Presentation by John Jurica – 457
In today's episode, John provides his masterclass on the 5 Important Steps on the Path to Hospital Executive that he first presented in 2020.
He walks through each step using his own career as the example, from volunteering on a hospital CME committee to eventually stepping into the CMO role. The process doesn't require a perfectly timed opportunity or an MBA on day one; it requires curiosity, a willingness to volunteer, and knowing who to ask.
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Starting with Mindset and Mentors
The first step is less about credentials and more about behavior: show up, volunteer, and stay curious about what happens outside of your clinical role.
John's entry point was a CME committee at his hospital, a medical staff unpaid role that few made time for. Within six months, he became the chair when the previous chair retired from medical practice. Six months after that, he was representing the hospital at the Illinois State Medical Society level. A year later, he was doing national accreditation surveys for the ACCME.
Mentors accelerate that process significantly. John's definition is deliberately low-pressure: a mentor is someone who helps you advance your career, often without knowing they're doing it. No weekly check-ins, no formal arrangement, no payment.
His two most influential mentors were Don — Chief Medical Officer of a 700-bed hospital — and Dennis, the CEO of his own hospital. Neither was approached more than occasionally. They introduced him to the American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL) and the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE), which became central to his development as a physician leader.
From Volunteer to Executive: The Practical Steps
Steps three through five are where the career actually shifts.
Part-time roles, such as physician advisor in utilization management, medical director for a family planning clinic, and medical director for occupational medicine, are where John built real management skills while still in clinical practice. These aren't prestigious titles. They are low-risk ways to confirm interest, gain administrative credibility, and have something concrete to point to when you eventually ask for the job.
Formal education is pursued concurrently. John earned an MPH remotely. Other viable options include an MBA, MMM, MHA, or the AAPL's CPE certification. What matters is building enough fluency in finance, operations, and leadership to function in a C-suite position.
Step five is obvious, but often delayed due to fear of rejection and other self-limiting beliefs. John asked his hospital CEO directly for a part-time VP for Medical Affairs role, which became the stepping stone to Chief Medical Officer. If no opening exists at your current institution, nearby health systems are worth exploring before assuming that relocation will be necessary.
Summary
The path to hospital CMO is longer than most nonclinical careers, but more accessible than most physicians assume. The steps John outlines – volunteering, engaging a mentor, working in part-time management roles, pursuing management education, and asking for the job – are sequential but overlapping by design.
The CMO role offers strong compensation, meaningful systems-level impact, better work-life balance, and the kind of institutional influence that individual patient care rarely allows. And for physicians already in hospital-based roles, the runway is shorter than one might think.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
EXCLUSIVE: Get a regular dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.
Links for Today's Episode:
- What Makes a Great Health System Chief Medical Officer?
- 6 Typical Assignments of a Hospital CMO – A PNC Classic from 2021
- How to Be the Best CMO Leading a Top 100 Hospital
- The Essential Guidebook to Being An Outstanding CMO
- Roadmap From Physician Advisor to Hospital CMO
- 4 Things the CMO Should Never Say to the CEO – 251
- American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL)
- American College of Healthcare Executives
Download This Episode:
Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.
Podcast Episode 457
Five Important Steps on the Path to Hospital Executive
Today it's just me talking about one of my favorite non-clinical careers, that of hospital chief medical officer.
It's just me with my slideshow for today's masterclass. But first, let's do this. Did you know that you can sponsor the Physician Non-Clinical Careers podcast? As a sponsor, you'll reach thousands of clinicians to sell your products or services or build your following. Your message will be heard on the podcast and seen on our website, in our newsletter, and on social media posts.
It's amazing how a direct invitation to thousands of physicians on this podcast can identify listeners eager to try out your products or services. And the first business to contact me will receive two free ad placements. To learn more, set up a short call, and do that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/zoomcall, and we'll discuss what that might look like.
Also, I wanna let you know that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast. I don't have all the details worked out yet, but you will notice soon that I'm changing how and where I'm sharing my podcast with a much greater emphasis on video. What I wanna do is elevate the content to that of a weekly series of masterclasses for those interested in accelerating their career advancement.
