Interview with Dr. Ashwini Bapat – 468
In today's interview, Dr. Ashwini Bapat describes why practicing in another country is awesome and how to set yourself up for success!
A palliative care physician who moved to Portugal in 2020, she shares her own story and walks through what Hippocratic Adventures offers for physicians at every stage of curiosity about living and working abroad.
Making the Move: Paths, Timelines, and Trade-offs
The two most common paths for physicians moving abroad are local clinical practice and remote telemedicine. And the right choice depends heavily on specialty, language(s) spoken, and how quickly a physician wants to be up and running.
Local practice requires licensure in the destination country, and in countries like France or Portugal, that means language proficiency first, which takes time. New Zealand and Canada are the fastest pathways for local clinical work, often achievable within a year for well-organized candidates. Telemedicine from abroad is a quicker route but requires maintaining US state licenses and working only with companies that explicitly allow remote work outside the country.
Timeline is not the most useful question to lead with. More useful is asking what the work should actually feel like, whether clinical contact matters, whether language learning is appealing, whether the goal is a permanent move or a flexible arrangement. From there, the next small steps becomes clearer.
For surgeons who need to operate, creative split schedules between the US and abroad are possible. For psychiatrists, a telepsychiatry private practice built in the US can travel with you. For physicians willing to pivot, non-clinical roles in pharma, medical education, and medical editing are available remotely from almost anywhere.
Practicing in Another Country and What Hippocratic Adventures Offers
Hippocratic Adventures, a company that helps American-trained physicians live and practice abroad, started as a Facebook group in April 2020. Three hundred physicians joined overnight, and it has since grown into a full resource platform. The physician community remains free and physician-verified.
The website hosts country guides for over 18 destinations, a job board focused on organizations actively recruiting American-trained physicians, and a resource called Telemedicine and Beyond compiling companies that allow remote work from abroad and physician-relevant pharma and medical education roles. There is also a CME-accredited course called Telepsychiatry from Abroad for psychiatrists building a relocatable private practice.
Typical Physician Members
The physicians using these resources span every specialty and career stage. A trauma surgeon negotiated a split schedule, operating in the US periodically while living in Barcelona. A primary care physician in Switzerland started freelance medical editing and is now director of a medical education company in Germany, working fully remotely. A pediatric GI fellow moved to France before getting licensed, sustained herself through real estate work for expats and US locums shifts, and is now practicing locally.
Flexibility is the consistent thread — about what the work looks like, the timeline, and what counts as success.
Summary
Practicing medicine abroad is not an extended vacation. It is a career decision that requires planning, flexibility, and a tolerance for some uncertainty. It is also one of the most expansive moves available, opening up face to face clinical, remote clinical, and nonclinical options that most physicians have never considered. Hippocratic Adventures exists to make that exploration concrete rather than theoretical. The free physician starter kit, country guides, job board, and physician community are all available below.
NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode.
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Links for Today's Episode:
- Hippocratic Adventures
- Dr. Ashwini Bapat's LinkedIn Profile
- Exploring Global Medical Science Liaison Jobs
- The Extraordinary Life of the Physician Digital Nomad
- How You Can Forge a Wonderful Life After Medicine – 246
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Live Your Dream Life Practicing in Another Country
Interview with Dr. Ashwini Bapat
John: Welcome back, Nonclinical Nation. Today I'm presenting my interview with Dr. Ashwini Bapat. Dr. Bapat is a board-certified hospice and palliative care physician who graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine, and then she completed her internal medicine residency and palliative care fellowship at Yale School of Medicine. She began her career as a palliative care doctor at Yale, then shifted to working remotely doing telepalliative care. After exploring new practice models, she and her husband, who’s also a physician, decided to move to Portugal to practice overseas. They both found productive, fulfilling careers there and began helping others pursue similar career goals. That led to starting her own Facebook group for other physicians interested in pursuing practices and nonclinical ventures, for that matter, in other countries. Now Ashwini leads Hippocratic Adventures, a company that mentors and coaches American-trained physicians to practice medicine abroad and assist them in finding job opportunities. Okay, with that, let’s meet our guest.
Okay, Nonclinical Nation, I think you’re going to really enjoy today’s interview. I think many of us, when we’re thinking about doing a nonclinical or even just an alternative clinical practice, that maybe we could do that in another country and still maybe practice what we’re used to practicing if we don’t want to go off in some other tangent, or possibly even practice while we’re traveling. I know one person that does that for sure that we’ve talked about before. So today’s guest is perfectly suited to tell us about this topic and answer any questions we might have. So, Dr. Ashwini Bapat, thanks for being here today.
Dr. Ashwini: Thank you for having me, John.
John: This is going to be fun. Yeah, there’s just so much here that we could go into, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I’ve got a lot of questions for you. But why don’t we start by you telling us about your background, what specialty, a little bit of that, and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of what’s going on.
Dr. Ashwini: Okay, sounds good. So, I’m a palliative care doctor, and I did my residency and fellowship at Yale, and then I practiced in Boston. So back in 2018, we were doing what you’re supposed to do. I was living the attending life, he was about to graduate from fellowship, and we thought we were going to settle in the suburbs of Boston. And we were house hunting, we were trying to find the perfect house, and one morning we found the perfect house on paper, and that same evening we had a planned vacation to Spain.
And within two or three days of roaming around the streets of Granada, picnicking under orange trees, walking past Roman aqueducts on the way to the grocery store, we both looked at each other and were like, “We don’t want to live in the suburbs of Boston, we want to live here, like somewhere abroad.” We weren’t sure where, and that is essentially what started our journey. And on that same trip, on that same vacation, we started Googling how can American doctors practice in Spain, how can they practice in France, where can American doctors go? And we went down the Reddit rabbit hole with very little kind of reliable information that was being shared. And I think that’s where our journey started, and that’s where our journey with Hippocratic Adventures started.
John: Interesting. So you found that maybe we’re not so interested in buying that house that looks like it’s perfect for us, but not excited about it, and this idea of traveling. Awesome.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, honestly, we had looked at fifteen perfect houses. On paper, they were perfect, but we couldn’t put in an offer, and we couldn’t figure out why. And then it was that trip to Spain where we’re like, “Oh, I know why. It’s because we weren’t excited. There wasn’t anything wrong with living in the suburbs of Boston. We just personally weren’t excited about what that future looked like for us.”
John: Now, at that point, were you both early in your practices, or where were you on that?
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, so I was practicing as a palliative care attending in Boston. I did mostly, almost all inpatient care and then clinic. And my husband at that time was about to graduate from fellowship. And so as a psychiatrist, his dream was always to have a very traditional psychiatry private practice. And so for that, we needed to figure out where we wanted to live. So that’s where we were at.
