consulting Archives - NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/tag/consulting/ Helping Hospital and Medical Group Executives Lead and Manage With Confidence Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:37:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.2 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/cropped-1-32x32.jpg consulting Archives - NonClinical Physicians https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/tag/consulting/ 32 32 112612397 Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources/#respond Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:36:19 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=54584 Help for the Struggling Physician - 393 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John shares his selections of the most valuable resources for physicians pursuing a nonclinical career. From comprehensive courses to specialized training programs, these curated resources help doctors navigate their career transitions more effectively. Whether you're just starting to [...]

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]]> Help for the Struggling Physician – 393

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

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

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Valuable Resources for Career Exploration

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

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

Specialized Training for High-Demand Opportunities

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

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

Summary

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

Links for today's episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 393

Valuable Resources For Doctors Exploring New Job Possibilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Disclaimers:

*Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so does not affect the price you are charged. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career.  

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

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/valuable-resources/feed/ 0 54584 Exploit Your Medical Knowledge In New Ways https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/exploit-your-medical-knowledge/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/exploit-your-medical-knowledge/#respond Tue, 18 Feb 2025 13:26:49 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=52645 Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 2 - 392 On this week's episode, John posts Part 2 of his interview with Dr. Robert Cooper who explains how to exploit your medical knowledge in new and profitable ways.  Picking up from Episode 391, Dr. Cooper dives deeper into nonclinical consulting opportunities, including disability [...]

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

]]> Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper – Part 2 – 392

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

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

Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program

The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build a nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.

His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.

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

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 900 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short weekly Q&A session on topics related to physicians' careers and leadership. Each discussion is posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 monthly.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Navigating Disability File Reviews

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

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

Exploit Your Medical Knowledge with Multiple Revenue Streams

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

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

Summary

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

Links for today's episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Email Download New Tab

Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 392

Exploit Your Medical Knowledge In New Ways

- Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Robert Cooper: That's right.

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

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

John: Oh yeah?

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

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

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

John: Okay.

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

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

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

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

John: Right.

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

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

Dr. Robert Cooper: Yeah, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

Dr. Robert Cooper: Thanks, John.

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]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/exploit-your-medical-knowledge/feed/ 0 52645 How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part Time Consulting https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/part-time-consulting/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/part-time-consulting/#respond Tue, 11 Feb 2025 11:51:46 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=48230 Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 1 - 391 On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John interviews Dr. Robert Cooper, an expert at part time consulting. Robert is an endocrinologist who has mastered the art of combining clinical practice with lucrative side gigs. He shares how he doubled his clinical [...]

The post How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part Time Consulting appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper – Part 1 – 391

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

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

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Building a Diversified Medical Career with Part Time Consulting

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

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

Maximizing Value in Consulting Opportunities

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

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

Summary

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

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

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 391

How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part-Time Consulting

- Interview with Dr. Robert Cooper - Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Robert Cooper: Exactly right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The post How To Be A Stunning Success Doing Part Time Consulting appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/part-time-consulting/feed/ 0 48230 How to Create A Fantastic B2B Business https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/fantastic-b2b-business/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/fantastic-b2b-business/#respond Tue, 31 Dec 2024 13:47:19 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=40682 Interview with Dr. Nicole Rochester - 385 In this podcast episode, John interviews the founder of a fantastic B2B Business. Dr. Nicole Rochester returns to the podcast 5 years after her initial appearance in Episode 127 in 2020. Starting as a pediatrician who launched Your GPS Doc, LLC in 2017 to help patients [...]

The post How to Create A Fantastic B2B Business appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> Interview with Dr. Nicole Rochester – 385

In this podcast episode, John interviews the founder of a fantastic B2B Business. Dr. Nicole Rochester returns to the podcast 5 years after her initial appearance in Episode 127 in 2020.

Starting as a pediatrician who launched Your GPS Doc, LLC in 2017 to help patients navigate the healthcare system, Dr. Rochester has expanded her business to include consulting for major healthcare organizations, speaking engagements, and coaching other physicians to start health advocacy practices.

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We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

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Building a Career with a Fantastic B2B Business

Nicole's journey from clinical medicine to entrepreneurship demonstrates how physicians can leverage their expertise to create multiple revenue streams while making a significant impact. Dr. Rochester's business evolution exemplifies organic growth through network building and opportunity recognition.

Starting with board participation and speaking engagements about health disparities, she expanded into consulting for healthcare organizations and hospitals. By accepting new challenges and learning as she went – from creating scopes of work to determining consulting rates – she built a successful B2B practice.

Her approach emphasizes the importance of valuing one's expertise appropriately, with payment rates for consulting that significantly exceed clinical hourly rates.

Expanding Revenue Streams

Beyond consulting, Dr. Rochester has developed additional business streams, including coaching other physicians to start their own health advocacy businesses. Her eight-week program helps doctors leverage their medical expertise in the growing field of patient advocacy.

She emphasizes the importance of mindset work for physicians transitioning to entrepreneurship, noting that doctors often underestimate their ability to run successful businesses despite their significant accomplishments in medicine.

Her approach combines practical business guidance with strategies to overcome imposter syndrome and build confidence in their nonclinical roles.

Summary

Physicians interested in exploring health advocacy or healthcare consulting can connect with Nicole through her website or by scheduling a discovery call to learn about her coaching program.

Her journey demonstrates how physicians can successfully transition from clinical practice to entrepreneurship. Leverage your medical expertise, personal experiences, and professional networks and create innovative healthcare solutions and multiple revenue streams.

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 385

How to Create A Fantastic B2B Business

- Interview with Dr. Nicole Rochester

John: Today, I'm very happy to welcome back my guest from five years ago. It's hard to believe. And at that time, she introduced us to her new innovative work as a physician health navigator. I think that's the right term; it can probably be called other things. But anyway, her business has grown and evolved since then, and so I thought I'd invite her back to talk to us, provide us some inspiration and share what she's learned and— maybe some things we can apply to our businesses. So with that, Dr. Nicole Rochester, welcome back to the podcast.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Thank you, Dr. John Jurica. It's so great to be back. Thank you for having me.

John: My pleasure. I know people are just gonna get a lot out of this because what you do is somewhat unique, I think. I know you're teaching others to do it, so that's awesome. But it's somewhat unique and you're running businesses or your business since, I don't know, six, seven years ago. And I see you're doing a lot more speaking recently. So why don't you catch us up? What's been going on for the past five years? You can maybe mention a little bit about your medical background before that, but bring us back up to speed.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Sure. Yeah, so I'll start a little bit at the beginning, like you said, just for those who may not have heard the prior episode. So I'm Nicole Rochester. I am a pediatrician by training, and I always like to say that I loved pediatrics because I know in this day and age, many doctors are finding their ways into non-clinical careers out of necessity, or they're kind of running away from something. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are lots of reasons to run away from medicine these days. But in my case, I really did enjoy my job and really thought that I would work there until I retired.

And for my situation, it was the life experience that led to my transition into entrepreneurship. It was a caregiving journey with my late father and seeing how difficult it was to get the care that he needed, to communicate effectively with the members of his medical team, to advocate for him. And so I found myself doing these things behind the scenes, realizing that as a physician and an insider, I was really uniquely positioned to advocate for my dad. And then after he passed away wondering, how is everybody else managing this? If it was this hard for me, who's a doctor, one of my sisters is a nurse, how much more difficult must it be?

And so I really felt this calling to advocate for other patients and family caregivers the way I had advocated for my dad. I thought I was making this up; it turns out I wasn't. There's an entire field of what's known as professional health advocates or independent health advocates. And so as I started thinking about this business model and doing research, I discovered that others were already doing it. And so in 2017, I left my academic pediatric career and launched Your GPS Doc, LLC, which started as a health advocacy company where I was working one-on-one with other patients and family caregivers, helping them understand and navigate the healthcare system, which involves a whole lot of things.

So yeah, so that was kind of how I got started. Since then, you know, since I was last on your podcast, my work has really evolved from working one-on-one with clients, which were patients and family caregivers, to working with healthcare organizations and hospitals and health systems. And that work involves some speaking, workshops, and training, as well as consulting. And then, as you alluded to, I also am coaching and teaching other physicians how to launch their own health advocacy businesses. So a lot has happened in the last five years, and honestly, things just continue to evolve. And I think I'm still learning, growing, and figuring things out as I go.

John: Good, we can learn from you and with you then as you know this continues. There are so many things that I could say about your opening comments. I'll start by saying that I bet 99% of the people that go see a physician when they're done with their visit and they go home—if they're really sick or not really sick—they can't spit back 5% of what they were told, except, "I saw the doctor and my blood pressure was okay." I have a 96-year-old aunt who doesn't live close to me, but I keep in touch with her. She goes and sees physicians, and then when she comes home, she asks me all these questions. And she's not even given a piece of paper with what her meds are or what she's supposed to do. It's just like, "Come back in two months." So that's shocking.

But the other thing I wanted to mention when you were talking about, you said there are these health advocates, but at the time you started doing this, what percentage of those health advocates were physicians?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yeah, that is a great question, John. I, to this day, have not been able to get reliable, validated data on that, but very, very little. And today, very, very few. You know, there are more, and I'm happy that I've contributed to that increase. But there were very few when I first started. And in fact, I was on a mission to find other physicians who were doing health advocacy, and I found a few, you know, maybe four or five. But it's something that I think most physicians continue to not be aware of. When people find out about me, specifically other doctors, they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is the part of my job that I love the most." And to your point about your aunt, these are the things that most of us went into medicine for. We liked talking to our patients when we were medical students and being able to sit and spend that time. And the reality is that we just can't do that for so many reasons. And so I always get excited when I talk to other physicians about the work because it's the communicating and the explaining and the connecting, the part of our jobs that most of us love but don't have enough time to do in the current environment.

John: Well, I wanna learn more about that aspect of what you're doing. So let's go a little deeper into your GPS Doc business and how it's changed in the last five years. How did you kind of migrate to working with organizations?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Sure, sure. So in terms of the work now, you know, I think the biggest lesson that I've learned and that I hope that your listeners will take away is that the things I'm doing now were birthed out of opportunities to which I said yes. I didn't go back and get another degree. I didn't go back and get more certifications. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that but I allow myself to sit in the space that they're asking me to do these things. How can I figure out how to do them? What do I already know? What do I need to learn? And we know doctors are great at learning and finding information. And I say that because there are opportunities that I easily could have shied away from due to fear, due to imposter syndrome and all those other things that we amazing, brilliant doctors face.