But I still also plan to post weekly audio content for those that prefer that approach. So stay tuned in coming weeks. I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. All right. As I mentioned, I'd like to talk about becoming a hospital executive. Typically, that would be the chief medical officer, but it could be also any, other s- C-suite person, such as the CMIO, chief medical information officer, or chief quality officer, or other chief X officers.
So I'm gonna do this by retelling my story, how I went from being a family medicine physician to hospital CMO. It took about 20 years to do that, but I think you can take what I did and make it more intentional and get this transition done a m- in a much quicker timeframe
And I'm gonna use some slides to help me do that
Okay. We've got five important steps on the path to hospital executive. But before we get to the five steps that I took, I want to explain a couple of things. One, why this is an excellent option for some of you, and I also want to set the stage before getting into the five steps. So what is so special about it?
let me just start by telling a story. I remember being in my position for a while. I had advanced from the VPMA position to the chief medical officer, and I was doing a presentation that I did every quarter to the board of directors. So I was part of the standing agenda item for the board to cover quality, patient safety, documentation improvement, things like that.
I was the go-to person for those presentations, and we had installed some quality monitoring tools that allowed me to compare quarter over quarter, year over year, risk-adjusted outcome mortality and hard outcomes like that, such as complication rates, surgical complications, length of stay, and those kinds of things.
We even sometimes got into the readmissions when that became a big deal. So I would stand in front of the board, and I would show the graphs that I had presented in which I had ranked the outcomes for the top 15 or 20 diagnoses as well as the top 10 procedures. And I could show where our deviations were no longer really the best, but for the most part, we had positive deviations and meaning we were better than expected.
Sometimes we'd have worse than expected outcomes, and then I would dig into that and answer questions, and I really enjoyed it. I think the board enjoyed it too because they really felt like it was meaningful. they liked looking at the financials because they were usually pretty good, but more importantly, because as board members, they were there to help make sure that we were providing good care, they loved to hear my quality improvement and patient safety presentations The other reason that was such a good job for me is because we were always challenging projects going on.
We always had service lines we were introducing, and typically, the CMO would have a lot of input on any new clinical project. We were helping the lives of our colleagues as well as the thousands of patients that we served. And as CMO, I had better work-life balance, excellent pay, and being part of an executive team that ran that multi-million dollar organization.
So it was a lot of fun, as was interacting with the board members on a regular basis. All right, so let's set the stage for the rest of my story. How did I get there? imagine that I'm practicing. I'm a few years into my practice, and one of the things that I came to realize is that I was very bad at firing my patients.
Now, that might seem like a weird thing to say, but actually that is a skill you should learn if you're in clinical medicine. there are many ways to improve your practice, of course, such as delegating well, becoming more productive, and reducing paperwork. But an important thing to learn is to fire patients if they are a bad fit for your practice because they get...
They affect the quality of care and the feeling in the office, the, the staff and so forth, because if you have patients that don't fit well and they're cau- troublemakers, I guess I could call them, then they're going to impact how the staff feel and how you feel. But all my patients, no matter how bad they behaved, would hang on forever.
And if I saw him or her on my schedule at the beginning of the day, I would just be in a bad mood all day. So over time, I accrued more and more of these kinds of patients because I wouldn't fire them like some of my colleagues would. And you throw that on with some of the burnout I was already getting, and that's what drove me to start to look around.
So I just wanted to give you that background. And, as I did, I could see that I certainly had motivation to change my career, and so I wanna get into the five major steps that I took that you can apply to your career search
All right. This is slide one for those that are watching the video. And the first is about my minds- mindset and, the way to look at this whole process. and I think you should be selective, but you should also be curious and be a joiner. you should be open to new things. And the way that manifests itself is by volunteering for activities that are not always strictly clinical.
And as you're doing so, be open to learning new skills. So if you're in the hospital, you're a hospitalist, anesthesiologist, surgeon, proceduralist, pretty much anybody who just happens to be in the hospital a lot for their job, then you're in a great position to start volunteering and participating in things, trying out things at your hospital if you're not already doing that.
Obviously, they're gonna recruit you for, volunteer things like chairing a department or something like that. But there's lots of other things you can do, on the hospital's behalf that they won't pay you for necessarily, and you should look and see what's available. I was only two years into my practice after finishing my residency, and I used to just go to a lot of department meetings.