John: Okay, so walk us through at a high level the steps on making the move, finding it, applying. What did you have to do? Because we have a second part to this story that we want to talk about later, so we’ll go through this at a high level and then I’ll ask you some more questions about that.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, absolutely. So literally from that vacation onwards, we started Googling and reaching out to any physician that had moved abroad. So we were looking at New Zealand, we were looking at Canada of course, we had colleagues that moved to Canada, we looked at the UK, and in the process we realized there were a ton of opportunities for psychiatrists and a palliative care doctor or internal medicine if I chose to work under that. And there were a ton of physicians that had already moved abroad and they were willing—we would meet them on Facebook—they were willing to share their experience, how they did it.
There were psychiatrists that had moved abroad and were doing their private practices abroad. So that exploration and that talking with other physicians is what got us excited. Oh, this doesn’t have to be a pipe dream, this could actually happen for us. And then eventually we started narrowing down in terms of the place and the experience that we wanted. So I think originally we were like, oh, do we want to live in New Zealand or Canada? And then we eventually realized that what we really wanted was we wanted an experience where we could learn a different language, where we could learn or experience a different culture, like a culture that was pretty different, and we were willing to go through the difficulty and the hardship of learning a new language from scratch. So I think that’s how our journey kind of started. And eventually, we took a vacation to Portugal.
So let me give you the background. My husband is French, so originally France was on the radar for sure. He speaks French, I was learning French, so it made sense. But then when we visited Portugal, there was something about it. I don’t know if it was the weather, if it was the warmth of the people, the architecture—there was something very familiar about it, and it felt right in our bones, and that’s when we decided, okay, maybe not France. France is lovely, but Portugal feels more like a better fit for us.
John: No, I think of Portugal, I go to Portuguese, but I’m not sure—is that the main language spoken, or is there a lot of Spanish there, or both?
Dr. Ashwini: No, Portuguese is definitely the main language. You can—I would say they get slightly offended if you start speaking in Spanish and assume that. Yeah, no, Portuguese is definitely the main language.
John: It makes sense, but for some reason, I remember something that doesn’t always correlate exactly with where you are, which language, but that’s another story. I’m going to jump ahead to a question now that I want to talk about later because it’s going to come up again, but it’s simply, when you were talking to these—I’m going to call them mentors or associates, people you talk to, other physicians—were they all practicing in that country, in that location, treating people in that country, or were some of them remote in that country but then still practicing and treating Americans?
Dr. Ashwini: So the psychiatrists my husband talked to—some of them were practicing locally, the ones that moved to New Zealand and Canada, they were practicing locally. We met one who lived in Brazil, and that person was seeing patients in the US.
John: Okay. Because that, I think that’s one piece of it that could be different for later we’ll discuss what you’re helping others do. So, okay, so that’s pretty clear. So you both set up practice there—what was the next step once you decided on that? And what about the hoops you had to jump through?
Dr. Ashwini: So once we decided we were open to learning a new language and a new culture, we knew we weren’t going to be able to practice locally immediately for the simple reason that we didn’t speak Portuguese, no figure. So we had to really think about alternative models, and for my husband it was kind of easy—I don’t want to say it was easy, it was a lot of work—but he essentially set up a telepsychiatry private practice. It was before COVID, and then COVID happened and so all his patients went to telepsychiatry, and so by the time we moved in 2020, all his patients he was seeing via telepsychiatry anyways.
And so for him, there were certain parameters you had to work within, but for him it wasn’t a big transition in many ways. For me, it was a huge transition because I had been working inpatient a hundred percent of the time, or in clinic, and so I went from a hundred percent clinical in-person contact to when we started thinking about how do I make that transition abroad for myself? I had to be a little more creative and I had to stop asking the question, “How can I practice palliative care in Portugal exactly as the way that I do now?” Because I knew that wasn’t possible, and I had to start asking the question of, “What skills do I have as a palliative care physician or as a physician in general that I can use as I move abroad?” And because of that, I eventually found opportunities where I could do telemedicine from abroad, so I could work under internal medicine, primary care, and potentially palliative care from abroad.
I could do e-consults from abroad, and over time, like in those first couple years after we actually moved to Portugal, I also did caregiver coaching where I used my palliative care skills to support family caregivers. So when I made that initial transition, it was a little bit of everything. It was a little bit of telemedicine, a little bit of coaching, and at the same time, we started building Hippocratic Adventures to help American-trained physicians live and practice abroad. And in the first three years, I kind of did a mix of things, and over time, Hippocratic Adventures ended up growing, and it ended up taking a lot more of my time and energy. So it was a very gradual transition for me.
John: Okay. So at least you started out doing some remote practice, actually, in palliative care and internal medicine, kind of whatever was available—
Dr. Ashwini: Whatever was available.
John: —since timing and so forth. And then the remote coaching that you were doing, that was with American families and caregivers.
Dr. Ashwini: Exactly.
John: Okay. And was there some, was there any difficulty in doing the remote hoops? Because you have to be licensed in every state, not for the coaching obviously, but for the practicing, you have to pick out where you’re going to do that and the typical kind of…
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, the typical challenges of doing telemedicine is, yes, you have to be licensed in the states where you’re seeing patients. So maintaining those licenses, as always, like you’ve got to renew your licenses, you’ve got to get your licenses first, then renew them. So the usual when it comes to telemedicine. With coaching it was a lot more straightforward. It was really using; it was very much drawing on my palliative care skills to be able to do that.
John: Just as an aside, how did you market the coaching? How did you find people that needed help with the coaching?
Dr. Ashwini: So, we reached out to a lot of caregiver support groups and shared kind of what we were doing and if this was interesting to them, and that’s how we kind of built that referral base. So, I did that for a period of time, and then eventually, as Hippocratic Adventures grew, I transitioned essentially all of my time to Hippocratic Adventures. So I don’t do the coaching anymore and I don’t do the telemedicine anymore, but all of that illustrates that as we made that move abroad, I had to be creative in how I approached my personal career and I had to be flexible in what I chose to pursue. And that it evolved over time as well.
John: Okay, then let’s talk about this whole life of Hippocratic Adventures, which is about, what, six years old more or less? You said 2020, it’s kind of when things got started. And so, how did it start? What were you doing at first on that? And then, I think you’ll have to explain exactly all the aspects of it now, because I know it has different parts. So, tell us from the very beginning what that looked like and what it was like growing that little baby into something bigger.
Dr. Ashwini: That’s exactly right. So we started as a Facebook group in April 2020. So right when the COVID pandemic hit, when no one was going anywhere, that’s when we started the group. And I remember the day we started it, overnight we had three hundred physicians join, and we’re like, “Oh shit, it’s not just us.” That’s literally the moment. And we invited back those physicians we had personally talked to who had moved to Canada, who had moved to New Zealand, who had moved to UK, and we asked them to share their experience—like write it down, share it in a blog. And so it was literally a Word document.
So we shared these three Word documents on that Facebook group, and then people were like, “Oh, by the way, I moved to France, I moved to Spain.” And we’re like, “Oh, can you write down that experience too? People want to be able to move to these places.” And so we started sharing originally in that Facebook group, and then in September, because it was kind of tricky to share the resources in a Facebook group, we launched our website, and since then, almost everything that we’ve built has come from questions from the physicians in our community who are looking to live abroad.
