Proven Options for Leveling Up – 368
This week John spends a few minutes sharing his thoughts on one of three popular full-time careers when preparing to “level up.”
Today John delves into the idea of “leveling up”- a journey of self-improvement that can lead you to a more satisfying and financially rewarding career. Drawing inspiration from professional athletes and attorneys he shares how to take stock of your strengths, identify areas for growth, and set new goals to help you become the best version of yourself.
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 addressing any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is now 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 per month.
- If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” 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.
Three Most Popular Full-time Careers for Physicians Seeking a Change
Suppose you’re a physician considering a career shift. In that case, John highlights three nonclinical roles that might be perfect for you: hospital Chief Medical Officer (CMO), pharma Medical Science Liaison (MSL), and insurance company Utilization Management (UM) Medical Director. These roles offer improved work-life balance, competitive pay, and full-time opportunities with major organizations. John describes each popular full-time career and how you can smoothly transition.
Your Network is Your Net Worth: Resources to Help You Succeed
Transitioning to a new career isn’t just about what you know, it’s also about who you know. In this section, Dr. John reminds us of the importance of building a strong professional network and leveraging resources like LinkedIn, the American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL), and the MSL Society. He also recommends joining online communities like the Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook group, where you can connect with others who’ve made similar transitions and get advice on your next steps.
Summary
Sometimes it makes sense to level up your career to one that offers better pay and work-life balance. The three options described today have demonstrated that they generally meet those goals. If you're looking for full-time employment in a well-established industry John advises you to consider one of these popular options.
Links for Today's Episode:
- How to Become CMO in a Year – 052
- 4 Things the CMO Should Never Say to the CEO – 251
- Hospital Management Career Bundle Tactics to Quickly Prepare for a Hospital Management Job
- Find Your Great First Nonclinical MSL Job
- Complete the Journey to Your First Fabulous MSL Job – 277
- Build a Rewarding Career as an MSL – Use Coupon Code HALFOFF to purchase for only $198
- How To Secure Your First Utilization Management Job
- The Truth About Medical Specialists and UM Jobs
- American Association for Physician Leadership (AAPL)
- Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook Group
- MSL Society
- Check out the 2024 Nonclinical Career Summit to learn about MORE career options.
Download This Episode:
Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.
If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.
Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton
Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 368
First Consider the Most Popular Full-Time Careers
John: Okay, nonclinical nation, many of you are ready to make a change in your professional life. It may be because you're frustrated and your work-life balance is shot, or maybe it's just because you're ready to level up.
What do I mean by leveling up? Well, leveling up can be described as a process of self-development or to become a better version of yourself. This can include identifying weaknesses and strengths, setting goals, replacing old habits with new habits, focus on success, and possibly moving to a career that's more satisfying and financially rewarding.
As I was thinking about this concept, I was trying to get examples, and I have two examples that really come to mind.
The first one is professional athletes. Some professional athletes are forced to retire. Some just reach their peak and decide after they've done everything they want to do, they just retire, but they have a lot of notoriety and they have hopefully saved up some money. And again, it's kind of parallel to what physicians can do.
I think of examples like those of Magic Johnson's business ventures in broadcasting, music, film, and finance, or John Elway's investments in dealerships in the Denver area that he said later sold off, and then him investing in the Colorado Crush of the Arena Football League in 2002. And of course, many successful athletes have finished their careers as athletes, and then leveled up to do something else very powerful.
Now, those might seem like outliers. Maybe those are just a select few, but I also think of attorneys. There are many attorneys who never practice, or let's say they finish law school, they pass their bar, and they do work for a while in the industry, in law, doing something, but then they find that they can take everything they've learned in law school and with their early experiences as an attorney and segue into another career, which they level up.
You can look around and see a lot of attorneys working in C suite of various companies, not actually practicing law, but applying what they learned as leaders, as researchers, as presenters, and they apply to the new job. You're an attorney and you have a background in healthcare law, well, you can do that with a big firm, or you can actually go and become part of a team to run a healthcare organization, and obviously all those skills will come in handy.
