It was founded in 2002 and is now owned by Microsoft. With over 500 million users worldwide, it boasts about 130 million users in the United States. It currently posts about 10 million jobs.

The primary feature that defines LinkedIn is each member's profile. Your profile can be thought of as a dynamic visual resume.

My LinkedIn Story

I updated my LinkedIn profile and submitted my name to the job listings page. An entrepreneur contacted me shortly thereafter looking for a physician with my skills to join him as a minority partner in a new venture: to open a brand new urgent care center.

He had spent two years researching the business opportunity. He had plans to open a clinic in a region north of Chicago that had a deficit of urgent care services, so he messaged me through LinkedIn and started an online conversation.

Click image to go to my LinkedIn profile.

About six months later, following some negotiation, I signed several agreements. I purchased stock in the new company, and gave notice to my then employer that I was leaving my job as chief medical officer.

Fast forward two and a half years. PromptMed Urgent Care has grown from nothing to a very active clinic, treating 40 to 50 patients per day on weekdays (a bit less on weekends).

Reasons to Be LinkedIn

For physician managers, executives, consultants, coaches, pharma representatives, or those planning to pursue a career in any nonclinical field, LinkedIn is a must.

Here are the reasons I find it so useful to be LinkedIn. Most of them relate directly to its status as an online resume, which facilitates the following activities.

1. Job Hunting

By updating in your profile and participating in LinkedIn jobs, you can constantly receive alerts about new jobs that match your search criteria. Remember, your profile is an online resume. It needs to be detailed, clear, complete and authentic, like any resume or CV. But it can present much more information, and is suited to providing details of your values and long-term goals.

It should contain your complete employment history (no gaps), educational background, other experience, and endorsements from those that know you well (professionally).

Think of this as creating your own personal brand that can be used for a variety of purposes, but especially job hunting. Describing your vision, values, goals and passions can be very attractive to employers looking for certain attributes.

2. Connections and Followers

LinkedIn provides recommendations for potential connections in an ongoing basis. You can cull your existing email lists and or manually search for connections to add. But LinkedIn also facilitates the process of identifying new connections.

It will use your first degree connections to identify second and third degree connections. You can message them and invite them to connect. (Premium services are more helpful and flexible in this regard).

You can identify people in your workplace, and alumni from your undergraduate school, medical school, and residency programs to connect with or follow.

Once you've developed this network, you can sort and categorize them for information you want to send them. You can message them, ask them questions, and consult with them in ways that helps each of you professionally.

I currently have almost 550 connections and another 20 members that follow me.

3. Get Published

LinkedIn encourages you to post articles to showcase your expertise and writing skills. This will help with your career advancement, but also with network development and promotion of  your side business or consulting practice.

Posting on LinkedIn enhances your authority and reputation by allowing you to share articles from other sources, or your own original writing. You can repurpose chapters from books or blog posts you've written.

If you happen to write your own blog or host a podcast, by posting articles on LinkedIn, you can encourage readers to visit your sites, and generate business for any venture you may be involved with.

I post my blog articles directly to LinkedIn using Buffer, and they typically generate about 200 views each, depending on the topic.

The last article I posted, Every Emerging Physician Executive Must Learn These New Skills, received 364 views. My most popular article, The Best Hospitals Are Managed by Physicians, attracted 554 readers.

4. Groups

There are hundreds of groups on LinkedIn that can expand your reach and serve as a source of education and networking. I'm personally a member of 14 groups, most of which are related to physician leadership, hospital executive interests, and non-clinical careers. I also enjoy the conversations posted to the Writing on LinkedIn Group.

These groups serve as another source of connections. You can interact with your group members even if they are not one of your connections or followers. You can post specific articles and opinions to your group and thereby encourage interaction with other members. I find this to be a very useful reason to be LinkedIn.

5. Great News Source

Depending on your connections and the groups you've joined, you will receive an ongoing flow of information similar to that of Facebook and other social media sites.