And so simple things like, “How do I get licensed in this country? What international job openings are there, and are they looking for American doctors? Can I do telemedicine from abroad and what companies allow me to do it? So all of those questions or what non-clinical careers can I do from abroad? How are other physicians doing it?” So that is how we have built Hippocratic Adventures to literally answer those questions.
John: So let’s see, so you’ve been doing that, and so now, I’ve seen the website, which looks very professional. So how does someone—how are you helping most of your, let’s say clients now, because it’s not just a Facebook group, most Facebook groups don’t have a fee associated with them, they can do that in a direct way, but tell me more about how you’re generating some income to pay for the growth of it, at least.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, our physician community on the Facebook group is completely free. It is a physician-only group, so we do vet them, just we want it to be a safe place for physicians. So that is the base of who we are. All of the resources that are on our website—the physician stories, the country spotlights, the roadmaps to get to whatever country, the different ways physicians are moving abroad—all of that is written by our community and is completely free. We have a job board on there because the first road bump people hit when they want to move abroad is, “I need a job.”
And so we have specifically reached out to organizations that recruit American doctors to their countries. And the popular countries our community wants to move to are places like Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, the Middle East. So we wanted to make sure that job board addressed that number one obstacle, which is I got to have a job when I move abroad, right? And not just freewheeling this. And then for folks that were ready to go a little deeper, we have this resource called Telemedicine and Beyond, and this is literally based on one of the obstacles a lot of physicians hit, which is they want to do telemedicine from abroad, but a lot of companies don’t allow you to.
So this resource compiles the companies that do allow you to work from abroad, and then it eventually expanded into other non-clinical work you can do, like pharma or industry roles that you can do from abroad, specifically for physicians, and then you can choose kind of your specialty and your level of experience, things like that. And because we realized that a lot of our physicians, if they transition into pharma, they do it in the US first, we also have pharma roles in the US so that they can help with that transition, and then we have other non-pharma roles in there that you can do from abroad as well.
And then for psychiatrists, my husband kept getting emails and messages from first his colleagues, and then from the wider psychiatry community about how they can do it too, how they can build a practice and take it abroad. And so for that, we built a CME-accredited course called Telepsychiatry from Abroad, basically to allow you to build a private practice for psychiatrists and take it abroad with you when you’re ready. So all of the initiatives have really been based on the obstacles that our physician community was having as they explored trying to move abroad.
John: And it sounds like, in certain scenarios, you have a lot of information, and there might—if something new comes up, of course, you’re going to not have a lot of information. But it sounds like if you fit into a certain slot, psychiatrists looking to do remote or whatever things that you have done, there’s going to be a lot of information there and assistance available.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. Even telemedicine—people that want to do telemedicine from abroad, very common path people take. Or pharma.
John: Yeah, I was wondering, I was going to ask you about the pharma piece, because that’s one that comes up a lot. Are there certain companies that are known for being more flexible if you’re already working and you’ve shown your skills in the US, and it’s like, hey, why don’t I go to one of your other areas? Because these countries, they have—some of them have offices in every, almost every major country.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, so that depends on the company, but one of the most incredible parts of that resource when it relates to pharma is that it specifically includes roles you can do from abroad or you can do from the US, so you pick and you can pick your country. So if you’re thinking, okay, I want to look at France, Spain, and Belgium, these countries have a ton of pharma companies headquartered there.
And then you can specifically look for physician-relevant roles, because anyone who has looked at pivoting into pharma, it is—and you know this—it is really hard to understand what those positions even mean. And so we’ve built it specifically for physicians. And then you can filter by specialty and it, I think it has the six hundred biggest pharma companies in the world on there, and it’s updated weekly, I believe.
John: Okay. So there, one of the things require a payment, just so I know, from looking at it from the standpoint of starting a business and so forth, because a lot of physicians also will do something like that, there’s a lot of free content obviously, and a lot gets produced by the members.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So that community is very important to us because we literally share each other’s stories and we build off of that. And for us, that is very important that remains free because we want to be able to share with other people how to do it, how to—here’s the roadmap. If you want to move to France, here’s how you can do it. If you want to do pharma abroad, here’s how one person did it. And let it inspire your story. So that for us is very important that it’s available freely on our website.
John: Alright. Now I did have some other questions here that kind of more, I think what my audience would want to know. For example, I’m really unhappy with my current—this is burnout-driven, which is probably not the best reason to decide to move to another country, but once you get over that and say, “Okay, no, I just, I’m unhappy and I’m going to fix it,” how long would it take from the time that I’m in this practice that I don’t like to actually starting in a new location? I’m sure that’s not a one number, but what have you found?
Dr. Ashwini: First, I always look—I’m a palliative care doctor, so you know what I’m going to say. I always say, if you’re unhappy in whatever position you’re in, and to be honest, in medicine, it is really easy to feel stuck. Like there are many people that feel like they can do their job in their sleep, because they’ve been doing it for so long, they don’t feel challenged, they feel like a cog in the wheel because of the way the administrative roles are run.
And for some people, they don’t feel like anything is particularly wrong, they just aren’t very excited when they wake up in the morning and maybe they want something different. So I always say, take a step back. And instead of asking how quickly can I get out of feeling stuck, maybe ask what do I want to move towards? What do I want my Tuesday to feel like? Do I want more time outside? Do I want more time with my family? Do I like clinical medicine, but maybe I just need to be in a different/slash better environment? Or do I want to try something non-clinical? And so I would ask yourself those questions first. Then I would start exploring, and I think this is the really fun part. This is where you listen to podcasts, right? This is where you read physician stories, check out blogs, see what other physicians are doing and how they’re doing it, and then be like, okay, which one of these resonates with me? Which one of these is like, that sounds really cool.
And then start taking action, and I think that’s what we’ve tried to create with Hippocratic Adventures, where we share a lot of different stories of how physicians are doing it to help you figure out what your version of living abroad could look like. So to get back to your question, because I won’t dodge it, the timeline, you’re right, it depends on the path. So if you were, let’s say, a family doctor who loves outdoors, wants an adventure, is excited about New Zealand. The paperwork, the credentialing, the licensure process is pretty smooth usually, and the jobs are readily usually available, and so potentially you could be in New Zealand, living there, working there within the year. That’s if you have all your paperwork and stuff, if you’re super organized about it.
If you decide, “Okay, I want to live in France,” because who doesn’t want to live in France? But if you’re learning French from scratch and you want to get licensed there, it’s going to take a while. And so, yeah, so it really depends, but then maybe you’re like, okay, maybe I could do telemedicine from there, then there’ll be a much quicker turnaround. Maybe it isn’t about how long will it take? But maybe it’s more about, what am I moving towards? What path feels right for me? And what are the next small steps I can take? Because I think that’s how you go from feeling stuck to feeling like, okay, there are possibilities for me.