And so I look at where I am now, and I think about like those first opportunities that led to this pivot. And it just reminds me that we don't give ourselves enough credit for all of the knowledge and experience that we have. So what happened with me is that I was on a board. In fact, I just finished my ninth year and just fell off of the board, but I was on the board of an organization in Maryland where I live that basically serves as the primary source of education and training, leadership education and training for healthcare professionals. And so they are deeply connected to the local hospitals and healthcare systems.

And so I was on the board, and in 2020, we had a meeting in June, just a few weeks after George Floyd had been murdered. We were in the midst of the pandemic, and so we were talking about what was going on in the world. And the meeting headed to an end, and I said, "Wait a minute, like, what are we going to do? Like, what, what can we do in this space?" And we were specifically talking about health disparities and racism in medicine. And so me asking that question kind of led to me being, I won't say voluntold, but I was asked, "Hey, what do you think we should do?"

And so I thought about how could we provide education in this space and start to educate healthcare leaders and healthcare professionals about structural racism and how that impacts the healthcare that individuals from marginalized communities receive. So then that led to, "Well, would you be willing to do it? You know, can you develop a talk?" And I have been giving, you know, all of us give talks, right? As medical students, we give talks as residents. I had definitely given a lot of talks as an attending, but I had never given a talk about this. And so this was the first time I said, "Okay, I'm going to say yes to this."

I had already always had an interest in health disparities, even as a medical student, so I kind of relied on that, did a bunch of research, found out, you know, what's going on, looked at statistics, all those things. And I developed a talk called, combating, I think it was called "Combating Structural Racism and Disparities in Healthcare" or something like that. I gave that talk for this organization, and it put me in front of a lot of hospital leaders, doctors, and other medical professionals in my state. And so then some of them reached out after the talk and said, "This was great. Can you come give that talk to my hospital? Can you come give that talk to my medical staff?" And so that led to more opportunities for speaking.

And then an organization that's affiliated with that original organization, the Maryland Hospital Association—actually, I'm sorry, it was the Maryland Patient Safety Center—they reached out, and I had been familiar with the CEO of that organization, who happens to be a pediatrician, a retired pediatrician. He and I had worked together in a hospital. So again, there's a thread here, that leverages network. So he saw the work that I was doing, he attended the talk and he said, "Hey, you know, we're in the middle of COVID. We're seeing that a lot of community members who are minoritized, marginalized are saying no to the vaccine, not only in the community, but we're even seeing healthcare workers who are Black and Brown and marginalized saying no."

And so they had a project where they wanted to address vaccine hesitancy in the context of health disparities. And so he said, you know, "We'd like for you to work for us as a consultant." At this point, John, I had never ever done a consulting job. They asked me to provide them with a scope of work. I literally didn't know what that was. Said yes, got off the phone, Googled how do you write a scope of work, and looked at a bunch of templates and examples, and basically created this scope of work around what I thought would be helpful. And that led to my first consulting gig, which then led to other consulting gigs and more speaking. And now, that has really kind of positioned me as a thought leader and an expert in health equity. And so then that led to some specific health equity projects around maternal health. And it just, you know, the snowball just keeps on going, and it all started with me asking a question in a board meeting and then developing a single talk, which has led to lots of iterations of that talk and many more.

John: All right. So I can ask you many questions about this, but I'm going to focus on two. One is, a lot of people that are trying to get something like that going find themselves having to do some kind of marketing, but it sounds to me like this thing kind of snowballed kind of on its own to some extent. So were you seeking speaking engagements, for example, or doing other things? Number one. Number two. Did you at any point charge for the speaking, or did you just use that as your marketing tool?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: OK. Yes. So I definitely—I had already been doing some speaking within the context of my business, Your GPS Doc. But because I started out primarily working with family caregivers and helping people navigate the healthcare system, the talks that I was giving were really focused on that. So I was giving talks at caregiver conferences, I was giving talks for local departments of aging around that, and some of those talks were paid. Initially, a lot of free talks, and then like many speakers, you start out free, and then finally either you get the courage to ask for money or somebody offers you money and then you go, "Oh my gosh, I can make money." And then you gradually raise your price.

So definitely the talks that I'm describing now were paid engagements. And once I did a few of them and really, really loved it, I did formally market in the sense that I put a page on my website, speaker page. I put a contact form so that people could contact me if they were interested in having me come speak. And I'm very active on LinkedIn, and so I started to post. If I would have a speaking engagement, I would post about it on LinkedIn. I would post a picture. I would usually ask somebody, "Can you please take a picture of me while I'm speaking?" And I would post that photo. I would tag the organization. Inevitably the organization would comment, "Oh, this was such an amazing presentation." You know, maybe they would share my post or maybe they would do their own post. And so that definitely led to some traction on LinkedIn. And so periodically, I continue to get requests about speaking engagements, either from people that saw something on LinkedIn or maybe they went to my website and saw it there.

So there definitely has been some intentional marketing. I will say that one of the things that I am admitting and acknowledging—and I always think about this to myself—is that I really don't market myself as much as I could or should. And I've just really been lucky, blessed all the things with the opportunities that have come my way. And I also recognize that moving forward, I am going to have to probably be more intentional about marketing and making sure that I'm top of mind and that people are continuing to find me.

John: Did you end up, at least on the marketing side and, you know, whether it's emails or posts on different social media, did you hire anyone and you have any assistance or are you handling all that yourself at that point?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: There have been a lot of iterations of having help and not having help. I definitely will say I probably waited too long to get some help in my business. And so I have had a virtual assistant at times, and I've had a social media manager. And I'll also say very transparently that at times those are my two young adult daughters. So, you know, if you have kids, teenagers, young adults, they can be amazing at helping you with those things. And then I've also had other individuals that I've worked with. But a lot of it I do and have done and continue to do on my own, just organically. And I have to, you know, social media is its own beast. Sometimes I'm really good at keeping up to date. And then other times I'll look and say, "Oh my gosh, I haven't posted in a month." And so I try to balance that.

John: Well, it's tough when you're helping patients directly, you're doing the things with an organization, and trying to manage and handle everything. And then, oh, I, got to remember to, you know, go on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever. It it gets overwhelming pretty quickly.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yes, absolutely.

John: If you're like me, then you go in cycles, though, when you really nail it for a while and then you drift away for a while. So you had to learn how to basically write a proposal, a scope of work. And actually, like you said, one of the big things was, well, how much do I charge? I don't want to necessarily ask what you charge then or what you're charging now, but maybe like, how did you figure out what? How did you come up with that number thinking, I don't want it to be so high it's crazy, but I don't want to leave a lot on the table? I mean, I'm spending a lot of time researching and doing all this work.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yes, that is a great question. That is something that I feel like it's hard to know, and I will say that generally—and this sounds crazy, John—but I just, I make it up. Not completely make it up, but I try to do some research. I try to ask around and see what other people are charging. As you know, a lot of times for many reasons, you don't get straight answers with that. And then I just would try something. I would say typically whether it's speaking, consulting, and even coaching, the initial price was much too low. Like I would significantly underprice my services. And then I would realize, you know, after getting feedback or seeing how it's going, it's like, "Wait, you know, I could be charging more." And then I would charge a little bit more the next time. And If I get a very quick yes, I'm like, "Uh-oh, you know, that probably was too low."

And so you kind of inch your way up as you get more comfortable, as you get more experience. For me though, like I did go in some of the Facebook groups for physicians, nonclinical careers, things like that. And you ask the question and a lot of times you would get kind of a range or people would say it depends. But I really felt strongly that as a physician, regardless of what I'm doing, whether it's consulting, definitely in the consulting space, what I was hearing from other doctors who were willing to share is that they were charging anywhere from $300 to $600, some even more, dollars per hour. And so I felt like, "Okay, let me maybe land in the middle of that and then kind of see if they say yes and then work my way up from there."

I think that we—one thing that I've noticed when coaching physicians is that they often start... When we're talking about the hourly rate, for example, with the health advocacy, they will go to their clinical hourly rate. And if they're a pediatrician like me, we're at the bottom of the pay scale and they'll say stuff like, "I don't think I should charge more than $150 an hour." And I'm like, "Absolutely not." Especially if you're working with organizations and things like that. So I think we all have a tendency to try to compare that work to what we did in a clinical setting, and the two are little like apples and oranges. And getting accustomed to the fact that your knowledge and expertise is extremely valuable and that you know the companies that are hiring you to consult or advise they're doing that because of your unique vantage point and your experience, and that deserves to be compensated. So it's not about taking advantage of anyone, but it's really kind of standing in your truth and trying to understand and figure out what you're worth.

John: That's good advice. You know, I was a chief medical officer for a hospital, so we had consultants always coming in. And, you know, a lot of times there were big consultations, so they wouldn't even give an hourly rate. It would be like just a project that would take a year, and, you know, it would be $100,000 or something like that. Now, you know, you have to do some work backwards, I guess, and see how much time you think it's going to take. But I would say, again, this is based on nothing except just talking to people like you. Like if you're a physician doing consulting and your clinical rate is like $200, $300 an hour, you know, doing whatever you're doing, you should at least double it.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: I agree.

John: What else have you learned in the last five years as you're making this, transition to doing really these bigger things and working with more of an institution? Anything you want to share with us about your mindset?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Oh, wow. Oh, yeah, mindset. I think what I have learned—I know that what I have learned in the last seven years since becoming a business owner is that 95, if not more, percent of the work is in our own head. It's our mindset. Everything else can be figured out. The information is out there; you can find it. But having the information, like as doctors, we always feel like if I just have more information... But for us, it's here—for everybody, but particularly for us. And I've been really intrigued with my own journey and with now coaching physicians, this idea that we represent—I don't know the exact number, but we're in the top echelon, I believe, in terms of intelligence and things like that. And we do really, really hard things as physicians, like literal hard things, like intubation and putting in central lines and saving lives. And yet when it comes to starting a business—and I'm not saying it's easy, because it is not easy—but we have so many fears and trepidations.

And I've talked to so many doctors that are like, "I want to do this, but I'm afraid to start my own business. I don't think I can start my own business. I don't think I could do it." And it's like, "Are you serious? Like you save lives every day. You're an emergency room physician. You're a critical care doc." And you don't think that you can start a business? So our mindsets are so important. And you know, whatever it takes, whether it's mantras, affirmations—for me, sometimes, John, I will actually go look at my CV, and anytime I have an opportunity to update my CV, it becomes an amazing exercise in boosting my confidence because I start to look back at like all of the talks that I've given and you know, my regular job and all the work I did as a pediatrician. Then to look at the different talks that I've given, the articles that I've contributed to, and the clients that I've had a chance to work with. And that reminds me like, "Nicole, you're doing pretty well,"

And so I think that we discount ourselves so much as physicians, and we just don't appreciate that, yes, we have the medical knowledge, but there's so much more that you can do with that medical knowledge beyond the clinical arena, and really, you know, just embracing that. So mindset, I continue to work on my mindset regularly because every now and then, it's something that you don't conquer, at least for me. Like sometimes I'm thinking like, "I've got this," and then some new opportunity will come my way and I see myself, I see that old part of Nicole trying to sneak back in. So I think mindset is incredibly important.