You can access the news in two ways. By following other members, you receive their posts. To follow new members, you can manage your feed preferences by clicking the More icon on any post. Then you add persons to follow from the Improve My Feed list, or the Followers list.

News and other content is also delivered to you daily from each of your groups. When you enter the Groups area, you're be presented with Today's Highlights, which presents a personalized selection of conversations from your groups.

6. LinkedIn Learning

LinkedIn Learning grew out of LinkedIn's purchase of Lynda.com. It has taken this content and merged it with its professional networking. I believe there is a monthly fee to access LinkedIn Learning, but it is included in Premium memberships.

There is a library of over 9,000 digital courses. And LinkedIn Learning will create personalized recommendations of courses for you, based on your interests and expressed needs. These courses can be accessed anytime, anywhere on cell phones and other personal devices.

I've just begun to explore their business courses, and they look very professionally produced.

Bonus Reason: It's Free!

One of the big reasons to sign up is that you get all of this for free. There are premium services that can sometimes be useful, but are not required. Everything I've presented is free, except for the ability to reach out to second and third degree networks, and LinkedIn Learning, both of which are included in the premium membership plans.

I've been growing my network on LinkedIn for about two years, mostly using the free membership.

In Closing

Any physician that has professional activities outside of clinical medicine, particularly a career as a hospital or medical group executive, consultant or coach, absolutely must have a LinkedIn profile. However, to have a poor LinkedIn profile may be worse than having no profile.

So, if you join LinkedIn, be sure that you complete your profile 100%. You should upload a professionally done portrait. And you ought to clearly articulate your goals and values. I would also recommend you check out LinkedIn Learning to see if there's information there that can be of benefit to you.

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Have you found LinkedIn to be valuable? Do you have questions about LinkedIn?

Next Steps

Please add you're thoughts and questions in the Comments. I will respond to them all.

Don't forget to SHARE this post, SUBSCRIBE Here or complete a SURVEY.

Contact me: johnjurica@nonclinical.buzzmybrand.net or leave me a Voice Message here.

Thanks for joining me.

Until next time.

The post Top Reasons to Be LinkedIn appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

(I had 70 on my list, then realized I had forgotten to add The Productive Physician, a blogger I mentioned in my Monthly Leadership Favorites for March, Wealthy Doc and Smart Money MD).

You may recall that I posted my first list of 30 blogs with My Fascination with Physician-Authored Blogs. Then I added 20 more and published the list of 50 in Are You Intrigued or Entertained by These 50 Physician Authored Blogs? All 73 of them are included in the updated table below. The new ones are listed at the top.

In this list I have avoided blogs that are strictly clinical in nature (well, maybe one or two slipped in). However, some of them may have a mix of clinical AND philosophical or financial content. In fact, one of them (Sutured for a Living) has a mix of clinical and quilting content (you saw that right: quilting!).

My Current Favorites

My favorites physician authored blogs are listed here:

1. UrgentCare Mentor
2. The White Coat Investor
3. Future Proof MD
4. The Productive Physician
5. Physician on FIRE
6. Investing Doc
7. The Happy MD
8. ZDoggMD
9. GomerBlog

The new ones that piqued my interest and might become future favorites include the following:

1. The Foodie Physician has lots of appetizing and healthy meals.
2. I enjoy humorous writing, especially when it involves stupid things patients say and do, which are often written about by Dr. Grumpy.
3. GomerBlog takes humor and satire to a whole new level. That's why I already added it to my favorites list.
4. The Happy Hospitalist seems to consist of humor scattered with the occasional coding and documentation advice. Confusing, but entertaining.
5. Matthew Hahn looks intense, and devoted mostly to standing up for us battered physicians. MACRA Must Die sounds like a good read.
6. I found five new personal finance blogs: Smart Money MD, Wealthy Doc, Some Random Guy Online, Doctor in Debt and The Wall Street Physician. I think that brings the number of physician authored finance blogs to thirteen!
7. And, finally! I found two blogs by physicians focused on leadership: md2leader and Richard Winters MD.  I met the author of md2leader at a recent American Association for Physician Leadership meeting and was pleased to find his blog once I returned home.