John: Yeah, I think once your eyes are open to what’s possible, and this is a lot even in the states, there’s just things people, physicians don’t know because they’ve just been driven through their training that this is what I’m going to do, and they don’t have time to even think about what’s actually available. Everything you said is just perfect coaching. If you want to get a career coach, this is part of the process. Okay, give me one or two examples of some very interesting clients or—they may not be clients, they just be member of the Facebook group, but something that kind of might inspire someone like, “Didn’t think it was possible.”
Dr. Ashwini: So off the top of my head, this one physician pops out to me. And I’ll tell you why later. So she is—I’m going to take the total extreme of a physician, right? She is a trauma surgeon with two kids. And she lives in Barcelona, Spain. I think she’s actually moved to France now, but at the time I talked to her, she lived in Barcelona, Spain. She did non-clinical research part of the time there, in Spain, and she would operate in the US, so she would fly back periodically to the institution she worked at, operate in the US for chunks of time, and live out the rest of her time in Spain. So I share this example because I think it’s extreme. Most people are like, “Oh, for a psychiatrist, it’s so easy, they just talk, they can do that over Zoom.”
But I’m a surgeon, and a hundred percent, if you are a surgeon that likes to operate, you should be in the operating room. But this is an example of how she innovated in a very creative way where she was able to negotiate with the institution she had a relationship with to do the split time. The other person I want to talk about is, because this is a non-clinical careers podcast, she was a primary care doc out in Colorado, and her husband got a position in Switzerland, they moved there, and her original plan was like, she actually had no plan, to be honest, she had no plan. She was like, “Yeah.” And she just worked in a veggie garden. She worked on her veggie garden. But within a couple months, she was like, “Okay, I can’t just not do anything. I need to do something.”
And so she looked on LinkedIn and she found this freelance medical editing position, and she was like, “Okay, let me try this, let me see what this is about.” She started doing that, and she eventually, over the past five years, ended up being the director at this medical education company that is based out of Germany. She lives in Switzerland, and she does that remotely, and then she periodically goes to Germany. Those two stand out to me because the first one maintained her clinical practice, she maintained operating time, and the second one pivoted into a non-clinical career that she ended up loving. So those are the two stories that stand out to me.
And then I’ll share one more story because this one’s also really cool. So this is a GI—pediatric GI—and she wanted to live in France. She moved to France, but her French wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t going to get licensed immediately, it was going to take time. And so in the US she had been doing real estate, so she chose to take that up to do real estate in France for expats, for American expats, British expats, and that’s how she got income going. And then she went to locums in the US periodically while she worked on her French, which obviously got better when she lived in France, and while she got licensed in France, and now she’s actually practicing, she’s in the early stages of practicing there.
John: Nice. Yeah, no, and they’re all unique at some level. What else do we need to know about working abroad? Maybe there’s some bad things, good things that we just didn’t touch on that you just want to maybe share.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So I would say we shouldn’t romanticize it. This isn’t an extended vacation for a lot of people. If you choose to live abroad for a longer period of time, you have to adapt. So if you are working clinically, there will be a learning curve, right? The way, if you work at a new hospital, there’s the learning curve. If you work in a new healthcare system, you’re going to have to learn the lingo, you’re going to have to learn names of medications that may be different, availability of medications is often very different as well. You have to learn how that healthcare system works.
And then outside of medicine, you’ve got to think about taxes and your immigration status, which you may not think about in the US. You’ve got to think about schools your kids go to, and if you have to learn a language, it’s going to take time. This isn’t like the Instagram version of “I moved abroad and all my problems got solved.” No, it’s life abroad with all of the problems, but maybe it feels more aligned for you. And then I think the second thing which was really hard for me, and I think it’s hard for a lot of physicians, is that, like you said, physicians follow a very linear path. The traditional path is very linear. You do med school, you do residency, maybe you do a fellowship, then you have attending life.
And in attending life, if you go the academic route, there are like academic ladders you go up. If you go the private practice route, there are like partnership levels and stuff that you can aspire to. When you move abroad, that path isn’t very linear and there is a lot of uncertainty, I would say. And so when you originally move abroad, you may have to try a couple different things before you figure out what lands. And I think the uncertainty is uncomfortable. I think it definitely was for me. And at the same time, it can help you explore different interests, it can give you space, and it can give you a certain amount of freedom as well. So, just to throw that in there.
John: Yeah, that makes perfect sense and good advice and coaching again. So, okay, now I want to dig in for five minutes or so, or less, into your business and your website, Hippocratic Adventures. So first, tell us where they can find that, and then how can they optimize that? What’s—what are the steps that they might not be obvious when you, you know, sign up for something like this? So go ahead and just go ahead and tell us about it.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So you can check us out at HippocraticAdventures.com. And this is where I’m going to take a step back. You don’t—so I would go there if you were merely curious about what life abroad could look like for you. You don’t have to be committed to the idea of moving abroad, you don’t have to know exactly what country you’re moving to or whether you want to work clinically or non-clinically, you just have to be curious to know what’s out there.
So if you are curious to know what’s out there, check out HippocraticAdventures.com and then check out her podcast, check out the blogs, see what other physicians are doing that have made it work, and then really pay attention until, “Oh, this sounds like something I would want,” or “This sounds really cool.” And once you do that, one of the free resources we have on there is called—it’s our physician starter kit, it’s called “How to Start Your Adventure.” It is a completely free download starter kit to help you think about the next steps as you explore moving abroad.
So I would start with those two things, and then if you are looking for community, so if you want to hang out with like-minded people that are curious about moving abroad or talk to people that have moved to this country, I would join our Facebook group. You will probably meet people that are interested in moving to the country or experience you want to have. Or they may actually already be there and they could help you out as well. So I think those are the two places to start.
John: Okay. And the Facebook group though, it’s going to be a time where they’re—you’re going to be verifying their physician and so on, right? It’s not an open thing where you can just jump in. Is that—you’re pretty prompt on getting in and clearing people and checking their credentials?
Dr. Ashwini: Yes. Yeah, we check, we verify that every single person in that group is a physician. So make sure to have your NPI handy.
John: Are there other things in there that once you’ve gotten to this step and you’re really serious, that are, will be available beyond this? Because I didn’t go into detail in your website, I didn’t join the Facebook group, so tell me more if there’s other things in there I can look forward to if I’m super serious.
Dr. Ashwini: Absolutely. So if you are looking for country-specific resources, we have guides for, I think, over eighteen countries on our website, and there are some of the more popular destinations—so places like Canada, the UK, Spain, France, Portugal, Cayman Islands, Singapore, Middle East, lots of countries on there, go check it out.
If you are looking for international jobs, so you want to—if you are a family medicine doctor or a nephrologist or a surgeon, whatever it is, go check that out because you’ll see what opportunities are already out there where they are specifically looking for American-trained doctors.
