restructuring subconscious beliefs.

Studies demonstrate that RTT can reduce anxiety by 62% after six months, offering a promising complement to traditional therapeutic approaches.

Protecting Youth Mental Health

The discussion focuses on the critical intersection of social media and youth mental health, with Dr. Katyal providing practical strategies for parents. He recommends delaying social media exposure until age 16, implementing screen time limits, and creating phone-free zones to sustain meaningful family interactions.

These guidelines stem from extensive research showing the causal relationship between social media use and increased rates of anxiety and depression among youth.

Summary

For parents and professionals interested in learning more about rapid transformational therapy and strategies for protecting youth mental health, visit sanjkatyal.com. Dr. Katyal offers remote sessions focusing on anxiety, screen addictions, sports performance, and career development, helping clients unlock their full potential by addressing limiting beliefs at the level of the subconscious mind.


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 390

The Secret Power of the Subconscious Mind

- Interview with Dr. Sanj Katyal

John: We're going to deviate slightly from our usual topics today, and there's a good reason. One of the consequences of working long hours under stressful situations is that invariably it affects our families, it affects our children, and with children facing a lot of mental health issues in recent years, including things like the pandemic and all social media, I thought I would get Sanj back here on the podcast and just get his thoughts on these problems. with that, welcome back to the podcast, Dr. Sanj Katyal.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Thanks, John. Happy to be here. It's great to see you again.

John: Yeah, it was basically about four years ago that you were here. I think it was April, let's have it written down, 6th of 21. And, we talked a lot about what you were doing at the time. I think a good place to start today is to kind of update us on what you were doing then and what you've maybe, what's changed and what else you're doing now, which in four years, I'm sure there's some new things.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: I'm a radiologist. I ran a large private startup radiology group for about 10 years, managing a group of about 100 radiologists. And probably back in 2012 or 2013, I, and I visited a lot of hospitals, talked to a lot of C-suite CMOs, and I began noticing back then a really growing discontent among physicians. Didn't really matter what specialty they were, or even really what stage of career they were. There just seemed to be a growing unhappiness.

I remember thinking back from one of these drives about my own life, wondering why I wasn't happier than I was back then. It's not like I was unhappy. I had pretty much achieved everything I set out to achieve. And, and I didn't really find myself bursting with joy or fulfillment. And I really sought out to figure out why. And that search led me to become certified in positive psychology, which is, some people call the positive, the science of happiness.

And I did that for a while. I taught university classes to college students in positive psychology and lectured nationally to various groups, a lot of physician groups. And I started working with physicians for, for several years. And I think that's probably around the last time I came on the podcast.

And that's been very fulfilling, but I always seem to hit some sort of limitation when I worked with physicians and even kind of in my own life and my own personal development. And I didn't really understand why until I came across a book called Tell Yourself a Better Lie by Marissa Peer. And she's a world-famous therapist out of London.

My wife actually gave me that book. She's a therapist and she's like, oh, you love studying about the mind. You're going to like this book. And I really did. It basically shed light on why the physicians that I worked with and even myself kind of kept coming up against blocks and seemed to default back to kind of our default state. And that journey has led me to, to really study and become certified in therapy called rapid transformational therapy.

John: Okay. A couple of things that I would comment on. One is that, it's interesting because to me, I talk to a lot of people that want to change careers, have changed careers. And a lot of them say, well, I went into medicine and I pretty much didn't like it from the very beginning, but I did it because it was, I was smart and I was expected to, and I do all these things.

But then I think there's another group like you who had a vision. It was awesome. They love doing it, but I can see how something gets old after 5, 10, 15, 20 years, particularly if it's very stressful because to me, at least personally, I started just experiencing just the emotional and intellectual strain of just having to focus and concentrate much for long every day, not, trying to hurt a patient or something. Yeah, just there's different things that lead us to that point where, well, it's time for a change.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, absolutely. I'm definitely in the second camp. I enjoyed it for a while, but things get, you don't want to spend your life on autopilot. Just going through the motions. And I think part of staying healthy and fulfilled is continuously learning and challenging yourself and kind of figuring out what your next passion may lead you to.

John: I did want to mention at this point, because you talked about the positive psychology, you wrote a book called Positive Philosophy: Ancient and Modern Wisdom to Create a Flourishing Life. Just our listeners know that if they want to really learn more about what you've done and written in the past, they can get that at Amazon or wherever. Things have changed. And now you were telling me before we got on the call that there's some recent revelations that you've experienced, you talked about, you mentioned right now, I guess, the rapid transformational therapy. tell us more about that and why that is interesting and exciting for you now.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah. The thing that's interesting about rapid transformational therapy is it can access the subconscious mind, which is where 95% of our thoughts and behaviors come from. Most of us use our conscious mind, our willpower, our quote, thinking mind to try to make changes in our life, self-improvement, new morning routines, new exercise regimens, diets, whatever it is. But really, it's our subconscious mind.

And what's kind of deeply ingrained at that level, that determines the vast majority of our thoughts and our behaviors. And this is why we always seem to default, and we default to the state of our subconscious mind. And this is the roadblock that I kept hitting up against using positive psychology and our quote, thinking mind to change habits and forth.

John: Okay. This is where some of us concrete thinkers are like, okay, this is going to be confusing. I'm going to have to have you to try and sort this out for me. If I think about my subconscious and accessing it or changing it, I'm pretty much at a brick wall. The closest I can come to is I could say, well, sometimes I have certain dreams, and I have to assume that maybe some of that is triggered by my subconscious. But why don't you explain a little more about how we can even access the subconscious and how can we change what's going on subconsciously? I guess that's what we're going to talk about for the next 10 minutes or so. That'll be very interesting to hear.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah. So, it's all part of the same mind, but you can think of it in simplistic terms as two different minds, the conscious thinking mind and the feeling subconscious mind. And feeling always wins over logic. Most of us know exactly what we should do, but the vast majority of us don't do everything we're supposed to do or, know that we should do at a conscious level. If we take a step back, as children, we've all had experiences that were unpleasant. It could be minor things like friends not being nice or excluding us from a group to more significant challenges like bullying or abuse.

These experiences left their mark on us and our minds, in an effort to protect us and try to make sense of the situation, came in and formed some beliefs about the situation. The three most common beliefs are, number one is I'm not enough. So, my parents yelled at me because I'm not good enough. My friends didn't include me because I'm not funny enough. I'm not smart enough, thin enough, pretty enough, whatever it is.

The second major belief, and this is a big one for physicians, particularly physicians that may be listening to this podcast, is what I want isn't available. As children, our basic need is love and acceptance. And those experiences where those needs are unmet lead us to form beliefs like what I want, which is basically love and acceptance as a child, isn't available.

The third main limiting belief is I'm different and can't connect with others. And this one was a big one for me, being the only Indian child in an all-white school with a funny name and parents with accents and stuff like that. But we carry these beliefs, these beliefs become deeply ingrained below the level of our awareness, in our subconscious mind. And we carry them basically like baggage or heavy anchors with us throughout our adult life. And they really distort how we see ourselves and how we see others in the world around us. Those are big, big burdens to kind of unshackle ourselves from.

John: I think what you were saying was that the approaches to addressing that is not the same as approaches to what, in the previous, the more superficial kinds of issues. You mentioned that rapid transformational therapy. What is that and how is that different?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, behavior change is really the last, it's far downstream of the thing. We're talking about negative experiences leading to limiting beliefs and faulty programming that lead to kind of distortions and behaviors that don't serve us. And most of us try to focus on the very last part and change our behavior, maybe act a little different, do some things that may mitigate symptoms, symptom relief of anxiety, of depression, discontent.

But it's really going back upstream and uncovering the root cause of where and why and when these limiting beliefs formed. And it's really just understanding where they formed, how they formed, that you become free of them. You don't really even need to do anything except gain an awareness of them.

And then you can install more effective beliefs that serve us better, align with our highest aspirations and true selves. And that's what rapid transformational therapy does. Typically, very common things like anxiety, phobias, fear of heights, fear of needles, agoraphobia, depression, these are all, could be handled very effectively in one to three sessions.

This is not long-term weekly therapy for years going back. And the reason that can be done that effectively and quickly is because it's done under a guided simple hypnosis that allows us to bypass the critical thinking mind, goes to the subconscious level where these childhood experiences took place. And then once we're aware of them, it's easy to dismantle those beliefs that form from those experiences.