The other thing I've noticed specifically around speaking as a doctor is that I have had to creatively and respectfully remind organizations I'm a small business owner. And I say that because I continue to speak for free periodically, but it has to be like a very small nonprofit or a very religious organization or just a cause that really aligns with my purpose in life. But there are large organizations, like large John, that will approach me about speaking and then tell me that they don't have a budget or the budget that they have is significantly below what I would charge. And I've gotten to the place now where I just politely decline. And if there is a back and forth, which sometimes there is, I will tell them, you know, they'll say, "Well, Dr. So-and-so spoke for us last year, and he or she did it for free." But they're always naming a physician who works for an employer. And so, you know, you may recall, when I worked in academia, speaking was considered, you know, you do it for "exposure."

I love when they say, "Oh, we thought you would just do it for exposure." And it's not... to sound arrogant by any means, but I don't need—well, I don't want to say I don't need exposure. I always need exposure, but I'm kind of beyond the stage of speaking for exposure. And when they bring up a physician who is employed, I remember when I was employed, absolutely, I gave talks all the time for free. But at that time, I had a goal of, you know, maybe advancing up the academic ranks; like there was something tied to that effort. And so now, you know, my CV doesn't earn me a title of associate professor or professor, and I literally work for myself; I provide for my family.

And so I think that's another thing that I want to share. You know, certainly in the beginning, again, there's nothing wrong with doing things for free. There's nothing wrong with doing things for lower cost as you are making a name for yourself. But after you've done that, you deserve to be paid. And so I just find a lot of times because we're so altruistic, there's just this attitude that we should come speak to large healthcare systems and pharmaceutical companies even just out of the goodness of our hearts.

John: Wise words there. So it's absolutely true. And when you're going your own and run a small business, you have to earn a living and you have to put money aside for when maybe it gets a little light for a while, you know.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yes.

John: It makes perfect sense. That's good encouragement. Okay, now there are some people that like what you're doing and, you know, different aspects, but I'm sure there are people that like the advocacy part because that's something, again, that maybe they hadn't realized they could actually get paid to do. So you're teaching other people how to do that as well, correct?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yes. Yes, that is correct.

John: So tell us all about that.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Sure. Yeah. And that's another thing, you know, there's a theme I'm realizing now. There's a theme in our conversation in terms of saying yes and embracing opportunity. Because with the coaching, I started my company in 2017. I was doing health advocacy. Within a couple of years, I became known in some physician circles as the doctor who does this. And so one, when doctors would say, "Hey, I have a family member who this happened to or this happened to," they would remember, "Oh, Nicole dealt with that when she was caring for her dad," or "Nicole now works with people."

And so I would get tagged in these Facebook posts. And so initially I would get tagged for like helping someone's family member navigate the healthcare system. But then doctors would sometimes say, often in the nonclinical groups, "Hey, is there such thing where I could just like help people understand their medical conditions or maybe when they're hospitalized, I can help them understand what's going on and communicate with their doctors?" And then I started getting tagged. They were like, "Hey, Nicole does that."

And so I would get tagged and then I would reach out to someone, I would hop on Zoom calls and maybe talk for an hour or two hours and just kind of answer their questions about how I got started and all the things. How much do you charge? Do you need insurance? All these things. And so I started doing that and then as I got busier, I didn't have the time or the capacity to have these two-hour Zoom calls. And so then doctors would say, "Well, can you just coach me?" And the first four or five or six or eight maybe times, I said no. I was like, "No, I don't do that." And they were like, "Well, can you just coach me?" "Nope, I'm not a coach."

So finally, around 2020, I started saying yes. I never advertised it. I just, you know, I said, "Okay, somebody reached out and they were like, 'I really would love to learn from you.'" And so I said, yes. So similar to that consulting scope of work package where I had to figure out what it was, I started researching, you know, coaching and like, how much should I charge? And then I thought about my journey. What were the things that I needed to know in order to launch Your GPS Doc? But even more importantly, what are all the mistakes that I have made? What are the things that I wish I knew when I first started?

And so I started developing a curriculum and I took my first coaching client and I worked with her one-on-one, and that was great. Everything went great. And so then, you know, the next doctor that came, I said, yes, I do this. But I never advertised it. I was still afraid. So if somebody came to me, I would say yes. But I wasn't out there saying "Hey, you all, I'm a physician coach." So then that led to me formalizing a curriculum that went from like a three-week program to four weeks to six weeks. Now it's an eight-weeks program. And then I went from a one-on-one to a group model.

And so since 2022, I've been hosting or leading the small group cohorts of physicians who want to start their own health advocacy business. And again, as the landscape changes, as new things pop up with the industry, I go back in, we update the modules. But right now, it's an eight-week program; there are lessons and modules and videos and downloadable templates and things that live on an online platform. And then weekly during the program, we have coaching calls, live coaching calls where I answer questions, where I deal with mindset challenges and coach the individuals. And yeah, we do that, and there's even an alumni program that I started just a few months ago because what I noticed is that a lot of the doctors that would finish, some of them would just take right off. Like they would finish the program, implement everything, start their business.

But a lot of them were still kind of nervous or scared, and they still needed a little more support. And so now we have an alumni program for those who want ongoing support after the eight-week program is finished. And it's just been an amazing thing to see these doctors in various seasons of their career. Some are retired, some have been out on disability for injury or illness, and some are still working full-time or part-time, and seeing them launch their health advocacy business and helping other patients and families has just been amazing.

John: Sounds like, though, from your standpoint, I mean, looking at what you're doing, you're definitely juggling a lot of things here.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yeah.

John: You know, you have, but it's interesting. I mean, real entrepreneurs, that's kind of what they do. Maybe you didn't really consider yourself an entrepreneur 10, 15 years ago, but you know, you're just meeting these needs as they arise. And some are, you know, huge, you know, organizations and some are just individuals. So it's really, I think it's very—I was going to say impressive, no, but it's very—it is impressive, but it's just, it's encouraging, I guess. It's like you said, there's so many things you can do if you just have that mindset. You could do a whole thing. It's all the mistakes to avoid because that's really like the, what did a consultant provides: "Don't do any of these things; do these things, and you're going to be where I was only it's going to take one-third of the time or whatever."

Dr. Nicole Rochester: That part. That is so important. Time is compressed when you work with somebody who's already done it. They've already made all the mistakes. Absolutely.

John: So where does somebody go to learn about that part of it, the coaching?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Probably the best way you can schedule a call with me to learn more about health advocacy and about the program and we can decide if this is a good fit. And that's bit.ly/NHAcall. And N-H-A is in all caps. And they can also just go to my website, which is yourgpsdoc.com.

John: Well, you've covered a lot and you've really given us a lot of inspiration and actual good practical advice as well. So, anything else you—I guess we're going to get to the end here. So, I just would open it up for any advice you have for physicians. You know, my audience, a lot of them are either burned out or they're frustrated or they've been in medicine for 25 years and they're like, "You know, I just don't want to work like a crazy person anymore." What advice would you have for them?

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Yeah, one, I, you know, I—sending hugs because it's really, really difficult to practice medicine now for so many reasons. And honestly, I'm afraid as I get older, like who's going to be around to take care of me because I know that so many of our colleagues are leaving. But I guess the advice I would give is really, really embrace the knowledge and the expertise that you have—not just with your medical career, although that's incredibly important—but your lived experiences, your personal experiences, your interests, your hobbies—like all of those things make you who you are. And all of those things are potentially monetizable.

And I think that's something that I've learned and continue to learn is exactly what I'm always surprised at: What is monetizable? And for me, it's not just making money. Like that's not my, that's never been my motivation: is to make money. I'm excited that I get to make money while I'm still doing things that bring me joy. But realizing that there's so much information and knowledge that we have that can help others and that other people are willing to pay for that information. So it's a win-win. I mean, you have a way of monetizing your skills and your knowledge and you're doing it in a way that helps the broader society.

John: I agree 100% and you're a good example of it..

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Thank you.

John: All right, Nicole. I don't think I'm going to wait another five years, but if I still have a podcast going maybe in two years or so, then I think we're going to have to get together again and see what else you've been up to. But this has been very interesting, fascinating, helpful. And I thank you for being on the podcast today.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me. And thank you for this platform. I've talked to a lot of doctors who listen to your podcast, and that's been their motivation to step out into the deep. So thank you for what you do.

John: Well, I appreciate that. All right. Well, take care. Bye-bye.

Dr. Nicole Rochester: Take care.

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The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

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]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/fantastic-b2b-business/feed/ 0 40682 Why You’ll Love the Best New Physician Consulting Business – A PNC Classic from 2021 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/best-new-physician-consulting-business/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/best-new-physician-consulting-business/#respond Tue, 27 Aug 2024 19:45:28 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=35346 Interview with Dr. Armin Feldmin - 367 In this podcast episode replay, I'm speaking with Dr. Armin Feldmin an expert in the best new physician consulting business. During our conversation, Armin explains how he developed this new consulting business over 15 years ago. Since then, he has helped attorneys with thousands of [...]

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Interview with Dr. Armin Feldmin – 367

In this podcast episode replay, I'm speaking with Dr. Armin Feldmin an expert in the best new physician consulting business.

During our conversation, Armin explains how he developed this new consulting business over 15 years ago. Since then, he has helped attorneys with thousands of cases. In doing so, he has helped thousands of patients get the financial support they need to optimize their medical care following an injury.

Our Episode Sponsor

We're proud to have a NEW EPISODE SPONSOR: Dr. Armin Feldman's Prelitigation Pre-trial Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program.

The Medical Legal Consulting Coaching Program will teach you to build your own nonclinical consulting business. Open to physicians in ANY specialty, completing Dr. Armin Feldman’s Program will teach you how to become a valued consultant to attorneys without doing med mal cases or expert witness work.

His program will enable you to use your medical education and experience to generate a great income and a balanced lifestyle. Dr. Feldman will teach you everything, from the business concepts to the medicine involved, to launch your new consulting business during one year of unlimited coaching.