Newly Discovered Physician Authored Blogs

Like last time, the table is searchable and sortable, so if you want to see all of the Personal Finance or Happiness blogs together you can easily do so. Also, I have set the table to display 37 sites at a time. You can scan the first 37, then see the next 36 by clicking Next at the bottom of the table. I think you can also adjust the number of rows being displayed if you prefer.

Other than listing the recent additions first, the table is in no particular order. Most sites are all fairly active with multiple posts within the past few months or so. The Entrepreneurial MD is one exception – its last post dating back to 2016.

I attempted to categorize the 73 physician authored blogs the best I could, without providing detailed notes from their About Pages. It is easy to identify a site as Personal Finance in nature. But some of the other descriptions are rough approximations of their content at best. I sometimes just called them Eclectic if they have commentary about lots of unrelated issues.

And one minor warning: a few of the blogs appear to promote political leanings. But none seem to be blatant. I am still trying to get a feel for Rebel.MD, for example. But the writing was very good, and I think the political content is minimal.

Here is the updated list of physician authored blogs:

[table id=8 /]

Next Steps

Check out some of the sites at your leisure and let me know what you think. Also, send me the name of your favorite physician authored blog or podcast, and I will add it to my list.

Don't forget to Subscribe here.

Please provide FEEDBACK, FEEDBACK and more FEEDBACK:  Survey Page

Use the Comments or email:  john.jurica.md@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading!

The post Newly Discovered Physician Authored Blogs: 23 Additions appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

In the updated list, there are several that have more of a commercial bent. That is to say that they have been monetized to some extent.

Probably the ultimate example of this is KevinMD. This one is familiar to many of us. It is one of the longest running. I included a note that the “blogger” is an internal medicine specialist. That's because it was founded by Kevin Pho, MD, an internist. However, anyone that has read its articles knows that it is actually a news blog that lists articles from hundreds of writers – many of whom are physicians.

My List of 50 Physician Authored Blogs

The table below lists blogs I have visited and read in some detail. I subscribe to many of them. My favorites are listed right here:

1. UrgentCare Mentor
2. The White Coat Investor
3. Future Proof MD
4. Physician on FIRE
5. Investing Doc
6. The Happy MD
7. ZDoggMD

UrgentCare Mentor was added after I met and interviewed its owner, Larry Earl. I am currently a partner in, and medical director of, an urgent care center. So his content is especially useful to me. His site is a good example of a platform that supports his business, so it is another that has been monetized. Others that fall in this category include:

• The Entrepreneurial MD
• The Physician's Odyssey Program
• Physician Renaissance Network
• DoctorCPR
• NonClinicalJobs

Some of the blogs in the orignal 30 were monetized through ads and affiliate links, but not to the extent of those listed above. However, the above blogs all contain valuable and interesting content. I have left out websites which do not offer substantial free content for readers.

Here is the updated list of physician authored blogs:

[table id=5 /]

Searching and Sorting the List

I decided to make this table searchable and sortable, so if you want to see all of the Personal Finance or Happiness blogs together you can easily do so. Also, I have set the table to display 20 sites at a time. You can see the next 20 by clicking Next at the bottom of the table. I think you can also adjust the number of rows being displayed if you prefer.

The table is in no particular order. The sites are all fairly active with multiple posts within the past few months or so. There are four new Personal Finance blogs in the updated list. There are also four blogs devoted to Career Change. I would point out that the sites listed as Happiness also spend some time addressing Career Change, but are not focused primarily on that topic.