John: Is there much research or follow up either you personally or in the literature with the ability for that kind of shift to maintain itself for more than three months, six months a year? I don't know that there would be any difference, but I'm thinking for people who are attached to, well, five years of one-on-one weekly therapy for an hour versus what you're talking about, they're going to probably have a little skepticism. Where do you stand on that?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah. And I want to be clear also, this is not like, I think as physicians, when we look at new things or things are maybe are unfamiliar to us, we're looking at everything as an either or thing. And this is not an either or thing. This can very easily be a supplemental add on to counseling, therapy, medication, if that's appropriate.

I'm not here to say this is going to replace everything in the field of psychiatry. What I am saying is that this is very effective, quickly bypassing and uncovering blockages that have been, that have kept us stuck for many, many years, often unknowingly because of that subconscious access. There are studies also, because there's a large number of growing physicians trained in RTT, MDs. And I'm actually with another physician in Asia forming a group of physicians trained in RTT. There are several studies. The latest one I saw was six months out, 62% reduction in anxiety. So, these are obviously ongoing and stuff, but that's, those are, and from my experience and anecdotally from all the people that I've interacted with, that's a pretty significant and realistic number to achieve.

John: That's pretty interesting to hear because, today, if you're a family physician, you're treating somebody for a medical problem and there's always some kind of psychological component, or it is a completely different DSM-3 diagnosis, but it's like, you have to refer them. Sometimes you can't get them in for months and months. You are, as a family physician, kind of committed to treating, more than just, 2% of their illnesses. It sounds like something that maybe in the future, pediatricians, family physicians, others could learn this and just incorporate it into their approach to patient care.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Oh yeah, no doubt. There was a journal article, which I can send you any of these, in the Annals of Internal Medicine that showed RTT is the most effective treatment you have yet to prescribe. That's the title of the article. And it kind of goes through that.

John: All right. But we were going to talk about a specific topic that you're very interested in and that many of us are. And I mentioned in the intro is that the rate of mental illness in children is just skyrocketing, really. I'm not going to go into the details, but it's just been something that's been talked about and written about for years now. Seemed to be the tipping point was the pandemic, but I'm really interested in hearing about that. And the issue with social media, it just seems like it's obvious there are issues and maybe you can expound on what social media, the impacts have been negative impacts primarily. We kind of know the positive and then how this might fit into therapy or coaching or a different approach.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Sure. Yeah. The mental health crisis really started back in 2010. If you look at it, it's basically a hockey stick graph. It goes like that. And in 2010, a couple of things happened. The social media companies introduced forward-facing cameras. They introduced third-party apps that had intentionally addictive principles by behavioral psychologists embedded into these apps. number of likes streaks. Those are all the infinite scroll.

The goal was always singular. And that was to keep as many eyeballs on the screens for as long as possible. They didn't care at all about the consequences. And consequently the rates of anxiety and depression and suicidal ideations and suicide itself, successful suicide have skyrocketed. And people, skeptics have said, well, that's correlational, that's not causation, but there have been now hundreds of causation studies.

If you take teens and you remove Facebook or Instagram for one week or three weeks or a month, and you measure pre and post metrics using well-established statistically significant life satisfaction skills, anxiety surveys, all of that, there is no doubt that it's a causation in addition to a correlation. And what's interesting to me, because I give a lot of lectures to schools and to parents around screen addiction and youth mental health is the tech company founders, the people that got really rich off of social media, they are very stringent with their own families on when they get social media and how much they use, because they know that they know the dose dependent relationship.

There was a big article in wall street journal a few years ago on Facebook files where it all came out of all the data they had on Instagram and causing anxiety and depression and suicidal ideation in young teenage girls, and they covered it up for years. It's a huge problem, but I think it's related specifically to social media itself, as opposed to just banning phones.

John: Do you have guidelines that some of us could just take, easy guidelines in terms of limiting exposure and how to even do that? Is there some way to logically have a conversation with your kid?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, there is, because I think you can show them now graphs and I can send you a graph. I have a graph on my Facebook profile. It's pinned up there. And it basically shows the rates of anxiety, depression in adolescence and undergraduates, I believe since 2010. I've shared all this with my kids and say, what do you think about this? Have you experienced this? Have your friends experienced this? It's not a secret to any of them. They know that the levels of stress and anxiety are rampant among them and their friends.

Probably the number one thing is I would delay social media as long as possible. Definitely till age 16 at the earliest, if you can, many people need to give people kids phones for convenience, say contact, picking up for sports and stuff like that. That's fine. But if you can delay, especially Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, good 14 year olds aren't on Facebook, but Instagram and TikTok are the big ones. And as long as possible, if you can delay that, there are a few other very simple guidelines.

If you'd like me to share them now, let's do that. One is I would turn off all notifications except text messages. Steve Jobs, the way he intended the iPhone to work was talk, text and music. That's what that was his great dream. It was not infinite scroll or constant interruptions while you're trying to study or in school or having dinner with your family or whatever. I would remove notifications. And what that tells them is you want to teach your kids to use their phone on their own terms with intention. I'm going to go in and I'm going to check my email. I'm going to check social media. I'm going to check this. I'm not going to be a passive person sitting here with a barrage of stimuli coming at me that I can't control all done on other people's timelines. That's no way to live life.

John: Absolutely. I would say, and it's probably easier for us old people. I'm a few years older than you. I'm sure to me, none of those should be synchronous. They're not synchronous. The only thing that synchronous is when I pick up the phone to call somebody, I don't even consider texting synchronous. People ask, well, you didn't answer your text. So, what it was 15 minutes ago. A text can be answered whenever I feel like it.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah. See the difference between the younger generation and us is their preferred means of communication is text. That is to them, that's a synchronous conversation, which is why I say, okay, texts are fine. If you cause your friend is that's all they do is text. That's how they communicate with each other. But you're right. Everything else is totally asynchronous. But there's a lot people around me, adults, physicians that I work with they're addicted to checking their emails. They're addicted to social media. It's a habit that's very easy to fall into because it's a dopamine hit intentionally designed to be that way.

John: Oh boy. All right. What else should we know about this other tips or other things to watch for and where can we get help?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah. I think delay social media, turn off notifications. Apple screen time is a great tool. I limit the number of minutes that they can go on different apps, and then they have to request permission for additional time to do that. My son, when he was an undergrad, he told me, he's like, you need to just remove my Twitter at all, because I have finals coming up and I don't want to spend, I don't want to waste any time on that. They know that it's a waste of time. Once they learned to live with limits. Limiting with screen time is a big deal. I would say no phones and at the dinner tables and restaurants and in car rides, car rides, especially for people that have kids at home, they're not going to be at home forever.

And those car rides are going to become very precious memories to you, or they should be from very precious memories to you. And they won't be if your child is just on the phone the whole time. Those might be the only time you have alone with that child uninterrupted for that whole day. I would protect dinners, restaurants, and car rides from phones.

John: Now, this shows you how far out of the loop I am now. All my kids are in their 30s. Are you saying that basically the parent maintains control over the phone? They have set the access to certain things with their password, the adult's password that the kids can't fiddle with that and change those settings?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, it's a screen time password that only you would know. And it sounds big brother-ish or draconian, but it's really not because these apps are addictive that unless you teach this generation how to limit themselves and find ways to occupy themselves without just going to the phone as a default, they're not going to do it.

John: Yeah. It makes perfect sense. Obviously. You have to think in terms of, well, let's see, am I giving my kid beer to drink at night? While he's watching TV? Am I giving him, handing him the car keys when he's 10 years old? These are just basic things. It's gotten to the point where you got to do that, even for social media, obviously, because it's just as important, just as dangerous.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, exactly.

John: All right. Now you're doing some of this right with your clients/patients, whatever. Tell us how that works for you. And then you can actually give us your website for anyone that might want to pursue your help.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Sure. Yeah. I think that the reason that kids, the default to screens all the time is that they're really living far below their potential and they're not engaged in life. And this all goes back to what we talked about at the beginning, the parents limiting beliefs and conditioning is being passed on to their children in the form, and they're now becoming indoctrinated with the same limiting beliefs, forget about what I really want to do. I better get a high paying job where I can make a lot of money and then retire one day and be happy.

Well, we all know that that just doesn't work. There's thousands of very wealthy, successful people that are miserable. And rather than pursuing what they're really interested in doing and having their parents facilitate that and support that most of the people that I see and work with, their kids are being inadvertently, and it's not malicious. That's just the way we think we're doing something good for them. We're teaching them how to succeed in the world.

But these limiting beliefs that are being passed on to our kids essentially limit their potential. And by limiting the potential limits, their ultimate happiness and fulfillment. And that's why a lot of kids are wasting time scrolling because they're not engaged. And that's quite frankly, why a lot of adults are right.