And besides the family medicine department, I'd go to the OB meeting, the pedes meeting, surgical meetings, and so forth, because I wanted to meet people and I wanted to learn what they were doing and how they interact with the other departments. And, I just showed up, as a staff physician guest there because I wanted to learn from my colleagues.
I went to all of the family medicine meetings and even early on, I started to help organize outside CME to come in just for the family medicine department because we didn't have that much in the way of CME, continuing medical education. And because I was always so interested in CME, I volunteered to be on the CME committee.
It had a different name then. It was, I think, called the Program Education Committee, but it was the CME committee, and we were going to help facilitate CME at the hospital for the physicians. then for a variety of reasons, within about six months into the membership on the committee, I was selected as the chair.
A lot of times you will become the chair because, other people just don't want to do it
And that was actually fun because I learned how to run a meeting, I learned what agendas were, and I really got into producing CME that would meet the needs of the medical staff. And then six months later or so, again, something else happened, and it was time for our CME accreditation review by the State of Illinois Medical Society.
And since I didn't wanna look like an idiot, I actually studied the criteria for the survey, and we actually did pretty well, which was a little bit unusual for many of the hospitals in Illinois. And because I seemed to have an interest in what we had to do to remain compliant, one of our surveyors that came to look at our program recommended to me to become part of the CME committee at the Illinois State Medical Society.
So I was appointed again to a voluntary position on the committee at the state level, started attending those meetings, which led to new opportunities. I continued to chair the committee at my hospital, and later I became the chair of the committee at the Illinois State Medical Society level on the CME committee.
And, that was rewarding. I learned even more about becoming credentialed and accredited and so forth. And that led to me being recruited to the committee on the Accreditation Council for CME, the sa-- the ACCME, which is the organization that does all of the national CME accreditation again, across the entire US, and they-- I think they even accredit state-- some organizations outside of the United States.
And so those were the big medical schools and multi-state regulations, and that led to me doing surveys and on-site surveys and what we call reverse site surveys and so forth. So basically, just being open to new things and agreeing to help out gave me a real education in continuing med- medical education and the accreditation of continuing medical education.
And so I just, had an explosion of that, and I got to see a lot of other physicians and what they were doing outside of their role as a physician, outside of their role even as a committee member at the state level. They were doing many other things. So I'm gonna get to the-- So this is the first stage.
It's just an example of what I did to open your horizons and say yes to things and volunteer for certain activities. If it's something you really hate doing, then, you can un-volunteer yourself very quickly. But if you open y- yourself up to these things, then you'll learn more and more opportunities for learning and for meeting people that might help you in your career.
And, I'll also mention that while being involved with all of these committees in different roles, the other benefit is that I met my first mentor. I think I had maybe two mentors that I got at about the same time. But my occasional interactions with him helped me to navigate to ever more interesting paid and unpaid jobs.
So that's step one and, and, so think of things in that way if at all possible. All right, so now we're going to move to what I call step two in my path, and that is to talk about finding and engaging a mentor. I think I've done a whole podcast ep- episode on this topic, but let me just give you my take on this.
My definition of a mentor is someone who helps you accelerate your career advancement. Sometimes a mentor doesn't even know they're being a mentor. They're just someone you run into on a somewhat regular basis, and they're just giving you free advice and helping out another doctor like yourself. And the main thing to know about this relationship is that you shouldn't abuse it.
you're not hiring a coach. You're not paying them an hourly basis to spend an hour or two, giving you all the ins and outs of how to follow the path that they followed. Now, you can learn that over time, but you don't need to meet with this person on a weekly basis or monthly basis.
Oftentimes, they will give you little pearls of advice that you can work on bet- between your meetings, whether they're planned or whether they just happen, because you happen to be attending a course or some other state or county meeting And a mentor in my mind is not a paid position, okay?
Unlike a coach. It's just someone who like to work with physicians. They enjoy helping their colleagues to grow and learn. And the other thing that I'd mention is that it's fine to have multiple mentors. there are certain areas where one is really good, and then you can talk to someone else and, For me, my other mentor, and again, I think I got both of these mentors, or at least in my mind it gelled to me as someone to go to, was the CEO of the hospital where I was recruited and where I was working. And to be honest, neither of them knew that they were my mentor per se, because I didn't bother them often and I didn't spend two or three hours picking their brain.