I interviewed somebody who was trained as an attorney. He, for a little while, was helping physicians with their contract negotiations as an attorney. What he did was leverage that to become more of an agent. He helps physicians negotiate better contracts as an agent, but not as an attorney. In fact, he still has attorneys review the contracts. That's a way to level up.
I think the physicians can do the same thing. Healthcare is the largest industry in the United States, and there are positions for physicians in every major aspect of healthcare. Maybe it's natural to think after a few years of being in the trenches and seeing patients, at some point it gets old, and now you look for the next challenge, and that's what we call leveling up.
And so, I want to talk about three of the positions that you should consider, particularly if you're in a big hurry. Now, you can spend six, 12, 18 months researching all of the possible nonclinical careers out there, but if you're looking for a particular type of career that I'll mention in a minute, then maybe you should select from one of the three most commonly pursued careers and go from there, and that's what I'm going to talk about today, the pros, the cons, some of the tactics for doing this, and so forth. They definitely provide a better lifestyle, and they pay well, and so I thought I would focus on those today.
Those careers are those of a chief medical officer at a hospital or health system, medical science liaison, or UM medical director. Now, they're all full-time jobs. We're not going to mess around with starting a new business or getting a part-time job and then segwaying to maybe looking for two or three different part-time jobs that you can patch together like I've talked about before, but these are full-time jobs. They involve employment with a large organization. They have a lot of the usual benefits that only large organizations provide, and they're really seen by physicians as very, very viable options. And so, I thought, "Well, if I can provide examples of these three and tell you a little bit about each of them, maybe that can kind of jumpstart your process of leveling up."
All right, I have definitely interviewed multiple physicians doing all of these jobs. I personally have been a chief medical officer, know many other chief medical officers and other senior executives in hospitals that are physicians. I've interviewed many medical science liaisons, which represents the pharma industry. And then the third is, again, one of the most common, and maybe somewhat underappreciated, and that's being a medical director for a health insurance company, or you might call them a healthcare payer, one of the big ones. That's what I want to talk about today.
Let's talk about the chief medical officer first. What about that? How do we do that? And one of the things that comes up, because maybe I'm comparing these three directly, and it's a little bit, I wouldn't say disingenuous, but it's not correct to, let's say, talk about a new MSL and someone who's becoming a new CMO. CMO is a pretty high-level position. Now, I was going to talk about medical directors in the hospital setting, and it is the stepping stone to becoming a CMO. Both those jobs pay well, they have great benefits, and the lifestyle is much better than, let's say, a practicing physician as an anesthesiologist or an ER doctor in the hospital.
But most medical directors that work in the hospital setting are medical directors for a service line, which means they're usually practicing at least half-time as well. I wouldn't want to call that medical director position as a full-time position. Now, there are some full-time medical director positions. If you're in a large enough hospital and you can be a medical director for quality improvement or for informatics or for utilization management or, let's say, even coding and documentation, those can all be full-time jobs. They can pay well. You can replace your clinical salary for sure. And they do serve as a stepping stone, though, to the ultimate hospital environment job, which would be that of a chief medical officer or one of the other senior positions like chief medical information officer or chief quality officer, something like that.
Now, as far as getting from your medical director role up to the CMO role, which is that last step before, but you could eventually become a COO or even a CEO of a hospital. But in focusing on the CMO role, you're going to do some of these things that we will talk about with all three positions, really.
Maybe a little different here. You might want to get an executive coach or mentor. You definitely want to join LinkedIn because you're going to do a lot of your networking and looking for jobs on LinkedIn if you don't have a way to segue up to the current institution where you're already working.
One of the resources is the AAPL, which is the American Association for Physician Leadership, which is at physicianleaders.org. They have a bunch of books. There's a bunch of other books you can look at for healthcare finances and leadership and so forth.
And the question with that job is, "Does it require relocation?" If you're in a large metropolitan area, there's probably multiple systems where you could look for a job, but it's not uncommon to be able to work your way up an institution's hierarchy, work as a medical director, take on more responsibility over time while you gradually decrease your practice. And ultimately, while you might keep your license, you reach a point where you really don't need a license.