You think about the Gallup surveys about workplace engagement and stuff, and it's less than 40%. And that's why, because people are in jobs that they have no business being in. And I think that's something that you help facilitate physicians by giving them options to explore nonclinical careers that they can use their training, but perhaps in different, more fulfilling ways. And I think that's part of dismantling these kinds of beliefs. The life I want isn't available to me. The career I want isn't available to me. I'm stuck. I'm trapped. I'm just going to suck it up for the next five years until I can retire.

John: Yeah. Are you serving an audience or a clientele that's physically located near you? Are you doing a lot of remote work? How does it work? And tell us if we want to reach you, how would we do that? And for what kind of issues?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, it's all on Zoom. I use Google Meet. it's very convenient. I work with people all around the world. I work primarily in four main domains. One is anxiety. The other is screen addictions and other kinds of addictions because addiction is basically a self-soothing behavior. And you got to figure out what you're trying to soothe yourself from, where the underlying pain is. Third is sports performance, really among kids and young adults. And then I work with a lot of adults that are trying to figure out where to go next in life, what to really uncover their own, their full potential and decide what to do. That's more of a career coaching stuff.

John: Got it. they can find you, tell us your website.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: It's sanjkatyal.com.

John: Okay, that will go in the show notes along with some of the other things, the book and so forth, and some of those other resources that you mentioned earlier. I don't know, any last words of advice or cautions for our listeners? Let's say our physician parents out there with their kids?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, I would encourage everybody to kind of look at their own belief system, conditioning, and what they're passing on to their kids, and try to see where that came from, and whether it serves them or their children, because most of the time, at least in my experience, it doesn't.

John: Yeah, I think back to my childhood and my parents. My dad didn't finish high school. I don't think they ever thought about reading a book on parenting. And so all those things, residual things, you just don't have access to solutions to problems that they never solved, or never even dealt with. And it happens within every generation. We're learning new things, we're facing new challenges, and we may not have all the answers. Would you say to just observe your kids and don't assume, well, they're just going through some stage if they're unhappy, depressed, anxious?

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, I would try to find out what your kids really want to do in life, free of your own inputs, and what parenting advice or suggestions, what did they love to do? What do they naturally do, without being asked to do? What did they do when they were really young on their own, try to find out what really makes them tick, and then do everything you can to facilitate them doing that, because they will be able to make a career out of it. And they will be far happier than if they're pushed into some of the things that we've all been pushed into.

John: What happens if you have that conversation, and either one, they say, I just want to hang out with my friends, or B, I don't know. I don't know what I like to do. I don't know what I want to do.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, I think not knowing is a good thing. We shouldn't expect an 18 year old to make a life sentence decision. Not knowing and taking a few years now, if they're sitting on the couch and playing video games, you have to have some kind of guidelines around what they can do. But taking a gap year or two and exploring different things, gaining awareness of themselves, and their underlying aspirations. There's nothing wrong with that. There's no race there. I tell my kids and other parents' kids, there's no race to the job market. The job market is going to be there. You're going to be working there for the next 30 years. There's no race to ever leave college early unless it's a tuition thing.

John: Yeah. Right. So long as they're not spending their time in college drinking and partying. Let's see some decent grades. All right. We'll go off on tangents on this all day long, I think. All right. Well, I want to thank you for coming to talk to me today about these topics. And it's pretty thought provoking. And I know there's a lot of anxiety around our kids and social media, and can we just cut them off and how to handle this. I think just what you've mentioned today is very helpful. I think they can do their research and if they feel like there's a problem, they should maybe look at your website, get some ideas and possibly even contact you in terms of helping one of their kids.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, I'm happy to help. Thanks a lot for having me back. It's good to talk to you.

John: I'd love to do this a little more often.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Yeah, it sounds good.

John: All right, Sanj, thanks a lot. I'm glad you could make it today. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Sanj Katyal: Thank you, John.

Disclaimers:

*Many of the links that I refer you to and 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. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, and 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. I do not provide 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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Have Faith in Your New Life Insurance Medicine Career https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/new-life-insurance-medicine-career/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/new-life-insurance-medicine-career/#respond Tue, 28 Jan 2025 12:04:27 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=46468 Interview with Dr. Megan Leivant - 389 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, Dr. Megan Leivant explains why you may want to pursue a new life insurance medicine career. Dr. Leivant shares insights from her six-year journey in the industry. Starting as a medical director at a direct life insurance company, [...]

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Interview with Dr. Megan Leivant – 389

On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, Dr. Megan Leivant explains why you may want to pursue a new life insurance medicine career.

Dr. Leivant shares insights from her six-year journey in the industry. Starting as a medical director at a direct life insurance company, she shifted to a reinsurance company, demonstrating the career growth opportunities in this field. Her experience highlights how physicians can leverage their medical expertise in an intellectually stimulating environment while achieving better work-life balance.


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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.


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Demystifying Life Insurance Medicine

Life insurance medicine offers physicians a unique way to apply their clinical knowledge in assessing mortality and morbidity risks. Dr. Leivant explains how medical directors collaborate with underwriters, combining medical expertise with industry-specific knowledge to evaluate insurance applications. The role involves case consultations, teaching, and research, providing intellectual stimulation while maintaining a connection to medicine without direct patient care.

Building a Career Path in Insurance Medicine

The transition into life insurance medicine involves specific strategies and resources for success. Dr. Leivant discusses professional organizations, networking opportunities, and industry certifications that can help physicians enter and advance in the field.

She emphasizes how full-time and part-time opportunities exist, making it an attractive option for physicians seeking career alternatives.

Beyond Patients, Still Doctoring

Dr. Megan Leivant shares how her medical skills and ability to build relationships remain central to her new role.

I miss seeing patients, but I'm still able to create relationships. It's just done in a different way now… It's critical thinking, it's teaching, it's teamwork and collaboration. So, I'm getting to still use a lot of those skills that I used when I was a practicing physician. – Dr. Megan Leivant

Summary

For physicians interested in exploring life insurance medicine, connections can be made through the American Academy of Insurance Medicine (AAIM) and LinkedIn. Dr. Leivant welcomes connection requests from interested physicians on LinkedIn to learn more about this rewarding career path.


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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton


Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 389

Have Faith in Your New Life Insurance Medicine Career

- Interview with Dr. Megan Leivant

John: Over the years, I've had the occasion to meet physicians who work in the life insurance industry, not health insurance not doing UM, but actual life insurance. And I've been sort of very interested in that topic. Those that I have spoken with informally, not necessarily on the podcast have said they really like those jobs. I've been interested in finding someone who's doing life insurance medicine. And so that is today's guest. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to talk to her. Hello, and welcome to the podcast, Dr. Megan Leivant.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Thank you so much for having me.

John: I think this is going to be fun. I wanted to learn more about this for years. And it's not as common a full time or even part time position as let's say, someone working in health insurance. I don't know about disability. Anyway, tell us a little bit about yourself, your mainly your education and clinical background that will get into what you do professionally now.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Sure. Well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast today. I'm really excited to be able to talk about life insurance medicine. It all started for me. I went to DePaul University for my undergrad, and I majored in biology and did a minor in French and then went to IU School of Medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine, and followed that up with my residency in internal medicine at Northwestern in Chicago. And then actually practiced outpatient internal medicine for 10 years.

And I did that in a variety of settings. I started out in a traditional private practice, and then I moved to the VA, and I worked at the VA for about five years. And then I was in more of a hospital based community practice before I made my transition. And then I did have a lot of teaching appointments throughout that period of time as well. And that was something that was really important to me.

John: Very nice. Well, then the obvious question that comes up is when a physician transitions from clinical to nonclinical, what led to that decision?

Dr. Megan Leivant: I would say several years before I transitioned out of clinical practice I realized that I was having an increasingly difficult time coping with the demands of outpatient clinical practice, which I know that many people are feeling that way. And present day. And so I actually started working with a physician career coach, Dr. Heather Fork, through Doctors Crossing, just to see what I could do to help my situation. Because at that point, I wasn't sure if I wanted to leave clinical medicine. I just wanted to try to figure out could I could I do better? Were there changes that I could make to try to make the day to day a little bit more manageable?

And we worked together for a good while. And I ultimately realized that transitioning to a nonclinical career was the path that I needed and wanted to follow. So through coaching, I learned a lot about my interests and my dislikes. We did the Enneagram and talked about marketable skills and personality traits. And it was really just a great growth experience to learn all that stuff and then help leverage those findings to apply them to different nonclinical career options. So part of that process, I attended the SEEK nonclinical careers conference to help jumpstart my research and look into other career options and reached out to former colleagues to kind of explore what they've done in the nonclinical realm.