I just every once in a while would ask them a question, say, "Hey, if I'm interested in doing this, what would you advise?" That was it. so besides encouraging me and giving little, tidbits of advice, my-- both mentors taught me about a couple of cool resources. One was the American College of Physician Executives, which is now called the American Association for Physician Leadership, or the AAPL.
That was recommended by my physician friend and mentor, and the American College of Healthcare Professionals, which was mentioned by the hospital CMO, and actually he invited myself and other physicians to, attend some of those meetings because there would be h- physicians that would attend with the leadership of their individual hospitals.
And these two organizations are really the premier organizations for executives interested in doing executive leadership type of work. and so my hospital supported me and other physicians to join those organizations and participate in their educational offerings. So that's it about mentors. think about it.
Find someone that might be natural, that's maybe doing something that you might wanna do, and in this case, it could be the CMO of the hospital where you're at or a CMO at some other hospital, could be the CEO of your hospital or the COO. Those people are very bright and, nowadays they work with a lot of physicians directly.
Back 20, 30 years ago when I started, it wasn't as common. So that's the second step to, to follow
So those are the five steps. Let me recap for a minute here. Basically the steps are this: be curious and start volunteering at the hospital in a variety of part-time settings, volunteer settings. Find one or more mentors, number two. Number three is try part-time hospital management jobs while still practicing.
Again, either medical director or, physician advisor is sometimes the title that they'll give you. And then, when it's right, you can s- and maybe you can even start this at the very beginning, but b- formal business and management education. There's tons of places where you can get that, from your own specialty societies often do that to some of the organizations that I've already mentioned today.
And then the final step is to ask for the job and work out the details. And of course, step five might be apply for a job at another institution. for whatever reason, there may not be any current or in the near future jobs available, and if you have other organizations nearby that aren't too far, you can do that without relocating.
Otherwise, you can look for, a full-time job in a new role, and, you might have to move away from your current, place. But oftentimes there are openings that you can step into. this is the outline of one simple approach to landing your first management job on your way to becoming a chief medical officer, for a health system.
You can get more information at m- my website, obviously, nonclinicalphysicians.com or, at the AP- AAPL, which is probably the best organization you could join to be a physician leader at physicianleaders.com. And, if you're just getting started, then what I'd say is make a commitment to do the following things later this week or next week, which is volunteer for one hospital committee if you're not already on one or two.
Try to become the chair of that committee, by the way. I didn't mention that earlier, but you learn the most when you're the chair of a committee. You learn how to lead, you learn how to organize, you learn how to run a meeting appropriately, which is not an open-ended free-for-all. I have other episodes that discuss that issue in detail.
but go ahead and get on one or two or three of those committees and stick with the good ones. Identify and reach out to at least one mentor, maybe pick or, try and find another person whose brain you can pick, one or two others over the next six months. And maybe explore, begin looking for what part-time medical director or assistant medical director type opportunities may exist in your hospital today.
See if they're likely to have any future openings, and always be prepared to step in when you see someone has decided to withdraw or move away or something. There are many nuances to the process and other steps that will be included in the full video on my new website coming soon. you can find links to the resources I mentioned today in the show notes at nonclinicalphysicians.com/path-to-hospital-executive.
That's it for my presentation for today. I will be here next week. Remember that the opinions expressed here are mine. While the information provided is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there's no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
So always consult an attorney, accountant, or career counselor before making any major decision about your career. All right. I'll see you next week. Goodbye for now.
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Podcast Episode 457
Five Important Steps on the Path to Hospital Executive
Today it's just me talking about one of my favorite non-clinical careers, that of hospital chief medical officer.
It's just me with my slideshow for today's masterclass. But first, let's do this. Did you know that you can sponsor the Physician Non-Clinical Careers podcast? As a sponsor, you'll reach thousands of clinicians to sell your products or services or build your following. Your message will be heard on the podcast and seen on our website, in our newsletter, and on social media posts.