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

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[From the original post in 2018:]

In this interview, Dr. Armin Feldman explains how to use a new kind of medical legal consulting as a lucrative side gig.

Dr. Armin Feldman is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin Medical School. He completed his training in psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.

He practiced psychiatry and psychoanalysis for over 20 years, and he owned a network of outpatient head injury rehabilitation clinics around the country.  

The Best New Physician Consulting Business

Armin describes how he developed a unique kind of medical legal consulting during that time. He sold his clinic network about 14 years ago. And he devoted himself to providing those services full-time. After a few years of perfecting his approach, he began teaching other physicians how to adopt what he was doing.

Over the past 12 years, he has trained over 1,600 other physicians through his Medical/Legal Consulting Coaching Program.

Active Medical Practice Not Required

Dr. Feldman’s consulting is pre-litigation and pre-trial in nature. He helps attorneys manage the medical aspects of cases, increasing case value and saving attorney time. He enables them to better negotiate and settle cases and get the appropriate medical care for their clients. And he does not participate in medical malpractice cases.

If you want to learn more, you can check out the home page for his coaching services and watch a short video at mdbizcon.com. And if you’d like to sign up for his biweekly email, just send him a note requesting it at armin@golegaldoc.com

Summary

That was an eye-opening interview. And it seems like a fairly compelling way to leverage your medical knowledge. Following Dr. Feldman's methods, you will be able to provide lucrative pre-trial medical legal consulting services on a part-time basis.

Links for today's episode:

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 337

Why You'll Love The Best New Physician Consulting Business - A PNC Classic from 2021

John: I'm excited to bring you today's interview with an expert on a new kind of medical legal consulting. I think you'll find it very appealing. Dr. Armin Feldman, welcome to the PNC podcast.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Hi John. It is a pleasure to be with you.

John: I've really been looking forward to this because I'll just say that I discovered you somehow doing something that I find very intriguing, very appealing. I've always been one to like, although I've never done it myself, medical expert witness sort of work because I think it fits in with physicians as a part-time gig. But I think you've found a way to even improve on that. First, why don't you just tell us a little bit about your background and bring us through your education and so forth and, and then to what you're doing today?

Dr. Armin Feldman: Sure. I grew up in Milwaukee and I went to college at University of Wisconsin. and then I also went there for medical school. After medical school, I did an internship in internal medicine at the University of Colorado. And then stayed at the University of Colorado for my residency in psychiatry.

After I finished my residency in psychiatry, by the way, for the next five years of Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, I was also a student at the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis and I am also a graduate of the Denver Institute. For about 20 years, I have practiced psychiatry and psychoanalysis. And an interesting thing happened along the way. When I was still a resident, I met a young personal injury attorney who was doing some work for a friend of mine. We've been friends now for over 30 years. But after I got into practice, he started sending me his injured clients who primarily have head injuries. And that led me into the field of mild traumatic brain injury.

My true specialty in psychiatry turned out to be mild traumatic brain injury. And I wound up owning an outpatient head injury rehabilitation clinic in Denver. I had a treatment program of my own design. I eventually had other psychiatrists, psychologists, neuropsychologists, psychotherapists, biofeedback therapists, and others working at the clinic. And that led me to eventually wind-up owning outpatient head injury rehab clinics all around the country. I was fortunate enough to eventually sell those clinics. And after I sold the clinics, I was thinking about, "Well, what do I want to do next?" I didn't want to retire. I love medicine.

As part of that work, I testified as an expert witness more times than I wanted to remember on behalf of my patients who are either being cut off their medical care or offered some pits of a settlement. And I was quite familiar with our legal system and I thought, "Well, maybe what I could do is just consult attorneys on any kind of medical question that came up in a case and work with them, pretrial pre-litigation".

In other words, in the areas of the law that I started working with attorneys, approximately 9 out of 10 cases settled. And so, that's where I came in. Well, one thing led to another, and I wound up developing what has turned into a whole new subspecialty of forensic medicine that deals with the pretrial pre and aspects of legal cases. And I developed a whole variety of fairly specific services to help the attorneys help their clients to better negotiate and settle cases.

And after doing that for a few years, I realized this probably could be a new field. I started training other physicians how to do this work through a training program and through conferences. And I guess as they say, the rest is history, it's now 14 years later. Through those means I've trained over 1,600 physicians around the country. And so, that brings us up to today.

John: Very interesting. And of course, you've touched on some of the factors that maybe make this a little bit more appealing than some other forms of consulting. But why don't I have you really spell those out for us? When we think of medical expert witnesses for legal reasons, of course, we're talking about reviewing charts, then a certain percentage of those will result in a deposition and then even a smaller percentage will potentially end up in court. It can get a little stressful, a lot of time involved. It sounds like you're doing something a little different that doesn't always involve those aspects. So, tell us about that.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah, that's right. First of all, I should say I don't do any expert witness work and I don't work in medical malpractice cases. I am working in other kinds of legal cases. The work is primarily in personal injury cases and workers' compensation cases with regard to injuries. But I'll tell you any physician in any specialty can learn how to do this kind of consulting. What happens is, the attorney will call me with a case. We will discuss the case. They will send the medical records. After I review the medical records, I'll interview the client of the attorney in every case. Typically, it was by phone, but now it might be by Zoom meeting. Less than 3% of the time I may want to interview the client in the attorney's conference room.

Once I do my review of the records and interview the client, then I'm going to do any medical research that I need to do. And then in many cases, I'm writing a report. Many services don't require a report, but the thing to understand is that I answer and other physicians that do this, we answer any kind of medical question that comes up in a case. And so, the issue may be related to a specific medical question, a specific condition, a specific injury.

By the way, there are about 16, 17 different kinds of services that we offer to these attorneys to help them. And what that means is to better settle the case. It means settling the case for better value with less attorney time. Help the attorney get the appropriate medical care for their clients, and also help the attorney just to negotiate all the medical issues in the case.

I'll give you a couple of examples. The service that is most requested is to provide the attorney with comprehensive medical summary reports, by the way, it's just a term I invented. But comprehensive medical summary reports that they will include in settlement demand letters. Through the negotiation process, at some point, the attorney will file or submit to opposing counsel and to the insurance company a settlement demand letter. And in that letter one of the things that the attorney must put in there, these are fairly standardized state by state, but obviously, they have to put in a description of damages. There are all kinds of damages. Damage to a car, loss of work time, loss of enjoyment of life, which by the way isn't medical damage. Medical damages tend to be the biggest group.

We will give our medical opinions based on all the things that I just told you about regarding every injury in the case. And so, we will write a comprehensive report that includes our medical opinions. And one of the things that makes this viable is in our legal system, physicians are expected to, and are sanctioned to give medical opinions to medical questions.

Now, if it's that 1 out of 10 cases that's going to trial, well, then obviously the attorney is going to need medical experts in every area of injury. But for the purpose of negotiating and settling the case, what the attorney needs are medical opinions, reports, and other services, all backed up by evidence from the medical literature that they can use to settle the case. And this is a completely legitimate thing that any physician can do. These reports will cover everything in the case, every injury in the case, along with a number of other fairly specific things that need to be in this kind of report.

Now, another thing that we do is that we can actually physically sit in and observe independent medical exams that other physicians do, which puts us in a position to write IME rebuttal reports. Now we all know that they're very good doctors that do very good IME. We also know that in every community across the country, there are physicians that are specifically asked to do these by the insurance companies because they have a fairly good idea of what the opinions are going to be. I think I was probably the first physician in the country to actually physically sit in and observe IBS and write rebuttals.

Another thing that we do quite often is we'll answer specific medical questions in cases. And when we do that, what we're doing, for the most part, is we're helping what the attorneys call to prove a particular medical theory for the case. Now sometimes we'll do that and we'll tell the attorney, "This isn't going to fly, don't do this". But most of the time what we're doing is we're helping to prove a particular medical theory for the case.

Let me just digress for a sec and I'll tell you one other thing. When I started doing this, let's say there was some issue in the case related to a rotator cuff injury, and the attorney wanted a report and my opinion on that particular thing. I would write up the report in the manner in which I just told you. My report's going to go to opposing counsel. Our work is not behind the scenes. Our reports are seen by opposing counsel. They're almost always seen by insurance adjusters. They're often seen by judges, treating doctors, IME doctors, and others.

And the opposing counsel gets my report. Well, what's the first thing they're going to do? They're going to look me up. They look me up and they call the attorney that hired me and they say, "Well, I looked Dr. Feldman up. Why should I pay any attention to his report? He is not an expert in rotator cuff injuries". And of course, this doesn't happen to me anymore because people know who I am, but that's what happens with everyone.

But what my attorney's going to say is, "Well, Dr. Feldman acts as a medical consultant for me, by the way, as opposed to a medical expert, but works as a medical consultant for me in all my cases. And if we can't get this issue and negotiate it out in the settlement based on Dr. Feldman's opinions and boards, and I back it up with evidence from the literature so forth, and you forced me to take this case to trial. When I hired my retained orthopedic surgeon, they're going to say exactly what Dr. Feldman said in his report. In fact, they would be both relying on the same literature, so let's get this settled". And that's how it works.

John: Okay. Let me go back a couple of things just to make it crystal clear because these are some of the things I found so fascinating. Number one is you were talking about the IME Independent Medical Exams. And what you're doing when you do them is you're actually observing someone else's IME as a way to kind of keep the whole process valid for your side of the equation for the attorney you're working with. I just want to make that clear. I think you did, but just for the audience to understand. This is like another sort of perspective to the whole process.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah, that's correct. Sometimes it's something as simple as an observation. I did a case. It was a woman that had a head injury. She had

symptoms, there were CNS questions. All the treating doctors were in agreement with this. One IME doctor said, "No, there's nothing wrong with her". So, I went to a different IME and the IME report came back and the report was that Babinski's were negative. Well, one was positive. And I saw it, I observed it. I tested that. I wasn't the only doctor that saw that. Many of the treating doctors saw that.

And so, that was something that came up in that particular IME. But most of the time, it's more of an opinion thing. The person doesn't need revision surgery for the rotator cuff, because there was no dial leakage on her arthrogram. Well, most orthopedic surgeons would say pain and range of motion, degree of functionality. These are the things that would be criteria with regard to whether that revision surgery would be needed or not. And that's what I might talk about in my revision and my rebuttal report.

John: Right. Again, just to point out something you've already said, the fact that you're a psychiatrist really doesn't make any difference. You don't have to be an internist, an orthopedist, or a neurologist. You need really a basic medical background and maybe a little experience and the ability to read the literature and then serve as sort of an interpreter there for your attorney, your attorney's client, that sort of thing.