I made new contacts on LinkedIn. it was a very kind of vulnerable, exposed experience putting myself out there to try to just figure out what was next. And I even tried some telemedicine during that transition. I did a little utilization management just to see what else is out there. But I kept hearing about this life insurance medicine career. And the more I heard about it, the more I thought it would be a really good fit. And so that's ultimately how I got from point A to point B.

John: Well, what you described is really, it could be considered like a model in some ways. These are things we always talk about in the podcast. Okay, getting a coach, using a coach. Heather Fork's been a guest here at least three or four times, and I've been on her podcast several times as well. And so she's kind of an icon from the standpoint of coaching physicians. There's many out there now. But while you've hit on a lot of the points we've talked about Seek here before. Many of the people I've interviewed have actually been alumni from Seek as speakers. So you can add your name to that list now. I guess you've been a mentor there, I believe?

Dr. Megan Leivant: Heather. Yes, I was actually a mentor just this past October, and that was a great experience.

John: I guess I'll go off a little longer on Seek. It's only like 45 minutes from where I live. It's held near Chicago, and I live south of Chicago. I've driven up there and attended a couple of times to meet some of the mentors and the speakers. So that is good. I mean, I think that'll inspire some people to get off the dime because I get asked a lot about what about coaching. And in the old days, Heather and a couple others were like the only ones. I don't know when you started.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Yes, yes, there are a lot of physician coaches out there.

John: It's always something to say, oh to try if that's if you're kind of stuck. All right. You kind of looked at your skills and your interests and what's out there. And then the lifestyle, I think, is always part of that decision. So why don't you start by next telling us what are the duties of a medical director? That's the really the entry point for most if they're going to do life insurance medicine. What does that look like?

Dr. Megan Leivant: Exactly. Yeah. And it is a bit of a of a frame shift, but at the core, I like to think of the primary duties of a life insurance medical director as three pillars. Case consultations are definitely the biggest pillar. And I'll talk about that a little bit more. Teaching is certainly part of that.

And then research. At a very basic level, you're assessing the morbidity and mortality risk of insurance applicants. And so they can be applying for many different types of life insurance products, but really at the core it's mortality and morbidity. And as a physician, really, that responsibility lies in understanding disease processes, their associated risk factors, and how that's going to impact morbidity and mortality. So that's where that frame shift comes in a little bit. as physicians, we are thinking certainly more in the moment, treating what is in front of us.

I think that's probably one of the biggest pivots that has to happen. But there's a number of areas of risk selection. So there's that life mortality risk, there's disability, there's critical illness, and then there's long term care, which is more that morbidity component.

Really a day in the life, the bulk of it is those case consultations. So an underwriter will send over a consultation. And I almost liken that to presentations on rounds. They ideally are sending over, this is a 58 year old male with X, Y, and Z medical conditions. Here's my question. And so, as a medical director, you were there as a consultant to give your opinion. And you provide your opinion back to the underwriter. You're also fielding messages from them and calls and that kind of stuff. But that's, that's, I'd say the bulk of the day to day.

But then you're teaching the underwriters are there to learn from you as well. So that's what I really enjoy about this career is I still get to teach. And it's formal, it's informal you could be giving an external presentation to a room of underwriters, or you're just teaching over over the phone or through one of your consults.

I like that piece of it as well. And then research we're always needing to research these medical conditions that we're encountering. I feel like I've learned so much more in this career, I could probably go back and be a much better clinician. I think from my experiences, but you're doing projects, you're helping update the manual, the manual is what you use to help rate the impairments that the applicants have. That's at the core, I think what the primary duties look like for a medical director.

John: The scary part of that might be if I'm imagining that I'm thinking about taking a job like this, it's well, how I have an understanding of how different illnesses impact one another and why having hypertension might be a risk factor for something involving cardiac problems and so on and so forth. But I'm thinking that people might be like, but I don't know how to quantify that. Where does the quantification come in? Does that come from the underwriter or is that working together or is there a book that has numbers in it? There's some training involved on the job, right?

Dr. Megan Leivant: Oh, yes, absolutely. And I would say it probably takes a good six to 12 months just to really feel comfortable with that. So yes, to your point, when an applicant comes in and presents with, let's say diabetes or heart disease we all have 100% mortality that's a given, right? We all know that. But in the life insurance industry, we use what are called table ratings. And so they go up by 25 increments. 125%, 150%. And that corresponds to a person's mortality. So the higher that number gets the more medical impairments they have.

And every company uses a manual. And that manual includes those conditions like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and there's ratings that are associated with those disease processes. And that can vary. And it does vary per company. But that is where that risk is then assigned to the condition. And then as a medical director, where we come in is, well, what if you've got someone who's had diabetes and heart disease and prostate cancer? Is that a risk that we can consider that the company wants to consider? And from a medical standpoint, can we put all that together to determine if that applicant is suitable for a policy? Jennifer That's a great question.

John: Dr. Justin Marchegiani. But just like anything that you're doing, when you're going from clinical to non-clinical, there's obviously something you're doing in that new job that, well, it uses those skills and that background. It's different because it's a different industry. And I think that's what stops some people. And the thing is, all of these things have been figured out. whether you're going to health insurance or life insurance or pharma, these are not mysteries to the people that are on the other side. And usually they are well-prepared to train you. Now, there isn't really any certification that a physician would typically pursue or do other education before maybe applying for their first job as a medical director in the insurance industry.

Dr. Megan Leivant: That's correct. there are definitely a number of things a person can do to build their knowledge base. But there are a number of directors, myself included, where I walked into this industry very green. I'd had no experience in life insurance medicine, and I was trained on the job. And I've done a lot of those additional classes and certifications now as a director within the industry.

John: I want to hear more about what your career has done since you've been there. But why don't we go first into the obvious question? Maybe they've talked to people that have started doing this, they really love their job, their lifestyle is good. How would I start to look for those jobs and or prepare for the job?

Dr. Megan Leivant: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think there's a number of ways to start looking into this career. And I think there's not just one pathway, probably one of the most useful tools would be to consider joining AIM.

And through that organization, this is kind of like our governing body, if you will, of within insurance medicine. So it's a group of insurance medicine directors, but there are also underwriters and that are members as well. And when you become a member of AIM, you actually can get paired up with a mentor. And the mentor is usually a director who is already in the industry. And I have really found that that's been a great way for individuals who are interested in getting into the industry. they now have a point of contact.

And that really can be a great nurturing relationship to help jumpstart that interest within insurance medicine. But then I think it's a lot of the other things that individuals do to look for new jobs, right? Look for job postings on LinkedIn, get your LinkedIn profile spruced up, try to reach out to if you happen to know anybody that's in the life insurance industry, certainly that's always really, really helpful.

Let others know that you are looking for a new career or that you're interested in this. Connect with an industry recruiter. they are definitely out there. Depending on where you live most of our positions are remote. There are some that are hybrid, but research life insurance companies that are in your hometown that could always potentially provide an opportunity, whether it's a bigger name or a smaller name. And attending a meeting.

That's an absolutely wonderful way to get to network and meet other industry directors, industry professionals. And there's a number of those. So, AIM has its own meeting every fall. And then there are several others that also could provide really good opportunities to try to help kind of jumpstart that career.

John: That sounds logical. Yeah. And I, one thing that I ask about, because we, for some of the big industries, there are these things like LinkedIn groups and Facebook groups. Do are there any such entities that you're aware of for life insurance medicine?

Dr. Megan Leivant: AIM does have a presence on LinkedIn, and I would say that would be a great place to start. I am not aware of any specific life insurance medicine, Facebook groups or anything, but, but AIM again has so many great resources. And so, that's where we end up directing a lot of our individuals that are interested.

John: Okay. So, I'll be sure to put a link to AIM in the show notes.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Yes.

John: So, now let's talk more about you. A couple of things. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you like about it and, and, and then what you've done because you're, I think you're no longer an entry-level medical director. We'll just kind of talk about both of those issues.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Sure. I'd say what, what keeps me coming back every day is that this is a really mentally stimulating job. I've really enjoyed, and I continue to enjoy the, the challenge that comes from reviewing these cases that come through every day. This is why I went into internal medicine. I love to solve problems. So, it really gives me the chance to still continue to do that on a day-to-day basis.