It's amazing how a direct invitation to thousands of physicians on this podcast can identify listeners eager to try out your products or services. And the first business to contact me will receive two free ad placements. To learn more, set up a short call, and do that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/zoomcall, and we'll discuss what that might look like.
Also, I wanna let you know that I'm in the process of reimagining this podcast. I don't have all the details worked out yet, but you will notice soon that I'm changing how and where I'm sharing my podcast with a much greater emphasis on video. What I wanna do is elevate the content to that of a weekly series of masterclasses for those interested in accelerating their career advancement.
But I still also plan to post weekly audio content for those that prefer that approach. So stay tuned in coming weeks. I'm really excited about it, and I think you will be too. All right. As I mentioned, I'd like to talk about becoming a hospital executive. Typically, that would be the chief medical officer, but it could be also any, other s- C-suite person, such as the CMIO, chief medical information officer, or chief quality officer, or other chief X officers.
So I'm gonna do this by retelling my story, how I went from being a family medicine physician to hospital CMO. It took about 20 years to do that, but I think you can take what I did and make it more intentional and get this transition done a m- in a much quicker timeframe
And I'm gonna use some slides to help me do that
Okay. We've got five important steps on the path to hospital executive. But before we get to the five steps that I took, I want to explain a couple of things. One, why this is an excellent option for some of you, and I also want to set the stage before getting into the five steps. So what is so special about it?
let me just start by telling a story. I remember being in my position for a while. I had advanced from the VPMA position to the chief medical officer, and I was doing a presentation that I did every quarter to the board of directors. So I was part of the standing agenda item for the board to cover quality, patient safety, documentation improvement, things like that.
I was the go-to person for those presentations, and we had installed some quality monitoring tools that allowed me to compare quarter over quarter, year over year, risk-adjusted outcome mortality and hard outcomes like that, such as complication rates, surgical complications, length of stay, and those kinds of things.
We even sometimes got into the readmissions when that became a big deal. So I would stand in front of the board, and I would show the graphs that I had presented in which I had ranked the outcomes for the top 15 or 20 diagnoses as well as the top 10 procedures. And I could show where our deviations were no longer really the best, but for the most part, we had positive deviations and meaning we were better than expected.
Sometimes we'd have worse than expected outcomes, and then I would dig into that and answer questions, and I really enjoyed it. I think the board enjoyed it too because they really felt like it was meaningful. they liked looking at the financials because they were usually pretty good, but more importantly, because as board members, they were there to help make sure that we were providing good care, they loved to hear my quality improvement and patient safety presentations The other reason that was such a good job for me is because we were always challenging projects going on.
We always had service lines we were introducing, and typically, the CMO would have a lot of input on any new clinical project. We were helping the lives of our colleagues as well as the thousands of patients that we served. And as CMO, I had better work-life balance, excellent pay, and being part of an executive team that ran that multi-million dollar organization.
So it was a lot of fun, as was interacting with the board members on a regular basis. All right, so let's set the stage for the rest of my story. How did I get there? imagine that I'm practicing. I'm a few years into my practice, and one of the things that I came to realize is that I was very bad at firing my patients.
Now, that might seem like a weird thing to say, but actually that is a skill you should learn if you're in clinical medicine. there are many ways to improve your practice, of course, such as delegating well, becoming more productive, and reducing paperwork. But an important thing to learn is to fire patients if they are a bad fit for your practice because they get...
They affect the quality of care and the feeling in the office, the, the staff and so forth, because if you have patients that don't fit well and they're cau- troublemakers, I guess I could call them, then they're going to impact how the staff feel and how you feel. But all my patients, no matter how bad they behaved, would hang on forever.
And if I saw him or her on my schedule at the beginning of the day, I would just be in a bad mood all day. So over time, I accrued more and more of these kinds of patients because I wouldn't fire them like some of my colleagues would. And you throw that on with some of the burnout I was already getting, and that's what drove me to start to look around.
So I just wanted to give you that background. And, as I did, I could see that I certainly had motivation to change my career, and so I wanna get into the five major steps that I took that you can apply to your career search
All right. This is slide one for those that are watching the video. And the first is about my minds- mindset and, the way to look at this whole process. and I think you should be selective, but you should also be curious and be a joiner. you should be open to new things. And the way that manifests itself is by volunteering for activities that are not always strictly clinical.