If you are looking for telemedicine or other remote non-clinical options you can do from abroad, including pharma or industry, Telemedicine and Beyond is the place for you. And then if you’re a psychiatrist and want to take your private practice abroad or build a private practice you can take abroad, that’s where our CME course, Telepsychiatry from Abroad, would step in. And the goal is really to help you go from, “I am curious and I have no idea what’s possible,” to, “Oh, hey, I can see a path forward for me here.”
John: There’s a lot there, it sounds like. Yeah. If I’m a little younger, I might look into that.
Dr. Ashwini: There, you know what? John, the people that are moving abroad span all different phases of their life. All different stages of the career, too.
John: Yeah, it’s just whenever the time is right and the emotional part of you and the—especially, I think having a sense of adventure that helps a lot too.
Dr. Ashwini: When you want something different. The timing, oh yeah, timing is never right. Your kids are either too young or they’re too old, or your parents are too old, right? So timing is never right, but sometimes it’s more like, “I want more. I want to feel alive again. I want to feel something. I’m excited.”
John: Yeah. That’s a good thing. Alright, Ashwini, I really appreciate you sharing all of this. I think we’ll hear more about you in the future, you and your business, and I’ll get all those links in for people to search and find if they’re interested. I think there will be interest in this, even if it’s like, I should at least check it out, maybe I’ll rule it out, but it sounds like it’s exciting. So, this has been great. So I appreciate you for being here, and maybe we’ll follow up down the road.
Dr. Ashwini: Thank you so much for having me, John.
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Live Your Dream Life Practicing in Another Country
Interview with Dr. Ashwini Bapat
John: Welcome back, Nonclinical Nation. Today I'm presenting my interview with Dr. Ashwini Bapat. Dr. Bapat is a board-certified hospice and palliative care physician who graduated from Tufts University School of Medicine, and then she completed her internal medicine residency and palliative care fellowship at Yale School of Medicine. She began her career as a palliative care doctor at Yale, then shifted to working remotely doing telepalliative care. After exploring new practice models, she and her husband, who’s also a physician, decided to move to Portugal to practice overseas. They both found productive, fulfilling careers there and began helping others pursue similar career goals. That led to starting her own Facebook group for other physicians interested in pursuing practices and nonclinical ventures, for that matter, in other countries. Now Ashwini leads Hippocratic Adventures, a company that mentors and coaches American-trained physicians to practice medicine abroad and assist them in finding job opportunities. Okay, with that, let’s meet our guest.
Okay, Nonclinical Nation, I think you’re going to really enjoy today’s interview. I think many of us, when we’re thinking about doing a nonclinical or even just an alternative clinical practice, that maybe we could do that in another country and still maybe practice what we’re used to practicing if we don’t want to go off in some other tangent, or possibly even practice while we’re traveling. I know one person that does that for sure that we’ve talked about before. So today’s guest is perfectly suited to tell us about this topic and answer any questions we might have. So, Dr. Ashwini Bapat, thanks for being here today.
Dr. Ashwini: Thank you for having me, John.
John: This is going to be fun. Yeah, there’s just so much here that we could go into, and I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I’ve got a lot of questions for you. But why don’t we start by you telling us about your background, what specialty, a little bit of that, and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of what’s going on.
Dr. Ashwini: Okay, sounds good. So, I’m a palliative care doctor, and I did my residency and fellowship at Yale, and then I practiced in Boston. So back in 2018, we were doing what you’re supposed to do. I was living the attending life, he was about to graduate from fellowship, and we thought we were going to settle in the suburbs of Boston. And we were house hunting, we were trying to find the perfect house, and one morning we found the perfect house on paper, and that same evening we had a planned vacation to Spain.
And within two or three days of roaming around the streets of Granada, picnicking under orange trees, walking past Roman aqueducts on the way to the grocery store, we both looked at each other and were like, “We don’t want to live in the suburbs of Boston, we want to live here, like somewhere abroad.” We weren’t sure where, and that is essentially what started our journey. And on that same trip, on that same vacation, we started Googling how can American doctors practice in Spain, how can they practice in France, where can American doctors go? And we went down the Reddit rabbit hole with very little kind of reliable information that was being shared. And I think that’s where our journey started, and that’s where our journey with Hippocratic Adventures started.
John: Interesting. So you found that maybe we’re not so interested in buying that house that looks like it’s perfect for us, but not excited about it, and this idea of traveling. Awesome.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, honestly, we had looked at fifteen perfect houses. On paper, they were perfect, but we couldn’t put in an offer, and we couldn’t figure out why. And then it was that trip to Spain where we’re like, “Oh, I know why. It’s because we weren’t excited. There wasn’t anything wrong with living in the suburbs of Boston. We just personally weren’t excited about what that future looked like for us.”
John: Now, at that point, were you both early in your practices, or where were you on that?
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, so I was practicing as a palliative care attending in Boston. I did mostly, almost all inpatient care and then clinic. And my husband at that time was about to graduate from fellowship. And so as a psychiatrist, his dream was always to have a very traditional psychiatry private practice. And so for that, we needed to figure out where we wanted to live. So that’s where we were at.
John: Okay, so walk us through at a high level the steps on making the move, finding it, applying. What did you have to do? Because we have a second part to this story that we want to talk about later, so we’ll go through this at a high level and then I’ll ask you some more questions about that.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, absolutely. So literally from that vacation onwards, we started Googling and reaching out to any physician that had moved abroad. So we were looking at New Zealand, we were looking at Canada of course, we had colleagues that moved to Canada, we looked at the UK, and in the process we realized there were a ton of opportunities for psychiatrists and a palliative care doctor or internal medicine if I chose to work under that. And there were a ton of physicians that had already moved abroad and they were willing—we would meet them on Facebook—they were willing to share their experience, how they did it.
There were psychiatrists that had moved abroad and were doing their private practices abroad. So that exploration and that talking with other physicians is what got us excited. Oh, this doesn’t have to be a pipe dream, this could actually happen for us. And then eventually we started narrowing down in terms of the place and the experience that we wanted. So I think originally we were like, oh, do we want to live in New Zealand or Canada? And then we eventually realized that what we really wanted was we wanted an experience where we could learn a different language, where we could learn or experience a different culture, like a culture that was pretty different, and we were willing to go through the difficulty and the hardship of learning a new language from scratch. So I think that’s how our journey kind of started. And eventually, we took a vacation to Portugal.
So let me give you the background. My husband is French, so originally France was on the radar for sure. He speaks French, I was learning French, so it made sense. But then when we visited Portugal, there was something about it. I don’t know if it was the weather, if it was the warmth of the people, the architecture—there was something very familiar about it, and it felt right in our bones, and that’s when we decided, okay, maybe not France. France is lovely, but Portugal feels more like a better fit for us.
John: No, I think of Portugal, I go to Portuguese, but I’m not sure—is that the main language spoken, or is there a lot of Spanish there, or both?