Dr. Armin Feldman: In fact, John, it's one of the things that's so much fun about this work. Now, some physicians I talk with, they might be interested in doing this. I talk with them and they just want to stay in their lane. They are not interested in this. But if you went to medicine because you found out that you love medicine, and you enjoy learning about all aspects of medicine, then this is just tremendous, it's so much fun.

I'm not in any position to do any orthopedic or neurosurgery, but I put my knowledge base of spine injuries, rotator cuff injuries, complex regional pain syndrome, and other things up against anyone. And I'm such a more well-rounded and better doctor for all of the hundreds of hours of research that I've done over the years.

John: It's interesting. I interviewed someone who is a medical director or a CMO at a life insurance company. And she happened to be a cardiologist. It's like, well, what does a cardiologist know about life insurance? But it was exactly what you're saying. She was asked to interpret. She would do her research. Whether she had to do with pediatrics adult cardiac renal didn't matter. It was all based on the basic background of being a physician that's got a broad sort of training. That's another very interesting perspective. All right. Are there challenges in this thing? It sounds like it's Nirvana, it's fantastic. There's got to be some challenges and probably some pre-work you have to do.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah. Again, I'm not sure this is entirely a challenge, but it's certainly a thing of interest. In my training program, I'm training physicians on two things. I'm training them on the medicine they need to know, but also, I'm training them on how to successfully start-up, but more importantly, how to run a long-term medical legal consulting business. If there's a challenge, it's the issues outside of medicine. How do you get from zero to up and running with your business? How do you market your business? How do you run your operations on a day-to-day basis? How do you do your billing? These kinds of things.

And so, maybe the challenge for physicians is on that side of the equation. Physicians are now just being employees of big corporations or hospital systems. So, what's the biggest trend? Everybody wants their own side gig, right? So many doctors want their own thing. Well, to have your own thing, you have to know something about business and how to run that business. It doesn't run itself. Now for me, of course, this has been part of the fun of it all. But if there's a challenge it's getting used to... And any physician can learn it, but it's getting used to that side.

John: The plus side there it sounds to me is that if someone is unhappy, unfulfilled and is looking for an alternative that if they can just squeeze out some time, they can actually start this on a part-time basis, learn about it, start working on how to get some clients. And then if it really resonates with them, then they can gradually either phase out or quit their other job or get another type of less stressful clinical job let's say.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah, that's right. Now there are physicians that do it full time. There are physicians that do it instead of retiring, but you're right, the largest group are physicians that do this as a part-time side gig.

John: Okay. Now, how does someone get paid doing this? Do you just sort of have a retainer? Do you use an hourly rate? Do you do a case rate? All the above? I think people will have that question.

Dr. Armin Feldman: The way I train the physicians that are doing this is I charge by the hour for everything that I do. One hourly fee. I keep the billing log form along. Attorneys understand hourly billing. Now, of course, in the areas of the law, which I work primarily, it's done by contingency. But I charge by the hour for everything that I do. Just to quick aside. Now I'm not working on contingency. When I send my bill, I expect to be paid in the next 30 days. And in the real world, 90% of the time I'm paid within 30 to 60 days of sending my bill.

But the way that I've advised physicians over the years is to do an informal survey of their colleagues, determine what you think is the average fee per hour for doing medical expert work in your community. Now, obviously, there's a range, right? Not hard to figure the average. So once you get that average, then you want to come in somewhat below what the medical experts are charging doing this acting as a medical consultant, pretrial, pre-litigation.

John: Okay. That's pretty straightforward. And they can get some either from you, if they take your coaching course or elsewhere, they can figure that out. Tell us about your course exactly. What is it? What is it like now? Is it face to face? Is it live? Is it online? Is it recorded? What does it look like?

Dr. Armin Feldman: It's one year and the physician gets all of the business concepts, all the business tools they need, the medical tools, the training, the manual, the how-to on every aspect of the business. They get everything that I use in my business. They get a website, so forth. And it's both on the business side and on the medical side. But the big thing is they get a year of coaching with me. And I've been doing this full-time for 14 years. And so, it's not an absolute necessity. Occasionally somebody joins the coaching program, I don't hear from them much and they're successful. But far and away, far, far and away, the physicians that stay in close touch with me are the most successful. Whatever they need during the launch plan period, I help all of the physicians with some of their marketing. That's how they learn it in the beginning. I'll actually help them to get their first cases in the door. I read tons of drafts of reports before they go out to their attorneys, and really anything I can do from my end that's going to help them to be successful.

John: That sounds like it's fairly comprehensive for those that take advantage of it. Can you give me an example? I'm curious if everyone that learns this from you, do they do exactly what you do or do you see examples where someone might say, "Well, I want to focus on this aspect or that aspect?" Or maybe they just end up doing something slightly different, just because we're all different. Any examples like that?

Dr. Armin Feldman: There's kind of a tried and true way to do this. And not that I haven't learned from coaching members over the years and made adjustments to things, both on the business side and the medical side. But the fact is if you vary too far from the standard approach, it tends not to be as successful.

John: Well, when you've been doing something for 15 years it tends to be a pretty well-oiled machine at that point, I assume.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah. Yeah. And not that I'm not open to hearing what physicians that are training or have trained are doing. But most of them come back around to doing it the way they were trained.

John: Got it. All right. Well, before we go any further, we're getting near the end here, but I want to make sure I mention your website. Actually, it's sort of a page that has this course on it. It's called mdbizcon.com. And I found a video there. It pretty much explains everything. It's again, pretty interesting. That's one of the things that got me interested in getting you on here in the podcast today. So, let's not forget about that. And then I'm also going to put a copy of your email address in the show notes for anyone that would like to get on your email list. Is that doable?

Dr. Armin Feldman: Yeah, that would be great. I do have a newsletter once a month for physicians that are interested in this topic. And then two weeks after the newsletter comes out, I send out a shorter plain text email with tips, advice on various topics as they come up in my day-to-day work. And then I'll talk about it.

John: If you were to be addressing some of my listeners here who are sometimes a little bit burned out or they're just frustrated with medicine in general, what advice might you have for them in terms of thinking about their careers?

Dr. Armin Feldman: I think as physicians, we all want to help people. That's a good portion of the reason we got into it. So, I would say, first and foremost, find something that you can use your medical knowledge to still help people. And this isn't anything profound, I'm sure you've heard it before. But if you're doing something that you really enjoy and find fun, it doesn't seem much like work. If you're going to do something on the side or look for something to cure that burnout, make sure it's something that you really enjoy, that you find fun doing every day. And if you can combine that with helping people, and by the way, making money, what's better than that?

John: Oh, that's absolutely right. Great advice. Yeah, I think if people don't know about these things, then they feel sort of frustrated or resigned that they can't break away from the corporate practice of medicine or something like that. But just in having conversations with people like you, we've seen just dozens and dozens of different opportunities and options for people if they just sort of open their eyes and look around. I appreciate those comments. Anything else you need us to know about this new kind of medical legal consulting?

Dr. Armin Feldman: If you enjoy medicine as a whole, and you got a kick out of being in med school and learning all the things that we know, and you want to put that medical knowledge to work in a nonclinical field that really helps people and is lucrative, this is something that you should look at.

John: Yeah, that's what I thought when I first heard about this. It's intellectually stimulating. It builds on your medical and actual understanding of the healthcare system itself. And you don't have to be in any particular specialty and you don't have to keep practicing to do this ultimately if you decide to do it full-time from what you've said.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Right.

John: All right. Well, thank you very much. This has been very fascinating, Armin. I really appreciate you for coming on today. And I hope a few of my listeners take you up on the email letter and maybe even enroll in your coaching course. With that, I'll have to say bye-bye.

Dr. Armin Feldman: Okay. Thank you, John. It's been my pleasure.

John: It's been great. Thanks. Bye-bye.

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Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post Why You’ll Love the Best New Physician Consulting Business – A PNC Classic from 2021 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/best-new-physician-consulting-business/feed/ 0 35346 How to Become an IME: A PNC Classic from 2021 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/how-to-become-an-ime/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/how-to-become-an-ime/#respond Tue, 02 Jul 2024 13:06:39 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=29968 Interview with Dr. Emily Woolcock - 359 Today we provide an inspiring story and learn how to become an IME (Independent Medical Examiner) from an expert orthopedic surgeon in this classic episode from 2021. Dr. Emily Woolcock is an internationally recognized speaker, best-selling author, mentor, and consultant. She is among the country’s most [...]

The post How to Become an IME: A PNC Classic from 2021 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> Interview with Dr. Emily Woolcock – 359

Today we provide an inspiring story and learn how to become an IME (Independent Medical Examiner) from an expert orthopedic surgeon in this classic episode from 2021.

Dr. Emily Woolcock is an internationally recognized speaker, best-selling author, mentor, and consultant. She is among the country’s most well-known orthopedic surgeons. Dr. Woolcock is board-certified by the American Board of Orthopedic Surgery and the American Board of Independent Medical Examiners.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career you love. To learn more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

For Podcast Listeners

  • John hosts a short Weekly Q&A Session addressing any topic related to physician careers and leadership. Each discussion is now posted for you to review and apply. Sometimes all it takes is one insight to take you to the next level of your career. Check out the Weekly Q&A and join us for only $5.00 per month.
  • If you want access to dozens of lessons dedicated to nonclinical and unconventional clinical careers, you should join the Nonclinical Career Academy MemberClub. For a small monthly fee, you can access the Weekly Q&A Sessions AND as many lessons and courses as you wish. Click the link to check it out, and use the Coupon Code “FIRSTMONTHFIVE” to get your first month for only $5.00.
  • The 2024 Nonclinical Summit is over. But you can access all the fantastic lectures from our nationally recognized speakers, including Dr. Dike Drummond, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu, Dr. Gretchen Green, and Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Go to Nonclinical Summit and enter Coupon Code “30-OFF” for a $30 discount.

Dr. Woolcock Begins Doing IMEs

Dr. Woolcock founded businesses in Georgia, Florida, and Maryland. They include the Orthopedic and Joint Replacement Institute, the Accident Rehabilitation Center, and National Orthopedic Consultants. In 2016 she established the IME Academy. Through the Academy, she teaches students to perform defensible, literature-based independent medical examinations.

Emily is passionate about helping other physicians. So she helps them break free from the work/life balance issues she experienced early in her career. As a wife and mother, she understands the struggles physicians and other healthcare professionals face. 