And as you're doing so, be open to learning new skills. So if you're in the hospital, you're a hospitalist, anesthesiologist, surgeon, proceduralist, pretty much anybody who just happens to be in the hospital a lot for their job, then you're in a great position to start volunteering and participating in things, trying out things at your hospital if you're not already doing that.
Obviously, they're gonna recruit you for, volunteer things like chairing a department or something like that. But there's lots of other things you can do, on the hospital's behalf that they won't pay you for necessarily, and you should look and see what's available. I was only two years into my practice after finishing my residency, and I used to just go to a lot of department meetings.
And besides the family medicine department, I'd go to the OB meeting, the pedes meeting, surgical meetings, and so forth, because I wanted to meet people and I wanted to learn what they were doing and how they interact with the other departments. And, I just showed up, as a staff physician guest there because I wanted to learn from my colleagues.
I went to all of the family medicine meetings and even early on, I started to help organize outside CME to come in just for the family medicine department because we didn't have that much in the way of CME, continuing medical education. And because I was always so interested in CME, I volunteered to be on the CME committee.
It had a different name then. It was, I think, called the Program Education Committee, but it was the CME committee, and we were going to help facilitate CME at the hospital for the physicians. then for a variety of reasons, within about six months into the membership on the committee, I was selected as the chair.
A lot of times you will become the chair because, other people just don't want to do it
And that was actually fun because I learned how to run a meeting, I learned what agendas were, and I really got into producing CME that would meet the needs of the medical staff. And then six months later or so, again, something else happened, and it was time for our CME accreditation review by the State of Illinois Medical Society.
And since I didn't wanna look like an idiot, I actually studied the criteria for the survey, and we actually did pretty well, which was a little bit unusual for many of the hospitals in Illinois. And because I seemed to have an interest in what we had to do to remain compliant, one of our surveyors that came to look at our program recommended to me to become part of the CME committee at the Illinois State Medical Society.
So I was appointed again to a voluntary position on the committee at the state level, started attending those meetings, which led to new opportunities. I continued to chair the committee at my hospital, and later I became the chair of the committee at the Illinois State Medical Society level on the CME committee.
And, that was rewarding. I learned even more about becoming credentialed and accredited and so forth. And that led to me being recruited to the committee on the Accreditation Council for CME, the sa-- the ACCME, which is the organization that does all of the national CME accreditation again, across the entire US, and they-- I think they even accredit state-- some organizations outside of the United States.
And so those were the big medical schools and multi-state regulations, and that led to me doing surveys and on-site surveys and what we call reverse site surveys and so forth. So basically, just being open to new things and agreeing to help out gave me a real education in continuing med- medical education and the accreditation of continuing medical education.
And so I just, had an explosion of that, and I got to see a lot of other physicians and what they were doing outside of their role as a physician, outside of their role even as a committee member at the state level. They were doing many other things. So I'm gonna get to the-- So this is the first stage.
It's just an example of what I did to open your horizons and say yes to things and volunteer for certain activities. If it's something you really hate doing, then, you can un-volunteer yourself very quickly. But if you open y- yourself up to these things, then you'll learn more and more opportunities for learning and for meeting people that might help you in your career.
And, I'll also mention that while being involved with all of these committees in different roles, the other benefit is that I met my first mentor. I think I had maybe two mentors that I got at about the same time. But my occasional interactions with him helped me to navigate to ever more interesting paid and unpaid jobs.
So that's step one and, and, so think of things in that way if at all possible. All right, so now we're going to move to what I call step two in my path, and that is to talk about finding and engaging a mentor. I think I've done a whole podcast ep- episode on this topic, but let me just give you my take on this.
My definition of a mentor is someone who helps you accelerate your career advancement. Sometimes a mentor doesn't even know they're being a mentor. They're just someone you run into on a somewhat regular basis, and they're just giving you free advice and helping out another doctor like yourself. And the main thing to know about this relationship is that you shouldn't abuse it.
you're not hiring a coach. You're not paying them an hourly basis to spend an hour or two, giving you all the ins and outs of how to follow the path that they followed. Now, you can learn that over time, but you don't need to meet with this person on a weekly basis or monthly basis.