I would maintain it only because sometimes when you're looking to change to a CMO role at another organization, they want you to have the license. I think sometimes that's because they might be using your license for some things, having to do with the pharmacy or covering for ordering drugs for different units. But ultimately, you won't really need to have that license because you're no longer seeing patients. Although as a CMO, you can continue to see patients once a week or every other week or so if you want to continue to do that.
But it's one of those jobs that you should think of right off the bat if you're in a position that enables you to pursue that kind of job. It's not right for everybody. If you're a dermatologist working in an outpatient setting or if you've never had privileges at a hospital, it makes it difficult to start that job search from nothing as opposed to being one of these people in the hospital that are there all the time, the emergency physicians, anesthesiologists and various surgeons and so forth. Geriatricians and hospitalists are typical, very common to move up that path. So that's the first one.
With that, I think I'll move on to the next one, which is medical science liaison. We've talked about this before. It's a very common and attractive position. It really doesn't require any special background. I think it's helpful if you have experience in working with particular drugs or drug classes. It's kind of whatever's popular at the time. Oncologists typically can get into pharma very easily. They'll often go into more of the clinical research side of things, but as an oncologist, it would be very easy to become an MSL, but also pretty much anyone who's using certain drugs and classes of drugs, whether it's cardiology, even gynecologists and family physicians, internists for sure. There's a big push in GI drugs lately. So if you were doing GI work and wanted to transition to this role, it'd probably be fairly easily.
And there are even positions for people that don't have a residency and haven't been in practice, but we're really focusing on those who have been in practice and want to level up to something new with a better lifestyle, but actually paying equal to or more in the long run than what you're doing now. And as I said, we're going to focus on some of those drugs to help convince our new employer.
As far as resources to try and move into this role, you want to commiserate with others that are doing it, you want to go on LinkedIn, you want to have a great profile. This applies to all three. Great LinkedIn profile, networking on LinkedIn, engage with peers. You can join the MSL Society, which the link there is themsls.org. They have a lot in there for people who are already medical science liaisons, but you can imagine just taking a few entry-level courses and reading about becoming an MSL and being an MSL and exceeding and excelling as an MSL would be very helpful. And in addition, you'll learn the language that they speak.
And when you're doing interviews and submitting your resume, you want to sprinkle those and your LinkedIn profile with the vernacular that's not used outside of the pharma industry. And some of it's not even used by anyone other than medical science liaisons. I do also mention the Contract Research Organization, CRO, because you can work directly for a pharmaceutical company as an MSL, but a lot of MSLs work for contract research organizations.
A CRO has different names, it could be the Contract Research Organization, it could be Contract Resource Organization, but they provide resources to pharma companies for those things that they don't want to keep hiring for. And sometimes it's MSLs, it can be other things, it could be the components that actually provide the studies, that monitor the studies and so forth.
You oftentimes will find that CROs are hiring medical science liaisons a little quicker than the pharmaceutical companies go. And all of these things are dependent on what is going on in the industry, how much demand there is based on what new drugs are being released by various companies. And it's at that point of release that MSLs get heavily involved. It's an educational role, it's not a marketing or sales role.
I remember once talking to a guest who's a pediatrician and she didn't think there was any way she could be employed by a pharma company, but because of all the experience she had with vaccines, they happened to be looking for somebody that had that experience and she was able to get a job. And I think initially she was employed by a CRO and then later moved up to a full-time position either with the CRO or with the pharma company itself. That's the second one I wanted to mention today. Don't forget to look at the MSL Society to get some ideas on how to approach that goal.
The last one I want to talk about today, again, one of the big three, is working as a medical director for a utilization management company, working for a large payer. Again, that doesn't require any special background. If you've done chart reviews before in the hospital setting, particularly maybe you've been a physician advisor for UM in the hospital, that might help. All the big insurance companies hire these people, but they also sometimes farm this out to something called an IRO, which is an independent review organization.