Dr. Ashwini: No, Portuguese is definitely the main language. You can—I would say they get slightly offended if you start speaking in Spanish and assume that. Yeah, no, Portuguese is definitely the main language.
John: It makes sense, but for some reason, I remember something that doesn’t always correlate exactly with where you are, which language, but that’s another story. I’m going to jump ahead to a question now that I want to talk about later because it’s going to come up again, but it’s simply, when you were talking to these—I’m going to call them mentors or associates, people you talk to, other physicians—were they all practicing in that country, in that location, treating people in that country, or were some of them remote in that country but then still practicing and treating Americans?
Dr. Ashwini: So the psychiatrists my husband talked to—some of them were practicing locally, the ones that moved to New Zealand and Canada, they were practicing locally. We met one who lived in Brazil, and that person was seeing patients in the US.
John: Okay. Because that, I think that’s one piece of it that could be different for later we’ll discuss what you’re helping others do. So, okay, so that’s pretty clear. So you both set up practice there—what was the next step once you decided on that? And what about the hoops you had to jump through?
Dr. Ashwini: So once we decided we were open to learning a new language and a new culture, we knew we weren’t going to be able to practice locally immediately for the simple reason that we didn’t speak Portuguese, no figure. So we had to really think about alternative models, and for my husband it was kind of easy—I don’t want to say it was easy, it was a lot of work—but he essentially set up a telepsychiatry private practice. It was before COVID, and then COVID happened and so all his patients went to telepsychiatry, and so by the time we moved in 2020, all his patients he was seeing via telepsychiatry anyways.
And so for him, there were certain parameters you had to work within, but for him it wasn’t a big transition in many ways. For me, it was a huge transition because I had been working inpatient a hundred percent of the time, or in clinic, and so I went from a hundred percent clinical in-person contact to when we started thinking about how do I make that transition abroad for myself? I had to be a little more creative and I had to stop asking the question, “How can I practice palliative care in Portugal exactly as the way that I do now?” Because I knew that wasn’t possible, and I had to start asking the question of, “What skills do I have as a palliative care physician or as a physician in general that I can use as I move abroad?” And because of that, I eventually found opportunities where I could do telemedicine from abroad, so I could work under internal medicine, primary care, and potentially palliative care from abroad.
I could do e-consults from abroad, and over time, like in those first couple years after we actually moved to Portugal, I also did caregiver coaching where I used my palliative care skills to support family caregivers. So when I made that initial transition, it was a little bit of everything. It was a little bit of telemedicine, a little bit of coaching, and at the same time, we started building Hippocratic Adventures to help American-trained physicians live and practice abroad. And in the first three years, I kind of did a mix of things, and over time, Hippocratic Adventures ended up growing, and it ended up taking a lot more of my time and energy. So it was a very gradual transition for me.
John: Okay. So at least you started out doing some remote practice, actually, in palliative care and internal medicine, kind of whatever was available—
Dr. Ashwini: Whatever was available.
John: —since timing and so forth. And then the remote coaching that you were doing, that was with American families and caregivers.
Dr. Ashwini: Exactly.
John: Okay. And was there some, was there any difficulty in doing the remote hoops? Because you have to be licensed in every state, not for the coaching obviously, but for the practicing, you have to pick out where you’re going to do that and the typical kind of…
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, the typical challenges of doing telemedicine is, yes, you have to be licensed in the states where you’re seeing patients. So maintaining those licenses, as always, like you’ve got to renew your licenses, you’ve got to get your licenses first, then renew them. So the usual when it comes to telemedicine. With coaching it was a lot more straightforward. It was really using; it was very much drawing on my palliative care skills to be able to do that.
John: Just as an aside, how did you market the coaching? How did you find people that needed help with the coaching?
Dr. Ashwini: So, we reached out to a lot of caregiver support groups and shared kind of what we were doing and if this was interesting to them, and that’s how we kind of built that referral base. So, I did that for a period of time, and then eventually, as Hippocratic Adventures grew, I transitioned essentially all of my time to Hippocratic Adventures. So I don’t do the coaching anymore and I don’t do the telemedicine anymore, but all of that illustrates that as we made that move abroad, I had to be creative in how I approached my personal career and I had to be flexible in what I chose to pursue. And that it evolved over time as well.
John: Okay, then let’s talk about this whole life of Hippocratic Adventures, which is about, what, six years old more or less? You said 2020, it’s kind of when things got started. And so, how did it start? What were you doing at first on that? And then, I think you’ll have to explain exactly all the aspects of it now, because I know it has different parts. So, tell us from the very beginning what that looked like and what it was like growing that little baby into something bigger.
Dr. Ashwini: That’s exactly right. So we started as a Facebook group in April 2020. So right when the COVID pandemic hit, when no one was going anywhere, that’s when we started the group. And I remember the day we started it, overnight we had three hundred physicians join, and we’re like, “Oh shit, it’s not just us.” That’s literally the moment. And we invited back those physicians we had personally talked to who had moved to Canada, who had moved to New Zealand, who had moved to UK, and we asked them to share their experience—like write it down, share it in a blog. And so it was literally a Word document.
So we shared these three Word documents on that Facebook group, and then people were like, “Oh, by the way, I moved to France, I moved to Spain.” And we’re like, “Oh, can you write down that experience too? People want to be able to move to these places.” And so we started sharing originally in that Facebook group, and then in September, because it was kind of tricky to share the resources in a Facebook group, we launched our website, and since then, almost everything that we’ve built has come from questions from the physicians in our community who are looking to live abroad.
And so simple things like, “How do I get licensed in this country? What international job openings are there, and are they looking for American doctors? Can I do telemedicine from abroad and what companies allow me to do it? So all of those questions or what non-clinical careers can I do from abroad? How are other physicians doing it?” So that is how we have built Hippocratic Adventures to literally answer those questions.
John: So let’s see, so you’ve been doing that, and so now, I’ve seen the website, which looks very professional. So how does someone—how are you helping most of your, let’s say clients now, because it’s not just a Facebook group, most Facebook groups don’t have a fee associated with them, they can do that in a direct way, but tell me more about how you’re generating some income to pay for the growth of it, at least.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, absolutely. So first and foremost, our physician community on the Facebook group is completely free. It is a physician-only group, so we do vet them, just we want it to be a safe place for physicians. So that is the base of who we are. All of the resources that are on our website—the physician stories, the country spotlights, the roadmaps to get to whatever country, the different ways physicians are moving abroad—all of that is written by our community and is completely free. We have a job board on there because the first road bump people hit when they want to move abroad is, “I need a job.”
And so we have specifically reached out to organizations that recruit American doctors to their countries. And the popular countries our community wants to move to are places like Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, the Middle East. So we wanted to make sure that job board addressed that number one obstacle, which is I got to have a job when I move abroad, right? And not just freewheeling this. And then for folks that were ready to go a little deeper, we have this resource called Telemedicine and Beyond, and this is literally based on one of the obstacles a lot of physicians hit, which is they want to do telemedicine from abroad, but a lot of companies don’t allow you to.