There's a ton of variety. I'm seeing diseases that to this day, I still had never seen before. So, I'm still getting to use my medical, medical degree. I'm growing my knowledge base, and, and that was really important to me as I was considering the, the pivot. But it's also a small industry, so there's a lot of great networking opportunities. I've really been able to kind of expand a different part of my marketable skills, if you will.

I miss seeing patients, but I'm still able to create relationships. It's just done in a different way now. And so I'd say that those are probably the big things that kind of keep me coming back every day. It's critical thinking, it's teaching, it's teamwork and collaboration. So, I'm getting to still use a lot of those skills that I used when I was a practicing physician. Yeah, as far as my kind of course throughout my career so far, I've been in the industry over six years, and I started out at what's called a direct life insurance company.

So, a direct life insurance company would be the company where you apply for your life insurance policy. So, they directly, they do that underwriting, and I worked there as a medical director for just under two years, and I got that experience. And then I've, since then, have been working for reinsurance companies.

There are a lot more direct life insurance companies than there are reinsurance companies. So, reinsurance companies help to insure the direct insurance companies. That's probably a very high-level way to kind of describe it, but, but so our clients are the direct insurance companies.

We still, as a medical director, are doing very much the same thing on a day-to-day basis, whether you're at a reinsurance company or a direct insurance company. But in a reinsurance company, we're probably seeing cases that might be a little bit more medically complex. There are certainly some differences there. But at the core, like I said, this is ultimately, it's still the case consults, but there's more teaching, there's more research, and that's kind of helps keep it really interesting and a lot of variety.

John: I wonder I was a CMO for a hospital for a while, and our hospital insured itself from liability. We're talking a little different than life insurance. But they had a consortium, they were so, quote, self-insured. But they did have a reinsurance company, I think, on top of that. Like, there's things that happen that they can't really predict or plan for. So, it's kind of the same idea.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Exactly. if I had a whiteboard, I could draw a diagram the direct companies would be in the middle, and then the reinsurance would kind of be a bubble around it. So, here's an extra layer of protection. We might take on the full risk that a direct company doesn't want to take, or maybe we share that risk because it's a really high net worth case. There's just so many different permutations. But that is a great way to describe it.

John: All right. Now, let me ask you this. Do most of medical directors for a reinsurance company come from a direct insurance company, or are they just out there trying to grab anybody that comes along?

Dr. Megan Leivant: No, that is a really, really great question. I would say, on the majority, physicians that are within reinsurance companies usually are coming to those companies with some direct experience. Now, I'm going to say that's not an absolute, because I do know of some directors that started out in reinsurance. And you're going to get that on-the-job training, no matter where you are. But I would say, on the majority, that's probably the path that you normally see is a direct to a reinsurer.

John: Now, in other industries that are similar, in my mind, to this, they have this whole hierarchy of medical directors and senior medical directors and executive medical directors, and then they get into the VP level. And again, kind of mirrors even the hospital setting. medical director is still involved in the clinical stuff a lot.

The VP or the chief medical officer is really an executive position. So how does that work? The physicians, because I did know one VP of a life insurance company. I haven't talked to him in many years, but I didn't know exactly what he did as a VP, which was different from what he maybe had done prior in previous roles.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it really, at least what I've seen, is that it really varies per company. I know a number of medical directors, whether they're in a direct company or a reinsurance company in that core role, they have a VP title associated with what they're doing. And I can't speak to the full industry as far as how many are VPs, but I think generally you're going to see that title or you will have that title as a medical director coming into a role, but it's very company specific.

The step up after that, though, is that, yes, depending on how big the company is, then some of them do have a chief medical director, and that's where you start to see some of that delineation as far as the administrative duties etc. Usually the chiefs are probably doing less casework and they're more involved with maybe research or product development or kind of higher level higher level concepts.

John: Yeah, that makes sense. And we see that in a lot of other industries where they just they just have a cascade of titles just to recognize the skill, the experience, and so forth. And then in some cases, it really means you're part of the senior executive team, which does a lot of the strategic planning and creating new service lines and things like that. So each industry, I think, has its own specific ways of doing things.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Definitely.

John: All right. Well, have I forgotten any important questions to ask you? I'm going to let you go in a minute. I definitely shed a lot of light. So any last comments or other things maybe that we've missed in this last 20 minutes or so?

Dr. Megan Leivant: Sure. Well, I think one thing you asked earlier was about prerequisites in a way of getting into the industry. And while there isn't anything that you need to specifically do to get into the industry, there are definitely once you are in, like, we actually, insurance medicine is a boarded specialty.

After you've been in the industry for several years, and there are definitely other courses you have to take and criteria you have to meet, but you can be boarded in insurance medicine. I'm actually working towards that myself. So I did want to kind of add that. And we do what's called a basic morbidity and mortality course that is part of that board preparation. So there are definitely all these opportunities to get that teaching that is needed as just part of the core function of our roles as medical directors.

John: Yeah, I would bet 99.9% of physicians coming out of the training would have no idea that there's such a thing as board certification in life insurance medicine.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Oh, sure. And it's both a written exam and an oral exam. So it's a process that can take up to a year really to kind of go through both of those.

John: And I saw that there's some certifications. Again, I'm assuming that those kind of things are sought after you're in the industry, but I noticed that there are certain things maybe you can explain a little bit about that.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Absolutely. There's a lot of, like I said, a lot of different initials, you can get after your name, a lot of certifications. And these are the courses that the underwriters take. There's LOMA courses, which is Life Office Management Association. And then there's ALU, which is the Association of Life Underwriting. And there are a myriad of different courses within each of those groups.

And those you take those and they're great courses. They really help teach you about the life insurance industry, especially the LOMA courses. Those are definitely more geared towards life insurance, just basic knowledge financial underwriting, risk management all of that. So yes, you can take a number of those courses and then ultimately get different designations depending on what combination of those courses you've taken.

John: Very good. Appreciate that. Yeah, I don't know. I'm a little too old to apply for a life insurance medicine job, but it sounds like the course might just be interesting.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Maybe not. And it depends on the company not everybody needs to be boarded. I think that's very company specific. There are definitely companies that might lay that down as an expectation. But I know there are directors out there that might do this part time and that's not an ask for them. So it's not I think there's definitely a spectrum.

John: Okay. Well, that's really good to know. Maybe they could create a career where they're doing half clinical and half something like this whether it's in this industry or even UM, whatever, that sometimes can be very positive from a lifestyle standpoint.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Sure. And I know of directors that are still doing that very thing. I do know of some that are still practicing clinical medicine, and then they do their life insurance job as well.

John: Excellent. Well, you did mention earlier, this whole thing about networking, tracking down your colleagues and former co-residents and so forth. But one of the things that I'm sure that our listeners might want to do is reach out to you. Hopefully that would be okay to do on LinkedIn. At least you can control that somewhat.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Yes, I'm happy to certainly connect with anybody that would like to do that through LinkedIn.

John: Okay. I'll put your LinkedIn, a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well, although if they just input your name, they're going to find you. So, all right, Megan, I think we've learned a lot today. I know I have, and I've appreciated this. I really encourage people who are listening to consider this because again, it's a small number, but the people I've talked to, some of them, they just love their jobs, you know? And so there's just something about applying your medical knowledge in this way that just so lines up so well with a lot of our intellectual stimulation, what we love and challenges. And so, I really appreciate you for describing all this and sharing this with us today.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Thank you so much for having me. Yes. Medical directors in this industry are very happy.

John: Nice. All right, Megan, you take care.

Dr. Megan Leivant: Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Bye.

John: Bye-bye.

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How To Make Meaningful Changes In Your Life Immediately https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-meaningful-changes/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-meaningful-changes/#respond Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:59:37 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=42962 Interview with Dr. Michelle Bailey - 388 In this podcast episode, John's guest shares how to make meaningful changes in your life and career. Dr. Michelle Bailey is an accomplished academic pediatrician, medical director, and physician coach who first visited the podcast in Episode 124. Helping physicians navigate career transitions since 2012, Dr. [...]

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Interview with Dr. Michelle Bailey – 388

In this podcast episode, John's guest shares how to make meaningful changes in your life and career. Dr. Michelle Bailey is an accomplished academic pediatrician, medical director, and physician coach who first visited the podcast in Episode 124.

Helping physicians navigate career transitions since 2012, Dr. Bailey combines personal experience with expertise to guide others through transformative career decisions. Her approach emphasizes the importance of thoughtful reflection and strategic planning in making successful life changes.


Our Episode Sponsor

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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.

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


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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.