And so, many people when they're starting out and becoming a UM or a benefits management medical director, they'll apply at an IRO first and they'll find a job part-time. This is the one that's a little easier to do, kind of the pilots where you're still doing your old job. You're doing some part-time chart reviews for an IRO and then some IROs will hire you full-time.
One of my colleagues really, he hasn't been a guest on the podcast yet. I'm probably going to have him on someday, but he was a surgeon and he just wanted to spend more time with his kids. And he thought, "Well, I don't know. I make a fair amount of money as a surgeon but I'm not having any time with my kids. I'm not spending enough time with my kids. They're growing up, I'm missing on that." And he said, "I'm going to level up to one of these different careers." And so, he did start working as a medical director for an independent review organization and he actually really enjoys it. In addition to doing general sort of chart review work, he's also serving as a resource for those surgical cases. So you can always get that. Even if you're a specialist, sometimes they have special roles for you. One of my other guests or the other one that was a guest as opposed to this first example, he was an invasive cardiologist for pediatrics.
And yeah, he's been working at a health system or a health insurer rather for gosh, at least five or six years now since I interviewed him. And he's very happy and he actually helps other people do that. The resources for that, besides looking around for IROs, if you want a list of some of the IROs, they're basically the ones that are certified. You can go to NAIRO, which is the National Association of IROs at nairo.org/members. You'll get a list of all the NAIRO members and you can go look at their websites to see if they're hiring the type of medical director that you might be looking at. And again, these can be for part-time positions to get you started, to get you exposed.
You can also go to Facebook and look for the Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook group. It's got at least 10,000 members now. It's pretty big group. And everybody in there is kind of talking about working as a payer or a health insurer UM medical director and other associated types of positions.
All the big insurance companies definitely will hire these people as well. Whether we're talking about Cigna or Centene or several others, any of the big ones, they all have them. But they also outsource some of the work to the IROs. Again, I will remind you that for all these positions, it's important to be on LinkedIn. It's important to have a complete profile. It's important to use LinkedIn and sometimes Doximity to locate your colleagues and network with them. See if some of them are already doing one of these jobs.
Like I said, maybe it's time to level up and this is how you can get started. And if one of these three positions sounds right for you, then you can just jump in now and start working on it and see what you think.
The other thing I would say is besides what I've already mentioned in terms of the benefits is they have great benefit packages in most of these places. You've got health insurance, disability insurance, retirement plans, four to six weeks of paid time off. And some of them will even give physicians deferred compensation benefits. So that can be nice for your retirement planning.
Well, I guess that's it for today's discussion. Thousands of physicians literally just in the last few years have found happiness in each of these three careers. They all offer full-time salaries, generally good benefits, and there are resources that can help you get started. Just check out those resources and get going. And if you have any questions, you can always contact me.
If you want to access everything that I've talked about today easily, you can go to the show notes. You'll also get a link to the podcast episode. You'll get related links, several related links actually and the transcript. And you can find all that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/popular-full-time-careers.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 368
First Consider the Most Popular Full-Time Careers
John: Okay, nonclinical nation, many of you are ready to make a change in your professional life. It may be because you're frustrated and your work-life balance is shot, or maybe it's just because you're ready to level up.
What do I mean by leveling up? Well, leveling up can be described as a process of self-development or to become a better version of yourself. This can include identifying weaknesses and strengths, setting goals, replacing old habits with new habits, focus on success, and possibly moving to a career that's more satisfying and financially rewarding.
As I was thinking about this concept, I was trying to get examples, and I have two examples that really come to mind.
The first one is professional athletes. Some professional athletes are forced to retire. Some just reach their peak and decide after they've done everything they want to do, they just retire, but they have a lot of notoriety and they have hopefully saved up some money. And again, it's kind of parallel to what physicians can do.
I think of examples like those of Magic Johnson's business ventures in broadcasting, music, film, and finance, or John Elway's investments in dealerships in the Denver area that he said later sold off, and then him investing in the Colorado Crush of the Arena Football League in 2002. And of course, many successful athletes have finished their careers as athletes, and then leveled up to do something else very powerful.