I attempted to categorize the 50 physician authored blogs the best I could, without providing detailed notes from their About Pages. It is easy to identify a site as Personal Finance in nature. But some of the other descriptions are rough approximations of their content at best.

And one minor warning: a few of the blogs appear to promote a political bias. None of the sites I have read were included or excluded based on this apparent bias, as long as there was entertaining or educational content on the site. I personally try to avoid any political posturing on the Vital Physician Executive.

The more I search, the more blogs I find. Many are strictly clinical in nature. I have purposely not listed those. I did include Notes from Dr. RW because it was just so clean and readable.

What About Podcasts?

Here is a link to the 10 Best Medical Podcasts on iTunes. These are mostly about healthcare and medicine. I'm not sure I agree with Samantha Hendricks' statement that these are the best.

But one of the podcasts I want to call out is Docs Outside the Box. I have been listening to it for a few weeks and I really like it. Dr. Nii Darko says in Episode 1 that his intention is to address “topics covering career advice, entrepreneurship, personal finance, technology, and more.”

I listened to the latest (18th episode) today, so he is early in his podcasting journey. Nii Darko (trauma surgeon) and his wife Renee (OB/gyn) also produce their blog Keeping Up with the Darkos which is one of the new blogs added to my list.

By the way, I featured FutureProofMD here before and Dr. Darko happened to interview FPMD in Episode 17, which I also enjoyed.

Request and Next Steps

Check out some of the sites at your leisure and let me know what you think. Also, send me the name of your favorite physician authored blog or podcast, and I will add it to my list.

Don't forget to Subscribe here.

Please provide FEEDBACK, FEEDBACK and more FEEDBACK:  Survey Page

Rather than use the Comments you can also email:  john.jurica.md@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading!

The post Are You Intrigued or Entertained by These 50 Physician Authored Blogs? appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

The first is a list of Top Picks. This is a list of the best of the blogs and podcasts that I regularly scan and/or consume. I think that you will enjoy them. I recommend that you check them out.

My Top Picks will be listed on its own page, but I am including a copy of the list below. As I discover new and interesting sites, I will add them to the list.

I am also adding a Resources page. This page will start by including a list of books that I consider to be essential reading for any physician leader. I have studied each of them, and I refer back to them often. In fact, I often write posts based on the information in them, like my posts about Goal Setting and Execution, Tactics for Building Trust, Effective Teams and Conflict, and Trust in the C-Suite.

These books are “clickable” and can be used to go to Amazon and purchase them. These are affiliate links that provide me a small payment for the referral, but has no effect on the price you pay for the item.

My plan is to also write a book review of each of the books on the list, like I did for Growing Physician Leaders. [So much to do, and so little time!] But I promise to add those reviews in the future, and add additional books to the list.

I also plan to add new free resources that I am in the process of creating for my readers. Come back often!

Here is the list of Resources:

[table id=4 /]

Next Steps

For more of my thoughts on healthcare and leadership Subscribe here.

Please help me out by taking a short survey:  Survey Page

Feel free to email me directly at john.jurica.md@gmail.com with any questions about anything. I am here to help you excel as a physician leader.

If you like this post, please share on your social media using the SHARE buttons below.

Thanks so much and see you in the next post!

The post VITAL Physician Executive Additions: Top Picks and Resources appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Blogs (or “web-logs”) started out as a place to write a diary or journal. Many were rather light-hearted. Some written by physicians have become very serious, with descriptions of memorable clinical encounters or important health industry news and commentary.

Others have become a source of free information for newcomers to hobbies or businesses. Topics range from crochet and needlepoint, to other artistic endeavors, to health and fitness, to starting and operating one's online business.

They continue to evolve. I have found it fascinating to explore them and interact with other bloggers, especially physicians.

So, I spent some time reviewing and cataloguing blogs written by physicians. So far, I have visited about 30 of them. There remains a long list of physician blogs that I have not yet investigated. My purpose for today's post is two-fold:

1. To list the first 30 physician-authored blogs that I have catalogued;
2. To provide a brief summary of the details of my blog, for those who are more nerdy and interested in the techy details.