Oftentimes, they will give you little pearls of advice that you can work on bet- between your meetings, whether they're planned or whether they just happen, because you happen to be attending a course or some other state or county meeting And a mentor in my mind is not a paid position, okay?
Unlike a coach. It's just someone who like to work with physicians. They enjoy helping their colleagues to grow and learn. And the other thing that I'd mention is that it's fine to have multiple mentors. there are certain areas where one is really good, and then you can talk to someone else and, For me, my other mentor, and again, I think I got both of these mentors, or at least in my mind it gelled to me as someone to go to, was the CEO of the hospital where I was recruited and where I was working. And to be honest, neither of them knew that they were my mentor per se, because I didn't bother them often and I didn't spend two or three hours picking their brain.
I just every once in a while would ask them a question, say, "Hey, if I'm interested in doing this, what would you advise?" That was it. so besides encouraging me and giving little, tidbits of advice, my-- both mentors taught me about a couple of cool resources. One was the American College of Physician Executives, which is now called the American Association for Physician Leadership, or the AAPL.
That was recommended by my physician friend and mentor, and the American College of Healthcare Professionals, which was mentioned by the hospital CMO, and actually he invited myself and other physicians to, attend some of those meetings because there would be h- physicians that would attend with the leadership of their individual hospitals.
And these two organizations are really the premier organizations for executives interested in doing executive leadership type of work. and so my hospital supported me and other physicians to join those organizations and participate in their educational offerings. So that's it about mentors. think about it.
Find someone that might be natural, that's maybe doing something that you might wanna do, and in this case, it could be the CMO of the hospital where you're at or a CMO at some other hospital, could be the CEO of your hospital or the COO. Those people are very bright and, nowadays they work with a lot of physicians directly.
Back 20, 30 years ago when I started, it wasn't as common. So that's the second step to, to follow
So those are the five steps. Let me recap for a minute here. Basically the steps are this: be curious and start volunteering at the hospital in a variety of part-time settings, volunteer settings. Find one or more mentors, number two. Number three is try part-time hospital management jobs while still practicing.
Again, either medical director or, physician advisor is sometimes the title that they'll give you. And then, when it's right, you can s- and maybe you can even start this at the very beginning, but b- formal business and management education. There's tons of places where you can get that, from your own specialty societies often do that to some of the organizations that I've already mentioned today.
And then the final step is to ask for the job and work out the details. And of course, step five might be apply for a job at another institution. for whatever reason, there may not be any current or in the near future jobs available, and if you have other organizations nearby that aren't too far, you can do that without relocating.
Otherwise, you can look for, a full-time job in a new role, and, you might have to move away from your current, place. But oftentimes there are openings that you can step into. this is the outline of one simple approach to landing your first management job on your way to becoming a chief medical officer, for a health system.
You can get more information at m- my website, obviously, nonclinicalphysicians.com or, at the AP- AAPL, which is probably the best organization you could join to be a physician leader at physicianleaders.com. And, if you're just getting started, then what I'd say is make a commitment to do the following things later this week or next week, which is volunteer for one hospital committee if you're not already on one or two.
Try to become the chair of that committee, by the way. I didn't mention that earlier, but you learn the most when you're the chair of a committee. You learn how to lead, you learn how to organize, you learn how to run a meeting appropriately, which is not an open-ended free-for-all. I have other episodes that discuss that issue in detail.
but go ahead and get on one or two or three of those committees and stick with the good ones. Identify and reach out to at least one mentor, maybe pick or, try and find another person whose brain you can pick, one or two others over the next six months. And maybe explore, begin looking for what part-time medical director or assistant medical director type opportunities may exist in your hospital today.
See if they're likely to have any future openings, and always be prepared to step in when you see someone has decided to withdraw or move away or something. There are many nuances to the process and other steps that will be included in the full video on my new website coming soon. you can find links to the resources I mentioned today in the show notes at nonclinicalphysicians.com/path-to-hospital-executive.
That's it for my presentation for today. I will be here next week. Remember that the opinions expressed here are mine. While the information provided is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there's no guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life, or business.
So always consult an attorney, accountant, or career counselor before making any major decision about your career. All right. I'll see you next week. Goodbye for now.
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