When she first began experiencing burnout, she found that a skill she learned in residency could solve her problem. She began performing highly compensated independent medical exams. By doing IME consulting and delegating nonclinical work to team members she cut back on her office and operating room commitments.

How to Become an IME

Emily is a very creative and dedicated physician. She balances clinical work, performing IMEs, writing books, and mentoring dozens of young people. She is busy. Yet, she loves her work. And she is not burned out. 

This is the first time I had a guest with the expertise to explain how to become an IME. It is similar to what an expert witness does. But it also involves examining patients, which some of you might find more compelling as a side job.

Like expert witness work, learning to be an IME pays very well. You generally must continue to practice medicine, at least part-time.

Find out what makes you happy and learn to  integrate that with your vocational calling and you will be a much better, well-rounded person. – Dr. Emily Woolcock

Emily provided inspiration and valuable information. She knows this topic well. If you’re interested in learning to be an IME you can find her course at theimeacademy.com.

Summary

Dr. Emily Woolcock describes her inspirational story. She discovered a way to reduce her work time while producing more income by performing Independent Medical Examinations. In this interview, she explains how you can do the same and improve your work-life balance. 

Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Music Note: I have returned to my usual music for the podcast. But I am practicing more now. I hope to bring a new music clip to a future episode soon.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to, and that you’ll find in the show notes, are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you, that I have personally used or am very familiar with.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post How to Become an IME: A PNC Classic from 2021 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/how-to-become-an-ime/feed/ 0 29968 Make Your Clinical Practice Great or Move On https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-your-clinical-practice-great/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-your-clinical-practice-great/#respond Sun, 14 Apr 2024 02:29:44 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=25075 The Second Annual Summit is Here - 348 In today's episode, John provides an overview of this year's Summit designed to make your clinical practice great or move on to a better alternative. With a lineup of expert speakers and a comprehensive agenda, the Summit aims to equip attendees with actionable strategies for [...]

The post Make Your Clinical Practice Great or Move On appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]>

The Second Annual Summit is Here – 348

In today's episode, John provides an overview of this year's Summit designed to make your clinical practice great or move on to a better alternative.

With a lineup of expert speakers and a comprehensive agenda, the Summit aims to equip attendees with actionable strategies for improving job satisfaction and exploring nonclinical opportunities.

The second annual Nonclinical Career Summit runs this week. It’s not entirely nonclinical in its scope, however. We have several presentations about starting and running a cash-based private practice. It features twelve experts who share inspirational messages and valuable know-how live over three nights.

It's called Clinical Practice: Make It Great or Move On

And beyond building your cash-based practice, our speakers will show you how to create an asset that can be sold later. Other experts will discuss MedSpas, Infusion Lounges, and other cash-only businesses, using Real Estate to diversify your income and assets, and several nonclinical side gigs including Expert Witness and Medical-Legal Prelitigation Consulting, Medical Affairs Regulatory Consulting, and remote SSDI Application Reviewer.

To learn more check it out at nonclinicalcareersummit.com. Remember that there is NO cost to attend the live event. And if you can’t participate in the Summit, you can purchase the All Access Pass videos (only $39 until April 16, 2024, when the price increases to $79).

Our Episode Sponsor

Dr. Debra Blaine is a physician like many of you, and her greatest challenge was fear. The whole concept of leaving clinical medicine was terrifying. But she is so much happier now as a professional writer and a coach. According to Debra, “It’s like someone turned the oxygen back on.”

If fear is part of your struggle, too, she would like to help you push through those emotional barriers to go after the life you really want. Click this link to schedule a free chat.

Or check out her website at allthingswriting.com/resilience-coaching.

Trends in Addressing Physician Burnout

Physicians have faced increasing stress and burnout in recent years due to corporate employment structures in the healthcare industry. There are several basic approaches to preventing these common consequences of clinical practice.

  1. Aggressive Contract Negotiation: Physicians are placing a greater emphasis on negotiating employment contracts to safeguard against burnout inherent in corporate settings. While not discussed extensively in the summit, this strategy is crucial for those considering employment.
  2. Identifying Root Causes of Dissatisfaction: Physicians are focusing on identifying and addressing the underlying causes of dissatisfaction, whether it's related to the nature of their vocation, organizational policies, or interpersonal dynamics. Analyzing these factors allows for targeted solutions to alleviate stress and improve job satisfaction.

Highlights of the NonClinical Career Summit

The Nonclinical Career Summit starting on April 16th features a lineup of expert speakers covering various aspects of nonclinical career options for physicians. Here's a sneak peek at what attendees can expect:

  1. Speaker Sessions Overview: The Summit will host twelve live presentations, spanning topics from evaluating the need to leave clinical medicine to exploring diverse career paths outside traditional practice settings. Each session offers actionable insights and practical advice tailored to physicians and other clinicians seeking alternative career paths.
  2. Logistics and Registration Details: The Summit will run over three consecutive evenings, starting on April 16th, with sessions starting at 7 p.m. Eastern Time. Live attendance is free, but registration is required to access the sessions. Attendees can opt for the All Access Pass for $39, providing access to session recordings and bonuses.

Summary

This week's podcast previews the 2nd Annual Nonclinical Summit featuring 12 expert speakers addressing ways to create a clinical practice outside of the corporate style of healthcare and nonclinical career options. Attendees are encouraged to register early to secure their spot and gain access to valuable resources aimed at supporting career transitions and enhancing job satisfaction.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Episode 348 Transcript

Over the past few years, I've noticed that there is a backlash to the increasing stress and burnout in physicians resulting from employment by large corporations. It seems like the burnout's getting worse and it's related to being employed, losing their autonomy, and really working in that sort of healthcare industrial complex, seeing as many patients as you can in every hour. So in response to that, I think physicians have begun to implement various strategies to prevent or address the burnout, the stress, and the dissatisfaction that's coming.

So these are some of the four trends that I have seen. It's not everything, but I see these as something that's getting more and more common. So first is a bigger emphasis on aggressively negotiating employment contracts.

After all, if you understand that employment leads to dissatisfaction and burnout, and maybe if you've been through it once already, to some extent, you should be able to address the cause of that burnout by building safeguards into your contract. We won't be addressing that in this summit, but it is something I've noticed, and you can take a listen to my interview with Ethan Encana, who's an MBA slash JD, which was posted in February 13th of this year. So if you listen to that, we'll be talking a lot about trying to protect yourself from the things that cause your burnout in your contracts, if you decide to go with the employment route.

Now let's move on to the next one, which is more in keeping with what I want to talk about today. And that is a big thing that physicians are focusing on now, and people are teaching about is finding, identifying, and somehow preventing the root causes of your dissatisfaction and addressing it in new ways. So is it your vocation itself? Is it the practice of medicine? Or is it the organization you're working for and their policies and procedures? Maybe they don't staff properly.

Is it the boss that you report to that's causing your stress and anxiety? Sometimes a fierce conversation can solve the problem. Sometimes moving to a different clinic or hospital will work, but you need to spend the time really analyzing what's, what, what it is about the work that's making things worse. And is it something that you can resolve either in the current situation or at a future one? So that's something we don't talk a lot about on the podcast, although I have had one of our summit speakers, Dyke Drummond, on the podcast to talk about that, but that was several years ago.

Number three is the physicians are implementing new or updated practice models that put more control in the physician's hands. Things such as direct primary care, concierge medicine, and other forms of cash only medical businesses. And this can solve the problem in two ways.

Number one, a lot of times doing that requires you to be in your own practice. So you're starting your own business. So you're not working for someone.

Doesn't mean it's not busy. Doesn't mean it's not challenging, but now you have that autonomy and you're in control. And the other reason is that it's oftentimes the insurance companies, which are driving this whole approach to medicine, where you've got to see as many patients as possible, because they have certain schedules, payment schedules that are difficult to, you know, earn a living on.

And a lot of the drive to see a lot of patients is because of either Medicare and counting it worked RVUs or trying to see so many patients an hour. And that can be overcome by starting your own business and taking cash. And you figure it out in that setting.

Since you don't have to hire two or three people per physician to do the billing, you can cut costs in that way and you can generate income. So it's another thing that I see growing in the past two or three to five years, even. And then the other one is just finding a part-time job.

It's something you can do on the side because you can then either cut your clinical back to part-time also. And then you get to do two different types of jobs. One, a clinical, one, a non-clinical.

You can find, you know, you feel like you're seeing a little more variety of things. You have better hourly compensation sometimes with the non-clinical side, especially those we're going to be teaching at the summit. And again, if it involves starting something like either a practice that just doesn't bill insurance or a med spa or an infusion lounge or a weight loss clinic, you're still at the end of that able to sell it.

And that's a big asset that can really be a big chunk of your retirement and really builds to what I would call it through that process, some career diversity. The other thing that's nice about doing something like one of these side gigs or side jobs is that they can grow to be a little more part of your week as you retire from clinical, let's say, as you get older. The other is it's protecting you so that if your clinical job, which may depend on employment by a hospital or part of a group, that would be protected.

That gives you that leverage, that independence that you otherwise wouldn't have if someone decides to fire you. Okay. So that's why, because of those last three issues that I've been noticing, Tom and I both, that's why we're calling this year's summit clinical practice, make it great or move on.

So there are ways to improve your practice as it is, where it is, or ways to improve it by moving and doing other things. And there are ways to make it better by splitting it with another non-clinical career. And so that's what we're talking about at the summit this year.

And I think it's very apropos. And the tagline is recognize dysfunction, fix it and protect yourself or seek better opportunities. So you can see, as I go through what we're covering during the summit, it kind of brings all of those in and those kinds of terms will probably make better sense to you.

So let's get into the specifics of this year's summit. Last year, we were, just like last year's summit, we're holding it on three consecutive evenings, starting the day after this episode, day or two after this episode is released. I might be releasing it a little early to give people a chance to go through this before the summit actually starts.

And we're doing it that way in the evenings live to enable as many clinicians to attend the free event. So as many people can come for free, making it because we know that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday evenings are the best time. If we do it during the day or on a weekend, people usually cannot even come for one or two of the hours of presentations.

But by doing it in evenings and doing it live at night, people can carve out some time and maybe at least watch one or two or three of the sessions each night. Now it starts on April 16th at 7 p.m. Eastern time with four live presentations at the top of each hour. They'll end 50 minutes later, followed by a 10-minute break.

And each presentation includes a live Q&A during the last 10 or 15 minutes. It continues on Wednesday, April 17th and Thursday, April 18th, obviously each night starting again at 7 p.m. Eastern. We're holding it on a typical Zoom meeting platform that most of you are very familiar with.