My Physician-Authored Blog

My first attempt at blogging can be found at Contract Doctor. This is a WordPress.com blog. This means it is free to set up and is hosted by WordPress. It was very easy to get that going. I still post there occasionally. The content there is mostly related to physician employment agreements, interviewing and negotiating contracts.

This blog (Vital Physician Executive) is a WordPress.org blog and is hosted by Bluehost. There are nominal costs in doing so. But the flexibility is much greater in the design of the blog. And there are multiple “plugins” that can be added to enhance the functionality of the site.

There are hundreds of “themes” that can be used to determine the appearance of a blog. Some themes are free. Premium themes are available through WordPress or by third-party vendors. I decided to go with the Get Noticed theme created and supported by Michael Hyatt when I started out.

The appearance of the Get Noticed theme is nice, and very customizable. Plus, is also fairly easy to add other features, like landing pages and the ability to transact business, if needed.

I have also installed the following plugins:

• Akismet  is an anti-spam service to protect the site;
• Disqus Comment System replaces the WordPress comment system to manage blog comments;
• MonsterInsights to enable integration with Google Analytics;
• Mailchimp for WordPress helps to integrate the MailChimp email service provider forms;
• Popup Ally enables me to add pop-ups to collect email addresses;
• TablePress is used to create tables like the one below; and,
• Yoast SEO helps with content analysis and search engine optimization.

Although I have listed web sites in the above list, all of the plugins are actually accessed and installed from within WordPress.

Other Physician-Authored Blogs

The table below lists most of the blogs I have actually visited. I find many of them to be worth subscribing to. My favorites are listed right here:

1. The White Coat Investor
2. Future Proof MD
3. Physician on FIRE
4. Investing Doc
5. The Happy MD

[table id=1 /]

The table is in no particular order. I have another 20 sites that I will list on a future post, once I have had a chance to review them in more detail. The sites listed are all fairly active with multiple posts within the past month or so.

The White Coat Investor is one of the more well-known and established finance blogs for physicians. It has been around since 2009. The author, James M. Dahle, has written a book of some acclaim called The White Coat Investor: A Doctor's Guide to Personal Finance and Investing.

I subscribe to all of the listed personal finance blogs because they each take on different financial issues that I find interesting. As a “guest-poster” on Future Proof MD, I have a special fondness for that site and its author.

I have made a feeble attempt to categorize the physician-authored blogs listed. It is easy to identify a site as Personal Finance in nature. But some of the other descriptions are rough approximations of their content at best.

Advice and Request

Check out some of the sites and let me know what you think. Also, send me the name of your favorite physician-authored blog, and I will add it to my growing list.

For more of my thoughts on blogging, healthcare and leadership Subscribe here.

Please help me out by taking a short survey:  Survey Page

And feel free to email me directly at john.jurica.md@gmail.com with any questions about anything.

See you in the next post!

The post My Fascination With Physician-Authored Blogs appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

I had already gone through two disasters with my passwords. The first time, my hard drive crashed and I lost my list of passwords and contacts. The second time I needed to change cellphone carriers due to a job change. I was unable to transfer my list of passwords, so I had to manually print and enter them into another location.

I tried using DropBox and it was a great tool for saving and sharing files. But it did not have the ability to save emails. I could not save a quick note without first creating it in another application. And locating old files was a little tricky at times, so my productivity was hindered.

I needed a tool that could help with storing and retrieving all kinds of text, audio and video  files, web pages, and photos.

Enter EVERNOTE.

Evernote

What is Evernote? It is a note-taking application hosted in “the cloud”, so it can be accessed from multiple devices (desktop computer, laptop, cell phone). It allows its users to capture and organize information. And, it can store text, images, audio and video. Content is organized using both Notebooks (files or locations) and tags.