Now, those might seem like outliers. Maybe those are just a select few, but I also think of attorneys. There are many attorneys who never practice, or let's say they finish law school, they pass their bar, and they do work for a while in the industry, in law, doing something, but then they find that they can take everything they've learned in law school and with their early experiences as an attorney and segue into another career, which they level up.
You can look around and see a lot of attorneys working in C suite of various companies, not actually practicing law, but applying what they learned as leaders, as researchers, as presenters, and they apply to the new job. You're an attorney and you have a background in healthcare law, well, you can do that with a big firm, or you can actually go and become part of a team to run a healthcare organization, and obviously all those skills will come in handy.
I interviewed somebody who was trained as an attorney. He, for a little while, was helping physicians with their contract negotiations as an attorney. What he did was leverage that to become more of an agent. He helps physicians negotiate better contracts as an agent, but not as an attorney. In fact, he still has attorneys review the contracts. That's a way to level up.
I think the physicians can do the same thing. Healthcare is the largest industry in the United States, and there are positions for physicians in every major aspect of healthcare. Maybe it's natural to think after a few years of being in the trenches and seeing patients, at some point it gets old, and now you look for the next challenge, and that's what we call leveling up.
And so, I want to talk about three of the positions that you should consider, particularly if you're in a big hurry. Now, you can spend six, 12, 18 months researching all of the possible nonclinical careers out there, but if you're looking for a particular type of career that I'll mention in a minute, then maybe you should select from one of the three most commonly pursued careers and go from there, and that's what I'm going to talk about today, the pros, the cons, some of the tactics for doing this, and so forth. They definitely provide a better lifestyle, and they pay well, and so I thought I would focus on those today.
Those careers are those of a chief medical officer at a hospital or health system, medical science liaison, or UM medical director. Now, they're all full-time jobs. We're not going to mess around with starting a new business or getting a part-time job and then segwaying to maybe looking for two or three different part-time jobs that you can patch together like I've talked about before, but these are full-time jobs. They involve employment with a large organization. They have a lot of the usual benefits that only large organizations provide, and they're really seen by physicians as very, very viable options. And so, I thought, "Well, if I can provide examples of these three and tell you a little bit about each of them, maybe that can kind of jumpstart your process of leveling up."
All right, I have definitely interviewed multiple physicians doing all of these jobs. I personally have been a chief medical officer, know many other chief medical officers and other senior executives in hospitals that are physicians. I've interviewed many medical science liaisons, which represents the pharma industry. And then the third is, again, one of the most common, and maybe somewhat underappreciated, and that's being a medical director for a health insurance company, or you might call them a healthcare payer, one of the big ones. That's what I want to talk about today.
Let's talk about the chief medical officer first. What about that? How do we do that? And one of the things that comes up, because maybe I'm comparing these three directly, and it's a little bit, I wouldn't say disingenuous, but it's not correct to, let's say, talk about a new MSL and someone who's becoming a new CMO. CMO is a pretty high-level position. Now, I was going to talk about medical directors in the hospital setting, and it is the stepping stone to becoming a CMO. Both those jobs pay well, they have great benefits, and the lifestyle is much better than, let's say, a practicing physician as an anesthesiologist or an ER doctor in the hospital.
But most medical directors that work in the hospital setting are medical directors for a service line, which means they're usually practicing at least half-time as well. I wouldn't want to call that medical director position as a full-time position. Now, there are some full-time medical director positions. If you're in a large enough hospital and you can be a medical director for quality improvement or for informatics or for utilization management or, let's say, even coding and documentation, those can all be full-time jobs. They can pay well. You can replace your clinical salary for sure. And they do serve as a stepping stone, though, to the ultimate hospital environment job, which would be that of a chief medical officer or one of the other senior positions like chief medical information officer or chief quality officer, something like that.