So this resource compiles the companies that do allow you to work from abroad, and then it eventually expanded into other non-clinical work you can do, like pharma or industry roles that you can do from abroad, specifically for physicians, and then you can choose kind of your specialty and your level of experience, things like that. And because we realized that a lot of our physicians, if they transition into pharma, they do it in the US first, we also have pharma roles in the US so that they can help with that transition, and then we have other non-pharma roles in there that you can do from abroad as well.
And then for psychiatrists, my husband kept getting emails and messages from first his colleagues, and then from the wider psychiatry community about how they can do it too, how they can build a practice and take it abroad. And so for that, we built a CME-accredited course called Telepsychiatry from Abroad, basically to allow you to build a private practice for psychiatrists and take it abroad with you when you’re ready. So all of the initiatives have really been based on the obstacles that our physician community was having as they explored trying to move abroad.
John: And it sounds like, in certain scenarios, you have a lot of information, and there might—if something new comes up, of course, you’re going to not have a lot of information. But it sounds like if you fit into a certain slot, psychiatrists looking to do remote or whatever things that you have done, there’s going to be a lot of information there and assistance available.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. Even telemedicine—people that want to do telemedicine from abroad, very common path people take. Or pharma.
John: Yeah, I was wondering, I was going to ask you about the pharma piece, because that’s one that comes up a lot. Are there certain companies that are known for being more flexible if you’re already working and you’ve shown your skills in the US, and it’s like, hey, why don’t I go to one of your other areas? Because these countries, they have—some of them have offices in every, almost every major country.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah, so that depends on the company, but one of the most incredible parts of that resource when it relates to pharma is that it specifically includes roles you can do from abroad or you can do from the US, so you pick and you can pick your country. So if you’re thinking, okay, I want to look at France, Spain, and Belgium, these countries have a ton of pharma companies headquartered there.
And then you can specifically look for physician-relevant roles, because anyone who has looked at pivoting into pharma, it is—and you know this—it is really hard to understand what those positions even mean. And so we’ve built it specifically for physicians. And then you can filter by specialty and it, I think it has the six hundred biggest pharma companies in the world on there, and it’s updated weekly, I believe.
John: Okay. So there, one of the things require a payment, just so I know, from looking at it from the standpoint of starting a business and so forth, because a lot of physicians also will do something like that, there’s a lot of free content obviously, and a lot gets produced by the members.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So that community is very important to us because we literally share each other’s stories and we build off of that. And for us, that is very important that remains free because we want to be able to share with other people how to do it, how to—here’s the roadmap. If you want to move to France, here’s how you can do it. If you want to do pharma abroad, here’s how one person did it. And let it inspire your story. So that for us is very important that it’s available freely on our website.
John: Alright. Now I did have some other questions here that kind of more, I think what my audience would want to know. For example, I’m really unhappy with my current—this is burnout-driven, which is probably not the best reason to decide to move to another country, but once you get over that and say, “Okay, no, I just, I’m unhappy and I’m going to fix it,” how long would it take from the time that I’m in this practice that I don’t like to actually starting in a new location? I’m sure that’s not a one number, but what have you found?
Dr. Ashwini: First, I always look—I’m a palliative care doctor, so you know what I’m going to say. I always say, if you’re unhappy in whatever position you’re in, and to be honest, in medicine, it is really easy to feel stuck. Like there are many people that feel like they can do their job in their sleep, because they’ve been doing it for so long, they don’t feel challenged, they feel like a cog in the wheel because of the way the administrative roles are run.
And for some people, they don’t feel like anything is particularly wrong, they just aren’t very excited when they wake up in the morning and maybe they want something different. So I always say, take a step back. And instead of asking how quickly can I get out of feeling stuck, maybe ask what do I want to move towards? What do I want my Tuesday to feel like? Do I want more time outside? Do I want more time with my family? Do I like clinical medicine, but maybe I just need to be in a different/slash better environment? Or do I want to try something non-clinical? And so I would ask yourself those questions first. Then I would start exploring, and I think this is the really fun part. This is where you listen to podcasts, right? This is where you read physician stories, check out blogs, see what other physicians are doing and how they’re doing it, and then be like, okay, which one of these resonates with me? Which one of these is like, that sounds really cool.
And then start taking action, and I think that’s what we’ve tried to create with Hippocratic Adventures, where we share a lot of different stories of how physicians are doing it to help you figure out what your version of living abroad could look like. So to get back to your question, because I won’t dodge it, the timeline, you’re right, it depends on the path. So if you were, let’s say, a family doctor who loves outdoors, wants an adventure, is excited about New Zealand. The paperwork, the credentialing, the licensure process is pretty smooth usually, and the jobs are readily usually available, and so potentially you could be in New Zealand, living there, working there within the year. That’s if you have all your paperwork and stuff, if you’re super organized about it.
If you decide, “Okay, I want to live in France,” because who doesn’t want to live in France? But if you’re learning French from scratch and you want to get licensed there, it’s going to take a while. And so, yeah, so it really depends, but then maybe you’re like, okay, maybe I could do telemedicine from there, then there’ll be a much quicker turnaround. Maybe it isn’t about how long will it take? But maybe it’s more about, what am I moving towards? What path feels right for me? And what are the next small steps I can take? Because I think that’s how you go from feeling stuck to feeling like, okay, there are possibilities for me.
John: Yeah, I think once your eyes are open to what’s possible, and this is a lot even in the states, there’s just things people, physicians don’t know because they’ve just been driven through their training that this is what I’m going to do, and they don’t have time to even think about what’s actually available. Everything you said is just perfect coaching. If you want to get a career coach, this is part of the process. Okay, give me one or two examples of some very interesting clients or—they may not be clients, they just be member of the Facebook group, but something that kind of might inspire someone like, “Didn’t think it was possible.”
Dr. Ashwini: So off the top of my head, this one physician pops out to me. And I’ll tell you why later. So she is—I’m going to take the total extreme of a physician, right? She is a trauma surgeon with two kids. And she lives in Barcelona, Spain. I think she’s actually moved to France now, but at the time I talked to her, she lived in Barcelona, Spain. She did non-clinical research part of the time there, in Spain, and she would operate in the US, so she would fly back periodically to the institution she worked at, operate in the US for chunks of time, and live out the rest of her time in Spain. So I share this example because I think it’s extreme. Most people are like, “Oh, for a psychiatrist, it’s so easy, they just talk, they can do that over Zoom.”
But I’m a surgeon, and a hundred percent, if you are a surgeon that likes to operate, you should be in the operating room. But this is an example of how she innovated in a very creative way where she was able to negotiate with the institution she had a relationship with to do the split time. The other person I want to talk about is, because this is a non-clinical careers podcast, she was a primary care doc out in Colorado, and her husband got a position in Switzerland, they moved there, and her original plan was like, she actually had no plan, to be honest, she had no plan. She was like, “Yeah.” And she just worked in a veggie garden. She worked on her veggie garden. But within a couple months, she was like, “Okay, I can’t just not do anything. I need to do something.”