Questions will be submitted using the chat. It could get a little bit confusing if you got a we're going to use the chat and either myself or Tom Davis will curate the questions. You know, sometimes we get two or three that are very much similar and we'll kind of bunch those together.

But that way we can spend 10 minutes at least getting, you know, answers to really the burning questions that come up during the presentation. I think I mentioned earlier, live attendance is absolutely free, but you have to register in advance to attend. That's the only way we can get you the link to attend.

So you just sign up on the link that I'll give you in a minute. And once you're registered, you can come and attend as many or as few sessions as you like. To save your spot, you're encouraged to register using the link that one of our speakers may have sent you.

You know, you might be watching this, but maybe you're already a student of Dr. Drummond's or Dr. Unachukwu or anybody that's helping us here, which I'll be going through in a minute. And you definitely can use their link and then they get credit. If it's easier or if you don't have any link from anybody else, then you should just go to nonclinicalcareersummit.com and you'll be given an option to sign up for the live free event.

And that's also the same link for purchasing the All Access Pass, because we understand that not everybody can attend all the live sessions. So we're making the recordings available for a very low price. That's just $39.

And given all the work that goes into putting this together, that's pretty darn reasonable. Now it does increase on the day that the summit starts. On Thursday morning, the price goes up to $79.

I'm sorry, not Thursday morning, on Tuesday morning, when the summit is starting later that day. But in the morning, it jumps to $79. That's on April 16th.

So if you want to get that really best price, you should sign up for the All Access Pass by Monday, April 15th. And again, it's $39. So you have to get that registration in by midnight on that date.

And again, it's also available at nonclinicalcareersummit.com or by using any speakers affiliate link if they're sending those out to you. All right, well, let's get into the details about the speakers and the lectures. Basically, like I said, we have four presentations per evening.

They're all live except one is being recorded ahead of time because the speaker is actually not available during the summit. But we didn't want to not include him in this thing. So let's just start with the first one.

And I'm going to say that these are not in the order in which they're being presented, but kind of in the order that they flow in my mind in terms of addressing the main thing we're trying to do for the summit. So for example, Dyke Drummond, Dr. Dyke Drummond, very well known. HappyMD is what he's known for.

He's got a podcast. He's been doing this a long time. He's coached thousands of physicians.

And he's going to be speaking on Tuesday night, the first night. And he's going to be answering this question. Do you really need to leave clinical medicine or is it just the job? And the official title, is it just a shit job or boss you want to escape? So really, it's not necessarily clinical medicine or clinical nursing or other clinical specialties that you're working in.

It's oftentimes other things that lead to the dissatisfaction and the burnout, the anxiety, things like that. So he's going to take that question head on. And how do you determine if this is really you should leave medicine or whether you should stick with it, but resolve the problem in a variety of ways.

And some of the ways he's going to talk about is just how you take control of what you're doing, listing the alternative practice models that might solve the problem. And if it is time to leave, let's put out that ideal job description process. So you can assess when you're going somewhere else, is it likely to be a better situation? So the next speaker I want to talk about is Mike Wu Ming, a very good friend of my podcast and myself, and he's written a book.

And he's going to build on what Dyke is telling us from the standpoint of what his experience has been with owning cash-based medical clinics. Okay, so it's still a practice. It's a medical clinic.

And he just describes sort of the mindset changes you have to go through to make this happen. He'll list the four or five financial levels of a physician, what that means, what it means to be a CEO, not only of your business, but of your life. He'll talk about ways to provide medical services outside the insurance industrial complex, if you want to call it that.

Let's see, he'll compare different types of cash-based medical clinics and where he sees future growth. All right, the third one, again, an expert on business in general, Dr. Una, Dr. Nneka Unachukwu. She goes by Dr. Una.

She has one or two podcasts. She's coaching a lot of physicians, and she's got many courses. And she's an expert and does a lot of speaking about creating a successful business.

In her case, I think is a good mix of people she's worked with who have created healthcare businesses, not necessarily a medical practice. Some have created different medical practices. And so she's going to talk about the business practices you must adopt to be successful, to get into a little bit about the importance of branding and marketing.

And again, she likes to focus, and I think she'll touch on this as well, how to build a practice or a business or both that has value and then eventually sell that business for cash out at the end, which again, I've mentioned earlier, is a great way to help segue into your retirement. And I've got just a hint of this because I'm currently in the process of helping my wife sell her own business, which she's been running for 15 years. And so we're going to just find out what it's worth at this point.

And it wasn't really something that we dwelled on up until the last couple of years. And I guess I'd mentioned now that if you do build a business of any sort, you should really always try to think of the eventual selling of that business because we all eventually go away. And even if it means turning it over to a partner in a medical practice, how does it happen? What's the value? Thinking about those things.

So those are the kinds of things that Dr. Una are going to be talking about. Then to kind of round that out and from another perspective, Joe McMenamin, who just was on my podcast, I think last week, but yeah, and he's going to be talking about corporate entities, meaning, you know, LLCs, corporations, things, how to create a legal situation for your business that makes it safe, protects you financially, keeps the tax concerns in mind. He's also going to touch a little bit on contract negotiations or starting a new business, other things to consider besides just the corporate structure.

And he'll be comparing those different legal entities that can help make your business successful. So the next is we're going to get even right into the nitty gritty of some of these cash-based businesses. See now a med spa, many physicians are familiar with, I wouldn't call that a medical practice.

And I don't think you need a license to run a med spa, although it helps if you're a medical director, if you're doing procedures that obviously are licensed and you have insurance for that. Now practice insurance, but she's going to talk about this. I believe she owned her med spa for 15 years.

She started it from the ground up. She grew it, she marketed it, she branded it and she sold it. And they happened not too long ago.

And she actually was able to segue into staying on as a part-time medical director. And so it really worked out well. She's very happy with how things went.

And again, I don't think she was thinking about the sale of it when she started it, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, but it worked out well for her. So she's going to share some of her experiences with that. Next two guests, our speakers are Jennifer Allen and Kimberly Lowe.

Now they're actually each doing an individual presentation because Jennifer is a physician and Kim is a nurse. They're going to discuss their particular experiences and reasons for going into starting an infusion lounge or an infusion center. And both of them will spend a little bit of time talking about what the heck is an infusion lounge.

And it turns out it can be a lot of different things. And let's see for Jennifer, she's going to be focusing too on the basic services they usually provide and how hers is different and who's sort of best qualified, or let's say has the best background and personality to do something like this. And a little bit about the first three steps, prepare to open your own infusion lounge if you decide to do that.

Now during Kim's session, and Jennifer's I think is on the first day, Kim's is on the third day. Again, she's going to tell you why she thinks it's a great investment and describe how the partnership model, you know, is working for them, for her in particular. She's going to hopefully mention some of the other businesses that nurses might be able to get into in healthcare that, you know, not everything is open to a nurse, you know, medical practice per se isn't.

But even in some places as an NP or an APN, you can do something like that. But she's going to talk about, you know, nurses and kind of side businesses that they might be doing that are similar to what she's doing. And she might end there with three mistakes that you should avoid when starting an infusion lounge.

Well, that brings us up to Paul Hercock. He's been on the podcast twice. He's from the UK.

And he created, well, he has a business that uses medical regulatory consultants or medical affairs, regulatory consultants to help meet the needs of the MDR regulations, medical device regulations in the UK and in the EU. Paul is a physician and he's been working in this field for a long time. And so he started hiring people to do this for him, for his business, which is called Mantra Systems, I believe, Mantra Systems.

And then because he was having difficulty finding people, he created a program to teach people how to become medical regulatory affairs consultants. So that's what he's talking about. And I think it's going to be very interesting.

You'll be working remotely for companies that are mostly in the UK and the EU, but you can work from the United States. In fact, we have a lot of people that contact me that are from the EU. You know, they maybe have traveled, they've immigrated to Europe and then they decided to come to the US and they may have a degree from somewhere in Europe, UK, France, you name it.

And there's no reason why they can't continue to do work back there remotely because things are just so easy to do in that way these days. And in fact, Paul told me that they often look to hire American physicians to do this because they have a lot more experience in dealing with the FDA. The MDR regulations are actually relatively new in Europe and the UK.

So that's going to be an interesting one. Very useful, very practical. Then Dr. Armin Feldman is going to come on.

He's been on the podcast a couple of times and he's going to tell us all about medical legal pre-litigation, pre-trial consulting. And I've discussed this before, but it's an awesome side hustle. Don't have to be licensed to do it, but you definitely have to have a medical background.

And he's going to explain exactly how that works, why there's a growing need for the service and how to get the necessary skills to do it. That brings us to Gretchen Green, who's pretty well known for teaching hundreds of physicians, how to become expert witness consultants. She's run her course nine or 10 times.

And so she's going to give us a quick overview of how to become an expert witness, how to build the business side of that, what to do, what not to do, what it entails. And so this is going to be really interesting and an overview for what she does. And then the last one is Tom Davis, known to many of you, I hope, as my past business partner in Newscript, which we've closed down back a few months ago.

But he's here helping with the summit. And he's been involved with companies that provide social security disability reviewers. And it's something that I didn't quite understand or wasn't well aware of.

I'm definitely aware of an independent medical examiner, but there are also other layers of the process of becoming, let's say, qualified for disability payments from social security. And it's a very niche area, but you can definitely get a remote position as a social security disability application reviewer. And it really piqued my interest.

I want to learn more about that. And so this is something that almost any physician can do. I believe they need to be licensed to start out, but I'm not sure you have to remain licensed.

And there are full-time jobs available as well as some part-time jobs, from what I hear. So I'm really interested in hearing Tom describe exactly what that entails and who's qualified and how we would apply for that. And then finally, did I say finally with Tom? There is one more, and it's kind of the icing on the cake.

And it's a little different, but we thought it would be nice to have Dr. Pranay Parikh talk about real estate and how it can make physicians' lives better. So we're not talking about becoming a full-time real estate investor or manager, but as I spoke about earlier, when you can build different sources of income, different sources of assets over time, then why not do that and add that to your portfolio of income streams? And so we thought, well, it's not a clinical type of thing. It's something many physicians are interested in.

So he is going to be talking about real estate. He spent, I don't know, the last five or 10 years in real estate. He actually has a real estate company that he's partnered with.

He's worked with others that you have heard of on the physician side of things. And there's so many different ways of investing in real estate. We thought, okay, Pranay, come on this summit and talk about how a side hustle in real estate can bring emotional and financial rewards, list the benefits and challenges of investing in real estate and describe, we're going to have him describe the three most popular approaches to investing in real estate.