Now, as far as getting from your medical director role up to the CMO role, which is that last step before, but you could eventually become a COO or even a CEO of a hospital. But in focusing on the CMO role, you're going to do some of these things that we will talk about with all three positions, really.
Maybe a little different here. You might want to get an executive coach or mentor. You definitely want to join LinkedIn because you're going to do a lot of your networking and looking for jobs on LinkedIn if you don't have a way to segue up to the current institution where you're already working.
One of the resources is the AAPL, which is the American Association for Physician Leadership, which is at physicianleaders.org. They have a bunch of books. There's a bunch of other books you can look at for healthcare finances and leadership and so forth.
And the question with that job is, "Does it require relocation?" If you're in a large metropolitan area, there's probably multiple systems where you could look for a job, but it's not uncommon to be able to work your way up an institution's hierarchy, work as a medical director, take on more responsibility over time while you gradually decrease your practice. And ultimately, while you might keep your license, you reach a point where you really don't need a license.
I would maintain it only because sometimes when you're looking to change to a CMO role at another organization, they want you to have the license. I think sometimes that's because they might be using your license for some things, having to do with the pharmacy or covering for ordering drugs for different units. But ultimately, you won't really need to have that license because you're no longer seeing patients. Although as a CMO, you can continue to see patients once a week or every other week or so if you want to continue to do that.
But it's one of those jobs that you should think of right off the bat if you're in a position that enables you to pursue that kind of job. It's not right for everybody. If you're a dermatologist working in an outpatient setting or if you've never had privileges at a hospital, it makes it difficult to start that job search from nothing as opposed to being one of these people in the hospital that are there all the time, the emergency physicians, anesthesiologists and various surgeons and so forth. Geriatricians and hospitalists are typical, very common to move up that path. So that's the first one.
With that, I think I'll move on to the next one, which is medical science liaison. We've talked about this before. It's a very common and attractive position. It really doesn't require any special background. I think it's helpful if you have experience in working with particular drugs or drug classes. It's kind of whatever's popular at the time. Oncologists typically can get into pharma very easily. They'll often go into more of the clinical research side of things, but as an oncologist, it would be very easy to become an MSL, but also pretty much anyone who's using certain drugs and classes of drugs, whether it's cardiology, even gynecologists and family physicians, internists for sure. There's a big push in GI drugs lately. So if you were doing GI work and wanted to transition to this role, it'd probably be fairly easily.
And there are even positions for people that don't have a residency and haven't been in practice, but we're really focusing on those who have been in practice and want to level up to something new with a better lifestyle, but actually paying equal to or more in the long run than what you're doing now. And as I said, we're going to focus on some of those drugs to help convince our new employer.
As far as resources to try and move into this role, you want to commiserate with others that are doing it, you want to go on LinkedIn, you want to have a great profile. This applies to all three. Great LinkedIn profile, networking on LinkedIn, engage with peers. You can join the MSL Society, which the link there is themsls.org. They have a lot in there for people who are already medical science liaisons, but you can imagine just taking a few entry-level courses and reading about becoming an MSL and being an MSL and exceeding and excelling as an MSL would be very helpful. And in addition, you'll learn the language that they speak.
And when you're doing interviews and submitting your resume, you want to sprinkle those and your LinkedIn profile with the vernacular that's not used outside of the pharma industry. And some of it's not even used by anyone other than medical science liaisons. I do also mention the Contract Research Organization, CRO, because you can work directly for a pharmaceutical company as an MSL, but a lot of MSLs work for contract research organizations.
A CRO has different names, it could be the Contract Research Organization, it could be Contract Resource Organization, but they provide resources to pharma companies for those things that they don't want to keep hiring for. And sometimes it's MSLs, it can be other things, it could be the components that actually provide the studies, that monitor the studies and so forth.
You oftentimes will find that CROs are hiring medical science liaisons a little quicker than the pharmaceutical companies go. And all of these things are dependent on what is going on in the industry, how much demand there is based on what new drugs are being released by various companies. And it's at that point of release that MSLs get heavily involved. It's an educational role, it's not a marketing or sales role.