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Make Meaningful Changes Using the Power of Strategic Pausing

Drawing from years of coaching experience, Dr. Bailey introduces her concept of the power of the pause – a transformative approach to career decision-making. She explains how taking intentional time to reflect and assess can lead to more fulfilling career choices, rather than making decisions from a place of burnout or fear. This methodical approach has helped numerous physicians discover paths they hadn't previously considered.

Her framework helps doctors identify their core values and non-negotiables, essential elements often overlooked in career transitions. The process involves creating space for deep reflection about both professional and personal priorities. Dr. Bailey emphasizes how this pause can be the crucial difference between making a reactive career move and finding a truly fulfilling path.

Transforming Medical Skills into New Opportunities

Michelle shares eye-opening perspectives on how physicians can leverage their existing skills in new ways. Her insights challenge common misconceptions about career transitions, revealing how medical training provides valuable transferable skills that can open doors to diverse opportunities. She offers practical guidance on identifying and articulating these skills effectively to make meaningful changes in your career.

Her approach helps physicians recognize and articulate their unique value proposition in nonclinical roles. She discusses how medical training develops numerous transferable skills that are highly valued across industries. 

Summary

Physicians interested in exploring career transitions or seeking clarity in their professional journey can connect with Dr. Michelle Bailey through her website at DrMichelleBailey.com or schedule a complimentary career consultation at callwithmichelle.com. Her approach focuses on helping physicians make thoughtful, strategic career decisions through structured reflection and practical action steps.


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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 388

How To Make Meaningful Changes In Your Life Immediately

- Interview with Dr. Michelle Bailey

John: I'm really happy to welcome back a guest from about five years ago. Back then, we were talking to her about her work as a senior medical director and some of the coaching she was doing. And I've been looking to get her back for a while, she's back to talk to us today and we're going to discuss mostly what she's learned and what she can teach us about career transition and physicians and so forth. Dr. Michelle Bailey, welcome back to the PNC podcast.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Hi, John, thank you so much for inviting me back. I'm so happy to be here.

John: Yeah, I've been following you over those last five or six years just to kind of see what you're doing. As far as I know, you still exist. You still have a LinkedIn profile. And I know that you're still doing coaching, physician coaching, it's always good to pick the brain of someone who has interacted with and helped physicians navigate their career, their life, whatever. That's why I really wanted to get you back here. So welcome back.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I've learned quite a few lessons over the last five years since we've had a chance to talk.

John: Yeah, and I think you've been coaching since around 2012. So you've been doing that for a while.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah, I actually started coaching around self-care and balance between work and home-life before it was a thing. And it was just what I was seeing in my work at Duke with students and residents and fellows and even some faculty. And that sort of blossomed into more coaching work around career satisfaction and career transitions, particularly after I made my own transition back in 2016.

John: Yes, yes, that was a big change. To go from full-time, I think you were doing academic pediatrics at the time.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: That's right.

John: Yeah, and then you flipped into the other thing you're doing, which is the nonclinical work. Tell us just about that for a minute.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Sure, yeah, I was an academic pediatrician. I was seeing patients full-time in addition to teaching responsibilities at the medical school. And I decided to make the leap and move into a nonclinical career. I went to work as a medical director for a global contract research organization. And for those listeners who haven't heard of that, essentially the company I work for is hired by pharmaceutical or biotech companies to execute the running of their clinical trials. And so I wasn't sure if I was qualified to do that in the beginning, but they were very confident that I was and made an offer for me to join the team.

And essentially I get to leverage my medical education and experience and bring all of that into the world of pediatric clinical trials. And it's just been a wonderful career path for me, surprising in many ways. I still get to learn, which I love, and I still get to advocate for kids and to be a part of helping to bring life-saving and life-changing medicines to them.

John: Okay, we're going to talk mostly about what you've been doing with the coaching, things that maybe are new or just aha moments maybe that you've even had over these, let's say last five years. However, you did mention that issue about going to, I guess some people call it now biopharma, they use this kind of all-encompassing name, but the physicians often just feel like, well, how can I do that? I'm not a researcher. I haven't spent any time writing articles on things like that. But explain what you were kind of alluding to in terms of the fact that you were qualified for what you did then and what you're doing now.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah, I can certainly say my journey and my experience mirrors a lot of the physicians that I have conversations with and ultimately end up coaching in that in our training and education, we don't really learn about options outside of direct patient care or bench research. And so that's really all I knew. And once I decided that I wanted to do something different, I had no idea what that would be.

And back during that time, there weren't a lot of podcasts like yours or conferences and other things around to kind of help educate you. But what I've learned over my eight plus years of being in this new industry is that we have transferable skills. So these things that we learn and skills we acquire as physicians, like leadership, for example, we have these skills that we bring with us to other industries and we can apply them.

For example, in my case, some of the skills that I get to use are just my general knowledge about children and the fact that they don't come to clinic visits alone, they come with their parents or they come with siblings. And so I'm looking at a study protocol for a research trial. And I see that the assessments for that study are going to keep that family on site in the clinic for like six to eight hours.

In my mind, that's going to be a difficult study to enroll for because as a parent, it means I've got to take time off from work. I've got to get my kids from school. I've got to arrange maybe childcare for the other kids or bring them with me. We got to figure out food while we're there for that period of time. So those are the insights that I can bring to a team that has never worked in a clinic and had these kinds of interactions with a family. And so it's things that are seemingly simple to us.

And I think we don't appreciate how much we know because it's just our world. It's what we do. But also just sort of the leadership that we acquire as a physician, the fact that we are really good at doing hard things, that's a part of our training. And also we're really good at figuring things out. So just because you've never seen something before, you don't know how to do something, you are motivated to figure out a potential solution. So that's another skill that we bring with us into these different roles.

And so I quickly understood how I could add value and contribute in meaningful ways to the team. And that really helped boost my confidence. And so what I talk to physicians about now is understanding their own set of transferable skills.

What are the strengths that they have? What skillset do they already have? And what gaps might they need to fill? But also just really paying attention to what it is they enjoy doing. Because usually there are things that we're really good at that don't feel like work because it comes naturally to us. And those are things that other people struggle with.

For me, what was really helpful was what I call the power of the pause is just stopping long enough to reflect on how I felt about my career at that point in time, what it was I wanted moving forward and getting really clear on that. And that included what I didn't want. So I had to get clear on that as well and then ask myself why I wanted that because that was going to be the motivation to help me push through the difficult moments as I was looking for a new career path. And I helped my clients with that power of the pause as well.

John: Nice. Well, I got to write that down, the power of the pause. I'm going to tell my listeners a secret right now. Actually, I've never discussed how I prepare for an interview before, but I want to discuss it now with you here because I'm going to ask you probably at least a few questions that the audience will be like, well, where did those come from? And so I'm just explaining to my listeners that when I'm preparing, some of my cohorts that do podcasts just wing it. They just know what they want to talk about when the guest comes on and they just do it. I'm so, I don't know what you'd call it, maybe insecure or is it just compulsive, obsessive compulsive?

I have to do a little research and so I'm looking at Michelle's website and I'm looking at Michelle's LinkedIn profile and so then I see these things out there. And so that's why I'm going to ask, for example, the next question. I think you may have already answered this question, but this is, I just want to let the audience know why I'm maybe being a little redundant, but you talk about getting clear on what's working, what's not working and what's missing from our lives.

That's kind of something a coach does, I think it helps their clients. And you're talking about the pause, is that when you're doing that getting some clarity or am I looking at something different there?

Dr. Michelle Bailey: No, I think you're absolutely right, John. So taking the time to pause is what allows you to have the space created to get clear. For many of the physicians that are looking to make a transition from clinical practice, they often are feeling very burned out, they're feeling low energy, exhausted.

And so from that space, if you're really just looking for how do I get out, your search is going to be driven largely by fear. It's like this sort of desperate energy of, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I got to get out of here, I got to do something. And instead, what I'm encouraging is to take that time to pause and give yourself a little breathing space to say, okay, I know I don't want to continue to do this indefinitely, it doesn't feel sustainable for me.

Given that, if I knew everything could work out well, what is it that I would want to do? And why do I want to do that? And taking the time to get clear on those things instead moves you into this energy of sort of positive momentum to move forward. It's a focus on where you're going rather than what you're running away from, you know? And I've seen how that makes a difference because I've had some physicians who've come to me after they've made a transition, but they didn't really think it through. They saw someone that they knew made this move into a different industry.

They thought, "Oh, they look happy, that's what I'm going to pursue." And so they do and they get an offer and they're thrilled about that. Everybody just wants to get their foot in the door, but only to find that this isn't a good fit for them based on the season of life and career that they're in and what it is they want.