There are similar applications, including Windows OneNote, Google Keep, OpenNote and others. My intention here is not to compare the various options. But I did find a useful review comparing OneNote and Evernote by Preston Gralla at Computerworld.

I needed a low-cost, reliable way to store lots of different information. And I wanted a tool that would help organize and retrieve research for my blog writing. Evernote was the best option for me.

(Note that I receive no payment for using or promoting Evernote – I just like using it).

Three Prime Productivity Hacks

Evernote has dozens of uses, some of which I will list at the bottom of this post. But let me tell you about the three that I use most often to enhance my productivity.

Research

In preparing for my blog posts, I regularly search the internet, review other blogs, and scan gmail alerts and RSS feeds. In the past I would print these and file them for retrieval later. Needless to say, retrieving the material was difficult and I needed enormous an amount of filing space.

Now I use Evernote and a Chrome extension called Evernote Web Clipper that allows me to send web pages directly to my Evernote inbox. I can add tags before sending them, or add the tags later. And I can always retrieve the articles or posts using  a simple search process when I need them.

Getting control of email

For years I would use my email provider's file system to save important emails. Or I would copy and paste important information into a document and save it on my hard drive, backed up by Carbonite, or CrashPlan. Still, I would let certain emails sit in my in box for months or years, in case I needed easy access to a travel confirmation or an email address.

Now if I have an important email, I just send it directly to my Evernote Inbox using the unique address provided by Evernote. This address is found under Tools>Account Info. All of my forwarded emails go into my in box (Spelled !Inbox so it is always the first notebook on the list).

Later, I open Evernote, attach several tags to the email and send it to the Notebook of my choosing. I can then find it by doing a general word search, a search using tags, or by flipping through the Notebook I have created.

Saving important documents

When I receive an invoice, receipt, or confirmation of an ID or password, I can drag the file into a note, or I can use Web Clipper to save it. When I receive similar paper documents from vendors, credit card companies, repairmen or the IRS, I scan and send them to Evernote. The tool that makes this possible is CamScanner. This allows me to take a high quality photo of paper documents and convert them to a pdf file.

For the Physician Executive, Evernote can be a good place to store agenda templates used to organize your one-on-one meetings with the CEO, COO or direct reports. Then each completed agenda can be saved into an appropriate Notebook. The check-list function can be used to create quick lists for project planning, and updated as projects proceed.

Consult the Evernote Experts

I am by no means an Evernote expert. But much has been written about Evernote because there are countless Evernote users. I find Michael Hyatt's posts particularly helpful. He has a unique way of using tags to categorize his content and boost productivity. He does not use Notebooks extensively. I find they work well for me. He also posted his 12 Surprising Ways to Use Evernote.

I also found the Kindle Book Mastering Evernote: The Unofficial Guide to Organizing Your Life with Evernote  by S. J. Scott to be very helpful (note that this is an affiliate link). Some of the other uses these authors mention include:

• Record ideas verbally directly into Evernote
• Store handwritten notes from meetings or classes
• Create To-Do checklists
• Store audio recordings of meetings
• Take a photo and save whiteboard lists from strategic planning meetings
• Sign up for blogs using your Evernote email address so they are sent directly to Evernote (I signed up for my own blog so I automatically save a copy of each of my posts!)
• Scan all your receipts
• Store photos of your valuables for insurance purposes
• Use it to write a daily journal
• Create a Notebook for travel related items
• Store your medical records
• Many, many more

Using Evernote, my ability to store important information has improved dramatically. But the productivity improvement results primarily from the ease with which the information can be retrieved. And my in boxes generally have fewer than 10 emails needing attention. All of this is a result of using Evernote.

I am now contemplating using it to write a daily journal.

How about you? Are you using Evernote? What unique ways have you used this tool? Please tell us in the comments section.

The post Productivity Tool for Physician Executives appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.