I remember once talking to a guest who's a pediatrician and she didn't think there was any way she could be employed by a pharma company, but because of all the experience she had with vaccines, they happened to be looking for somebody that had that experience and she was able to get a job. And I think initially she was employed by a CRO and then later moved up to a full-time position either with the CRO or with the pharma company itself. That's the second one I wanted to mention today. Don't forget to look at the MSL Society to get some ideas on how to approach that goal.
The last one I want to talk about today, again, one of the big three, is working as a medical director for a utilization management company, working for a large payer. Again, that doesn't require any special background. If you've done chart reviews before in the hospital setting, particularly maybe you've been a physician advisor for UM in the hospital, that might help. All the big insurance companies hire these people, but they also sometimes farm this out to something called an IRO, which is an independent review organization.
And so, many people when they're starting out and becoming a UM or a benefits management medical director, they'll apply at an IRO first and they'll find a job part-time. This is the one that's a little easier to do, kind of the pilots where you're still doing your old job. You're doing some part-time chart reviews for an IRO and then some IROs will hire you full-time.
One of my colleagues really, he hasn't been a guest on the podcast yet. I'm probably going to have him on someday, but he was a surgeon and he just wanted to spend more time with his kids. And he thought, "Well, I don't know. I make a fair amount of money as a surgeon but I'm not having any time with my kids. I'm not spending enough time with my kids. They're growing up, I'm missing on that." And he said, "I'm going to level up to one of these different careers." And so, he did start working as a medical director for an independent review organization and he actually really enjoys it. In addition to doing general sort of chart review work, he's also serving as a resource for those surgical cases. So you can always get that. Even if you're a specialist, sometimes they have special roles for you. One of my other guests or the other one that was a guest as opposed to this first example, he was an invasive cardiologist for pediatrics.
And yeah, he's been working at a health system or a health insurer rather for gosh, at least five or six years now since I interviewed him. And he's very happy and he actually helps other people do that. The resources for that, besides looking around for IROs, if you want a list of some of the IROs, they're basically the ones that are certified. You can go to NAIRO, which is the National Association of IROs at nairo.org/members. You'll get a list of all the NAIRO members and you can go look at their websites to see if they're hiring the type of medical director that you might be looking at. And again, these can be for part-time positions to get you started, to get you exposed.
You can also go to Facebook and look for the Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook group. It's got at least 10,000 members now. It's pretty big group. And everybody in there is kind of talking about working as a payer or a health insurer UM medical director and other associated types of positions.
All the big insurance companies definitely will hire these people as well. Whether we're talking about Cigna or Centene or several others, any of the big ones, they all have them. But they also outsource some of the work to the IROs. Again, I will remind you that for all these positions, it's important to be on LinkedIn. It's important to have a complete profile. It's important to use LinkedIn and sometimes Doximity to locate your colleagues and network with them. See if some of them are already doing one of these jobs.
Like I said, maybe it's time to level up and this is how you can get started. And if one of these three positions sounds right for you, then you can just jump in now and start working on it and see what you think.
The other thing I would say is besides what I've already mentioned in terms of the benefits is they have great benefit packages in most of these places. You've got health insurance, disability insurance, retirement plans, four to six weeks of paid time off. And some of them will even give physicians deferred compensation benefits. So that can be nice for your retirement planning.
Well, I guess that's it for today's discussion. Thousands of physicians literally just in the last few years have found happiness in each of these three careers. They all offer full-time salaries, generally good benefits, and there are resources that can help you get started. Just check out those resources and get going. And if you have any questions, you can always contact me.
If you want to access everything that I've talked about today easily, you can go to the show notes. You'll also get a link to the podcast episode. You'll get related links, several related links actually and the transcript. And you can find all that at nonclinicalphysicians.com/popular-full-time-careers.
Sign up to receive email reminders, news, and free stuff every week!
Enter your name and email address below and I'll send you reminders each podcast episode, notices about nonclinical jobs, information about free and paid courses, and other curated information just for you.
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. 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.
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.