For me I'm not afraid to tell my age, but I'm at a different stage of life. I'm 57. And so I have grandkids. I want to be able to travel with my wife. I want to spend time with my grandkids. I want to pick them up from school or go on field trips with them.

It was important to me that whatever I did next allowed me location independent work and also allowed me to be able to have a flexible schedule so that if I needed to go and pick up my grandson from school, I could do that without feeling stressed out about it. So you have to just get clear on what your priorities are and what your values are.

When I work with clients, I have an exercise I do with them to help them get in touch with what their core values are now. Because the person that we are when we embark upon this journey in medicine is not necessarily the same person we are now, depending on how much time has passed. Like most of us are young adults when we're starting out on this medical journey and life happens along the way. And so being clear on where you are and what's important to you and where you want to go will really help direct your path towards something that's going to be a better fit for you.

John: Boy, how long would you say the average client that you've spoken with or even people you've even just mentored, how long does it take to figure that out do you think normally? Because many of us have this sense that we don't know what our passion is. We don't know what our purpose is. We don't really know what we like and we don't like. We just barrel forward and do our job because that's what we'd spent 15 years of our lives learning and it's hard for us to stop and even come up with answers to those questions.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah, it varies quite a bit. I will say the physicians that have the fastest results in terms of finding that next step career in the nonclinical world are the ones that already come with a degree of clarity. They have made the decision. There's no ambivalence as to whether or not I want to do this. It's like, I've decided I'm going to leave clinical practice. I want to pursue a nonclinical career.

I don't know exactly what, but this is what I'm thinking of because I like X, Y, and Z. And so that the more clarity you have, the more accelerated I would say your journey is in terms of the transition. But for some people who haven't really given it much thought, the questions that we go through are very deep and reflective questions and it can take a good six weeks for them to really figure out, okay, this is what I want and this is why I want it.

But then there's another step of giving yourself permission to actually go after what you want. There's a lot of guilt and other uncomfortable emotions that can arise in thinking about making the transition. I feel like I'm going to be abandoning my patients. I don't want to abandon my partners. I don't want to leave them in a lurch. My family won't understand.

I may have to change my lifestyle if the salary that I get for nonclinical position is less than what I've had as a clinician. So there are all of these variables that come into play and I do think it's really helpful when you have a coach that can help hold space for you to work through some of that because you don't want that to be the barrier that keeps you stuck for yet another year and you're miserable. Life is just too short and too precious for that.

John: Well, if I was going to engage a coach, that would kind of be the thing. That's why I would do the engagements. Like, okay, I don't like what I'm doing. I'm not satisfied. It doesn't mean I'm burned out or whatever. I'm just it's just no longer what I want to pursue. And I really can't figure out, I would engage a coach to do that. So that makes perfect sense. that's kind of a core addition to the process that you have. So can you give us like just a glimpse as like what you said, you had either like some method or some tool or something to help people tease that out. Just an example would be very helpful.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah, sure. So one of the things that we do is to explore like what's important to you now so that you can figure out what are some of the non-negotiables that you will need in this next career. So for example, like I have one client that I'm working with now, and it's important to her to be near an aging parent so that she can be a support to them.

And so she is really looking for an opportunity that allows her to stay in her geographic region for work. She knows through this exploration that it's important to her to have social connections around work. So as much as some people think, oh, I would love to just work from home full time, it is not for everyone.

And so if you need that social stimulation and connection on a regular basis through work, then you may need to have an opportunity that is office-based or at least hybrid. Where certain number of days you're going into the office and then a certain number of days you're working from home. So these are the kinds of questions that I will ask a client so that they can get clear on what's really important to them. And that sort of builds the scaffolding so that they know this is the container. Like I have to have this and I have to have that. Those are my non-negotiables.

Now with that in mind, what kinds of opportunities would fit into that? Because often we're doing the opposite. We're looking for an opportunity and then seeing how we can fit into that opportunity instead of the other way around.

John: I'm such a practical person at times. I have to ask this question. So what I would do, it could be a little overwhelming. There's lots of things that I definitely do want and a lot of things that are like absolutely not. And so they develop maybe even a checklist so that when as they're looking at job descriptions or they're talking to recruiters or whatever, it's like, okay, I got to make sure that we got these five are in and these five are definitely out of this job.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yes, absolutely. And it kind of helps you create a matrix that you can work from. And even for you, like if you were thinking about doing something different, for example, I would start by saying, well, John, just write down like top of mind, the first 10 things that would be important to you in your next career, in this next opportunity.

And sometimes when people are asked that question, they're not able to write down 10 immediately. So that's not an uncommon thing. But what I would do is continue to ask yourself, it's like, okay, if I'm not so clear yet on what it is that I do want, let me start with what I don't want and write that out.

Let me get clear on that. For me, as an example, I was really clear that I did not want a job with a long commute because that's what I had in my clinical work. My commute was easily 40 to 45 minutes, an hour plus if the weather was inclement.

And so, it's like, well, I need a commute that's 15 minutes or less because I want to be able to maybe even go home for lunch. So starting there can help you gain that clarity that you need for what it is you do want. And thinking about like what would an ideal schedule look like for you? What hours would you be working? Would you be sitting at a desk or would you be doing something that's more interactive with people on a day-to-day basis? So these are the kinds of questions that you can ask. And I've developed some tools that I use with my clients to kind of help guide them through that process.

John: Excellent. I think that gives everyone a pretty good idea how that goes. And I go back probably about the time when I was speaking with you the first time on the podcast, like just have an episode with a coach about why coaching is so beneficial.

And because there's a lot of resistance to coaching. I see it all the time. And people call me or they ask for advice and it's like maybe you just need to sit down with a coach for a few weeks because I don't do coaching. And I'm not going to answer your question in a short email. But they're like very reluctant at times. But so that's a good refresher and a good look into coaching.

Now, I had on my list too, I wanted to ask you about what new revelations have you had about coaching in the last five years? Is there something new about coaching or just have things evolved in terms of where we are as physicians in the whole milieu of the healthcare system itself and different forms of employment?

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah. Let me start off by saying, I believe in the power of coaching. And so I have my own coach. I'm a coach, but still I have my thoughts and beliefs that at times can be limited. And so one of the things that's valuable in working with a coach is having someone to help you see different perspectives. I will say that I have noticed that there seems to be an increase in thinking about working with a coach. Like you, I've been in a lot of Facebook groups and other social media groups where I saw a fair amount of bashing of coaches.

John: Oh, really?

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah. And I think there's some that really feel like there are people who are out there who are presenting themselves as coaches that don't have any training, that don't have any background and are really just looking to take advantage of physician colleagues. So I'm not a proponent of that. However, there are a lot of us physicians who have gone on to do additional training in coaching.

And there are different types of coaching as you probably know, John there's executive coaching for people who are trying to get into executive level positions who want to do hospital administration or maybe go into the C-suite for an organization. There are life coaches, there are career coaches. So there are different sort of specialty areas, if you will.

And for me, career coaching was the likely choice because people started reaching out to me to ask me to help them with their own transition because I was speaking so visibly about my own journey and how I didn't have as much support as I would have liked back then and thought something was wrong with me because I wasn't happy doing what I was doing. And so I do see that more physicians are reaching out for some support, that many of the challenges that I hear when I have conversations with physicians about their career, is they're feeling a bit stuck and unmotivated. They don't know what they would do next if they were to transition.

If they decide that they do want to transition, they don't know where to start or how to sort of get their foot in the door. And it's feeling not as easy to make the transition for a lot of physicians as it was previously. And I can say that certainly there are changes within the industry that are reflective of the economic state of the region that you're living in that can make a difference.

But even at times where we've seen a downturn, where there were fewer jobs available, there's always someone somewhere that is hiring. And so one of the most powerful things that you can do to enhance your own career and raise the likelihood that you can accelerate your transition is networking. And I get a lot of eye rolls when I say that. It's kind of like role plays when we were in medicine and we were learning a new skill and they were like, okay, we're going to do a role play. And everyone's eyes would kind of glaze over because no one enjoys doing it. But it is an activity that helps you develop a skill and get better at it.

And networking is one of those things. And the way I sort of talk about it is if you're looking for an opportunity for yourself, you are one set of eyes, one set of ears. But if you are telling other people what it is you would like to do, then you get more sets of eyes, more sets of ears.

It's kind of like boots on the ground that are going out like little sentinels that are looking on your behalf. So when something comes to their attention, they can think about you and reach out to you. So you want to stay top of mind for people. And that's one of the most important reasons for networking. Plus you learn about other things that people are doing that you otherwise might not be aware of.