And so she looked on LinkedIn and she found this freelance medical editing position, and she was like, “Okay, let me try this, let me see what this is about.” She started doing that, and she eventually, over the past five years, ended up being the director at this medical education company that is based out of Germany. She lives in Switzerland, and she does that remotely, and then she periodically goes to Germany. Those two stand out to me because the first one maintained her clinical practice, she maintained operating time, and the second one pivoted into a non-clinical career that she ended up loving. So those are the two stories that stand out to me.
And then I’ll share one more story because this one’s also really cool. So this is a GI—pediatric GI—and she wanted to live in France. She moved to France, but her French wasn’t good enough. She wasn’t going to get licensed immediately, it was going to take time. And so in the US she had been doing real estate, so she chose to take that up to do real estate in France for expats, for American expats, British expats, and that’s how she got income going. And then she went to locums in the US periodically while she worked on her French, which obviously got better when she lived in France, and while she got licensed in France, and now she’s actually practicing, she’s in the early stages of practicing there.
John: Nice. Yeah, no, and they’re all unique at some level. What else do we need to know about working abroad? Maybe there’s some bad things, good things that we just didn’t touch on that you just want to maybe share.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So I would say we shouldn’t romanticize it. This isn’t an extended vacation for a lot of people. If you choose to live abroad for a longer period of time, you have to adapt. So if you are working clinically, there will be a learning curve, right? The way, if you work at a new hospital, there’s the learning curve. If you work in a new healthcare system, you’re going to have to learn the lingo, you’re going to have to learn names of medications that may be different, availability of medications is often very different as well. You have to learn how that healthcare system works.
And then outside of medicine, you’ve got to think about taxes and your immigration status, which you may not think about in the US. You’ve got to think about schools your kids go to, and if you have to learn a language, it’s going to take time. This isn’t like the Instagram version of “I moved abroad and all my problems got solved.” No, it’s life abroad with all of the problems, but maybe it feels more aligned for you. And then I think the second thing which was really hard for me, and I think it’s hard for a lot of physicians, is that, like you said, physicians follow a very linear path. The traditional path is very linear. You do med school, you do residency, maybe you do a fellowship, then you have attending life.
And in attending life, if you go the academic route, there are like academic ladders you go up. If you go the private practice route, there are like partnership levels and stuff that you can aspire to. When you move abroad, that path isn’t very linear and there is a lot of uncertainty, I would say. And so when you originally move abroad, you may have to try a couple different things before you figure out what lands. And I think the uncertainty is uncomfortable. I think it definitely was for me. And at the same time, it can help you explore different interests, it can give you space, and it can give you a certain amount of freedom as well. So, just to throw that in there.
John: Yeah, that makes perfect sense and good advice and coaching again. So, okay, now I want to dig in for five minutes or so, or less, into your business and your website, Hippocratic Adventures. So first, tell us where they can find that, and then how can they optimize that? What’s—what are the steps that they might not be obvious when you, you know, sign up for something like this? So go ahead and just go ahead and tell us about it.
Dr. Ashwini: Yeah. So you can check us out at HippocraticAdventures.com. And this is where I’m going to take a step back. You don’t—so I would go there if you were merely curious about what life abroad could look like for you. You don’t have to be committed to the idea of moving abroad, you don’t have to know exactly what country you’re moving to or whether you want to work clinically or non-clinically, you just have to be curious to know what’s out there.
So if you are curious to know what’s out there, check out HippocraticAdventures.com and then check out her podcast, check out the blogs, see what other physicians are doing that have made it work, and then really pay attention until, “Oh, this sounds like something I would want,” or “This sounds really cool.” And once you do that, one of the free resources we have on there is called—it’s our physician starter kit, it’s called “How to Start Your Adventure.” It is a completely free download starter kit to help you think about the next steps as you explore moving abroad.
So I would start with those two things, and then if you are looking for community, so if you want to hang out with like-minded people that are curious about moving abroad or talk to people that have moved to this country, I would join our Facebook group. You will probably meet people that are interested in moving to the country or experience you want to have. Or they may actually already be there and they could help you out as well. So I think those are the two places to start.
John: Okay. And the Facebook group though, it’s going to be a time where they’re—you’re going to be verifying their physician and so on, right? It’s not an open thing where you can just jump in. Is that—you’re pretty prompt on getting in and clearing people and checking their credentials?
Dr. Ashwini: Yes. Yeah, we check, we verify that every single person in that group is a physician. So make sure to have your NPI handy.
John: Are there other things in there that once you’ve gotten to this step and you’re really serious, that are, will be available beyond this? Because I didn’t go into detail in your website, I didn’t join the Facebook group, so tell me more if there’s other things in there I can look forward to if I’m super serious.
Dr. Ashwini: Absolutely. So if you are looking for country-specific resources, we have guides for, I think, over eighteen countries on our website, and there are some of the more popular destinations—so places like Canada, the UK, Spain, France, Portugal, Cayman Islands, Singapore, Middle East, lots of countries on there, go check it out.
If you are looking for international jobs, so you want to—if you are a family medicine doctor or a nephrologist or a surgeon, whatever it is, go check that out because you’ll see what opportunities are already out there where they are specifically looking for American-trained doctors.
If you are looking for telemedicine or other remote non-clinical options you can do from abroad, including pharma or industry, Telemedicine and Beyond is the place for you. And then if you’re a psychiatrist and want to take your private practice abroad or build a private practice you can take abroad, that’s where our CME course, Telepsychiatry from Abroad, would step in. And the goal is really to help you go from, “I am curious and I have no idea what’s possible,” to, “Oh, hey, I can see a path forward for me here.”
John: There’s a lot there, it sounds like. Yeah. If I’m a little younger, I might look into that.
Dr. Ashwini: There, you know what? John, the people that are moving abroad span all different phases of their life. All different stages of the career, too.
John: Yeah, it’s just whenever the time is right and the emotional part of you and the—especially, I think having a sense of adventure that helps a lot too.
Dr. Ashwini: When you want something different. The timing, oh yeah, timing is never right. Your kids are either too young or they’re too old, or your parents are too old, right? So timing is never right, but sometimes it’s more like, “I want more. I want to feel alive again. I want to feel something. I’m excited.”
John: Yeah. That’s a good thing. Alright, Ashwini, I really appreciate you sharing all of this. I think we’ll hear more about you in the future, you and your business, and I’ll get all those links in for people to search and find if they’re interested. I think there will be interest in this, even if it’s like, I should at least check it out, maybe I’ll rule it out, but it sounds like it’s exciting. So, this has been great. So I appreciate you for being here, and maybe we’ll follow up down the road.
Dr. Ashwini: Thank you so much for having me, John.
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