John: Yeah, I just have a comment on a couple of things you said just to actually emphasize those and support what you're saying. Number one, most physicians would probably be shocked to know how many hospital CEOs still get coaching. There's so many people in business that get coaching.

They just see it as part of the job because they want to be cutting edge. They want to think strategically and they get a lot from the coaching. So that's one thing I, again, that kind of just because of this resistance that physicians have like, well, I've gone to all this school.

Well, that's not the point. And then the networking that's, there's so many it's not like you're going to a meeting and then having some drinks after the meeting and a conference room and you're networking. Nobody likes that really, at least physicians don't have time for that.

But to connect with people, whether it's through LinkedIn or through word of mouth or whatever, like you said, it just magnifies what you're doing. It just makes it so much more of a reach and exposure. So, yeah, it seems like that's becoming more important since we last spoke.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Absolutely, yeah. I think, as you mentioned, CEOs and other executives, this is just a part of the job. And often they are provided with a coach at the expense of it's charged to the company. And coaches are really valuable in helping you with a strategic plan so that there's some organization to what you're doing. And you're not just like throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Because that burns a lot of time and a coach can really help you be more efficient and more organized because you're thinking in a more strategic manner.

John: That is so true. And I love hearing that. Okay, we're going to run out of time pretty soon, actually. I had this long list of questions, but let's try and kind of focus here. What else have you got to tell us that really can be useful? I know we were talking before we got on about making changes and I was thinking, well, that could be useful not only in career transition. I don't know if we've touched on that yet, just how to implement those changes in your life or other career tips or transition tips, anything like that that you think would be helpful.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Yeah, I think there are a few skills that really lend themselves to making change. One is decision-making. I didn't give this too much thought before I started working with a coach, but then I realized I have an approach to how I make decisions.

And I'm one where I need to have all the information. I want to see it all laid out so that I can weigh all my options before I make the decision. And there's this saying, how you do anything is how you do everything. And I noticed that that wasn't just showing up with big, important decisions. It was little decisions, like what entree I wanted to eat when I went out to a restaurant at dinner.

And my wife is like, pick one. I'm asking all these questions of the server to try and weigh my options. Which am I going to enjoy more? So decision making is a skill and I think it's one that can really lend itself nicely to helping you when you want to make change in your life. I think another skill like that is, well, I call it a skill, but self-confidence.

So belief in yourself. I said earlier during our conversation that physicians can do hard things. It's just part of our training and we're really good at figuring things out. I often remind the physicians that I'm coaching that they can do hard things and that they can figure it out. And it's okay that you haven't done this exact thing before. You have what it takes to be able to do it. And so your own self-confidence plays a big factor in how successful you may or may not be in doing things in your life when you're ready to make a change.

John: Okay. No, that is also, and people, I think if they recognize that maybe they don't feel that they're portraying themselves as not confident, but if they're doing it and not realizing it, then maybe they just need to step back and say, okay, let's stop and think about what I'm doing and saying, and then let's see if I can just portray myself as I really am, which is a confident powerful person that definitely can handle this new job.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Right. And I'll tell you one way you can know if you're lacking in confidence is the action that you're taking or rather the action you're not taking. So one of the things that I do see is for a lot of physicians, they are doing what they feel is taking steps to transition, but it's honestly a lot of busy work.

That's not really putting themselves out there because they're either afraid of rejection or they're having that self-confidence issue. And so when I ask very concrete questions, like how many applications have you submitted in the last week? And they say, well, none. So being able to really look at some concrete metrics for yourself and focusing on what you have control over. So you don't have control over whether or not someone makes you an offer for a job, but you do have control over how many people you connect with to network, how many applications you're putting out there how many jobs you're exploring, like maybe reaching out to recruiters.

These are things that you have some control over and just take a look at whether or not the actions you're taking are things that will make a meaningful difference in moving your career search forward, or if it's just accumulating more information and more data, which isn't necessarily going to help you in that next step.

John: So true. Again, it's logical. But the thing is, too, if you apply to a lot of places, you're eventually going to get feedback. And then you're going to say, oh, I didn't know that was stupid of me to do that way. And you're telling me because I've now made a contact with this person, a recruiter or the HR department. And there's a lot of information you can get from that. And it doesn't happen unless you start to apply.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Right. And the caveat is applying strategically.

John: Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Right. Just applying for any job and using the exact same resume, the exact same cover letter isn't going to cut it. People are looking at why should we hire you over someone else? And so the purpose of your resume and your LinkedIn profile is to help them understand why they should hire you. Why would you be a good choice as opposed to someone else? And most of the folks within HR who are looking at the initial application to invite folks for a screening interview don't have a medical background.

They don't necessarily understand how you can translate the skills you already have into this new role. And as a result, a lot of physicians, when they look at the job description, feel like they're not qualified for these roles that they're interested in. And so that's where transferable skills come in. And I'm developing a resource that folks can use to help them identify those transferable skills and what positions would be really good, a good fit for those skills.

John: Okay. That's a good segue because this is going to be a chance to learn more about your website and contacting you. But I want to say one other thing, and I've probably forgotten it now. But anyway, I think it's, I had a guest once tell me that she, before she found her first nonclinical job, she literally had sent in a thousand resumes, but she was going to websites and putting it in. She had no contact with any company person. She never called anybody, never talked to anybody.

And so, it was just a black hole. These things were going into. And like you said, the other thing I remember was that the job descriptions are like what they would want in the perfect candidate. Here's everything we want. They never get everything they want. So don't think that that rules you out.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: And to that point, I would say there's a lot of research that's been done on gender bias. And men, when they look at a job description, if they have like a third of the qualifications will apply. Whereas women, if they don't check off all the boxes, are less likely to apply. And that may sound like a generalization, but there's a lot of literature that's been done to kind of back that up. And so I would encourage listeners to not count themselves out. And if you check all the boxes, you're probably overqualified for the position and it's not going to necessarily be a good fit for you. So look for something where you have a lot of the qualifications and you can move into that role and still have room to grow.

John: That sounds good. That's good advice. Okay. So how do we find you and tell us about your website and yeah. And maybe even if you want to do a little pitch to say, what is the kind of client you're looking for that would be ideal for you? We could give you that opportunity too. Just tell us about your website and stuff.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Sure. Folks can find my website at drmichellebailey.com. You can also sign up for a complimentary career consultation with me. I love having conversations with physicians and hearing about where you are and what you're thinking about if you're considering a transition. And I'm happy to give you just some guidance on what might help. And for that, you can sign up at callwithmichelle.com. And then you can also find me on social media.

I'm on Facebook at Michelle Bailey, and I'm on Instagram at the Dr. Michelle Bailey. And I would say in terms of an ideal client that I enjoy working with and that I think I can help the most, it's someone who has been thinking about leaving medicine for a while, but they're still ambivalent. They're not sure whether or not that's the best course of action for them. And they have no idea where to start or how to figure that out. I think having just that complimentary consultation that I spoke of earlier is an opportunity to create that space where you can pause and reflect on where you are and where you'd like to be.

And I've had conversations with a lot of physicians who haven't gone on to be clients, but had that one consultation and came back to me and said that was so helpful because I got much clearer on what it was I wanted, or I learned that I'm actually not ready to leave clinical practice. I just need a different position within clinical medicine. And so I would encourage you to just think about that. But I'm happy to sit and chat with anyone who wants to have a conversation. I enjoy helping.

John: Very good. Now, I would definitely encourage people if they've been in this mode for the last six or 12 months, thinking about it and maybe even ruminating about it and just can't get it out of their mind, but I have not taken any action, you definitely want to reach out to Michelle and see if you can get off either fix the problem or move forward to the next thing. So that'll be very helpful.

There will be links in the show notes with all those, because it's sometimes hard to write those things down while you're driving. So just go to the website. At the end of the outro of this, then I'll put all that stuff there where you go to find all these links.

All right, Michelle, I will thank you very much for coming here today. But we really covered a lot of stuff that was very dense. Like you could write a book based on that.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Thank you so much, John, for having me. I really appreciate it. And just wanted to say how much I appreciate all you do to support the physician community.

John: I love doing it. And it gives me a chance to meet people like you, which is really fascinating. And I like to see other people helping us, our colleagues who are suffering.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Agreed.

John: Yeah.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: And impact is the most important thing for me.

John: All right. With that, I'll say goodbye.

Dr. Michelle Bailey: Bye, John.

Disclaimers:

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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.

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