That wraps it up. That covers the 12 lectures that we're bringing during the summit. I'm really looking forward to learning from all of our speakers.

They'll be sharing their wisdom. You'll be able to follow up with them later if you want to. Some of them are going to probably be promoting the summit with us.

Some of them are going to be providing their own bonuses. So if you are already following some of them or on their email list, watch out for their emails because they will be helping to promote it. So even if you're using the free version, if you register through them, you can get any bonus they might be providing as being part of this.

Our team is really excited to bring you this year's summit. We're doing our very best to bring you actionable advice that will help you to improve your current situation, establish your own practice or healthcare business, or create a lucrative side gig so that you can maintain your autonomy, improve your income and satisfaction and support your transition when you withdraw from clinical practice. So there's a lot of benefits to this year's summit.

Sign up for free right now or purchase your all access pass by going to nonclinicalcareersummit.com. The day that this is being released, the all action pass still only costs $39. And I think it'll be that way for another day or two. But if you're listening to this later, you'll have missed that $39.

So on Tuesday, April 16, the price will jump up to $79. Still a very reasonable price if you need to get the recordings. And then after that, when the summit's done, they'll actually jump up in price again.

But for right now, if you want to get in early, go to nonclinicalcareersummit.com. And to make things easier for you, instead of remembering that link, you can find the show notes and some other links by going to nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-your-clinical-practice-great.

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Many of the links that I refer you to are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so does not affect the price you are charged. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post Make Your Clinical Practice Great or Move On appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/make-your-clinical-practice-great/feed/ 0 25075 Expert Witness or Medical Legal Consulting: Which Should You Pursue? https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/expert-witness-or-medical-legal-consulting/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/expert-witness-or-medical-legal-consulting/#respond Tue, 28 Nov 2023 16:06:35 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=20920   Episode 328 In today's episode, John helps listeners to decide whether expert witness or medical legal consulting best aligns with your needs. From decoding the nuances of medical documentation to navigating the uncharted waters of depositions and court testimony, John shares a roadmap for physicians eager to diversify their careers. Our Show [...]

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Episode 328

In today's episode, John helps listeners to decide whether expert witness or medical legal consulting best aligns with your needs.

From decoding the nuances of medical documentation to navigating the uncharted waters of depositions and court testimony, John shares a roadmap for physicians eager to diversify their careers.

Our Show Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

Did you know that you can sponsor the Physician Nonclinical Careers Podcast? As a sponsor, you will reach thousands of physicians with each episode to sell your products and services or to build your following. For a modest fee, your message will be heard on the podcast and will continue to reach new listeners for years after it is released.  The message will also appear on the website with over 8,000 monthly visits and in our email newsletter and social media posts. To learn more, contact us at john.jurica.md@gmail.com and include SPONSOR in the Subject Line.

The Role of Physicians in Translation and Interpretation

John sheds light on the pivotal role physicians play in translating and interpreting complex medical concepts. He highlights instances where clinicians, whether employed or in a consulting role, act as bridges between the clinical and administrative realms.

Examples include positions in clinical documentation integrity (CDI), quality improvement, utilization management,  and informatics, where physicians serve as interpreters for those without a clinical background.

Nonclinical Career Paths: Expert Witness Consulting and Medical-Legal Consulting

Delving into nonclinical career options, John explores two distinct avenues—expert witness consulting and medical-legal consulting. He elaborates on the differences between the two, discussing the responsibilities, compensation, and prerequisites for each.

Expert witness consulting, involving legal testimony, is contrasted with medical-legal consulting, a role centered on reviewing, summarizing, and advising on cases without the necessity for courtroom appearances or depositions.

Both freelance consulting businesses offer the benefit of producing hourly revenues that exceed those of typical clinical activities. Yet, they can be done remotely, and with no risk of the kind of lawsuits that practicing physicians must endure. 

Summary

For those considering expert witness consulting, John suggests Dr. Gretchen Green's comprehensive course and SEAK, an organization that offers resources and directories for physicians learning to be expert witnesses. Dr. Armin Feldman's offerings cater to those interested in medical-legal consulting. Both courses cover essential aspects, from legalities to business setup.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 328

Expert Witness or Medical Legal Consulting: Which Should You Pursue?

John: I am doing this on my phone. I think the clarity will be a little bit less than usual. I did a dry run earlier and it was kind of breaking up a little bit, but we'll do our best today. I just want to spend 10 or 15 minutes talking about a particular topic that interest to me, and it's something I've noticed. And then I will talk about the generalities and then work my way into two different nonclinical careers that one might consider to do either as a side gig or full-time, although only one of them can be done as a full-time job.

I'm in Scottsdale, Arizona. I normally am in the Chicago area where I live most of my time, but my wife and I bought a small house out here and it's been getting renovated and we're just kind of out here to check on things. And so, that's part of the issue. But let me get started.

One of the things I've noticed when physicians or other clinicians, anybody's looking for a new position, a new job, particularly in healthcare, even if they decide to do some consulting or even if they're employed, that the jobs that open up for physicians and other clinicians involves either translating or interpreting things.

Because what you do is you start with your one foot in the healthcare medical world and then you obtain some expertise in another area that benefits physicians, benefits healthcare organizations. And then as an employee or as a consultant, you can be the person who can educate and interpret the language and the concepts that maybe are foreign to one side or the other, just like the CEO of a hospital doesn't really understand what a physician goes through for their education, training background and all that. It doesn't really understand how nurses and physicians and therapists interact with patients and kind of bond that we have.

And this is why we get in trouble sometimes because we're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole because the CEO is thinking in terms of the bottom line and finances and making things as productive as possible, and the physicians, nurses, therapists and others are thinking about, "How can I make this patient better? How can I help this patient understand what's going on?"

That comes up a lot and I'll give you some just simple examples. These are jobs I've always talked about in the healthcare field, in hospitals. Let's say clinical documentation improvement. That is a position as a physician advisor or medical director where you are explaining to your colleague physicians the rules and regulations around using the ICD-10 or the DRG system or whatever it may be. It's not really intuitive, it doesn't correlate directly with what we do clinically. In the CDI world, there's different levels. Usually three levels on the inpatient side for heart failure, for pneumonia and so forth. But they're all based on trying to figure out the complexity and then paying a higher amount for the more complex.

But it doesn't directly correlate with what we've learned as physicians and nurses in terms of treating those patients. And so, the physician advisor or medical directors interpreting and translating the concepts from one group to another. That's a great place to be. And there's a lot of jobs and they pay very well when you can find yourself in that important position of making that translation and making that connection and helping others get what they need. And at the same time, capture the true medical information.

Well, the same thing is true in informatics. A medical informaticist is translating to his or her colleagues. Concepts that need to be understood in terms of using an EMR or even beyond that, tracking data. And then it kind of extends into quality improvement where we have to maybe explain the statistical factors that are used in analyzing billing data to measure quality.

And again, it's not an easy to understand topic, but a quality medical director would spend a lot of their time explaining the p-values we use when we're looking at those statistical differences. And the reason why we feel that these comparisons between patients, between groups of patients, groups of physicians and their quality is really truly statistically significant and at the same time is risk adjusted, which is the big issue a lot of times in accepting quality improvement data.

Again, these are all interpretations and translations between these groups of people and get them to buy in and understand then learn how to do it better. UM it's the same thing. We don't think in terms of utilization management or benefits management when we're trying to take care of our patients, but if we do understand it better, then we can actually be more effective.

But one area where this comes up, which we don't normally think of as specifically this issue, but it is, and that's in any kind of consulting. And the type of consulting I am going to talk about today is legal. Medical legal types of consulting. And when I think about that as a nonclinical job, I think of maybe two sides of the same coin. Probably the most common areas where attorneys and physicians interact. And that is on one hand being an expert witness consultant or starting on expert witness consulting business, and what many of us now call medical-legal consulting.

Those are two really different ways of interfacing with the legal system as a healthcare provider. There are some opportunities in both of those for let's say a nurse or a physical therapist, something like that. Probably more opportunities for physicians. That's what I'm going to be speaking about for the next five minutes or so.

Let's compare those two types of consulting. Expert witnesses. Most of us understand what that means. Basically, we will provide services to an attorney and usually picking one side or the other in this case because it's usually because of a lawsuit that has been filed. And in this case it's often a medical liability lawsuit. And so, as an expert witness, you can be on the side of the patient who's accusing the physician of doing something wrong or missing something or failing to document something or failing to communicate. There's a whole lot of reasons why you can get sued.

And other expert witness consultants are going to be on the acute side, the physician side, explaining why the physician really did follow the standard of care. And that sometimes things just don't go well because it's the nature of medicine. We all die, we all get sick, we all have injuries that hopefully we treat properly and within the scope of practice and within the standard of care.

Now, an expert witness, number one, it's a very highly compensated physician. Let's say that you're going to be an expert witness for a family physician. Let's say you're a family physician. Now many expert witnesses, of course, are board certified, fellowship trained even in specific subspecialties, but there are a lot of internists, ER docs, family physicians who do expert witness consulting because you just have to talk to the standard of care, which most of us know very well because we work in it every day.

But it's very good pay. So, we'll start with that. Let's say I'm on a three star scale. I would say its three stars. Really as a family physician or an internist, if you take all the hours you work doing your medical records and everything into account, you'd be lucky to make $100 to $150 an hour. Because usually, let's say you're making $200,000 to $300,000 a year. If you're working 60 or 70 hours a week, that doesn't come up to that much. As an expert witness, you are going to be charging 2, 3, 4 times that amount on an hourly basis, and you get paid for every minute you spend doing that work unlike in clinical practice, which is why the numbers don't look so good.

That's one good thing about being an expert witness. However, most expert witnesses have to be in practice, active practice because they start to lose their credibility if they start to do that full-time. You can definitely cut back on your hours in clinical. And what I often talk about is spending, let's say you could easily drop 20 hours of clinical practice to do 10 hours of expert witness care or expert witness consulting and make equal to or more than you would've clinically. So, it is very well paid, and the more experience you get and the more time you've done it, then the better the pay gets and you can charge higher levels.

As an expert witness, you're doing three things. Basically you are reviewing charts and writing reports about your opinion. And then you might be attending a deposition and you might end up testifying in court. Now, most attorneys don't like to... Well, it's not that they don't like to go to court, but they prefer to have a settlement if they can. I think the patients prefer that. Oftentimes the physician prefers that or whoever else is being sued.

When you're involved as an expert witness, you're doing mostly chart review and report, and then you're doing a smaller percentage of depositions and then some go quite a while before they ever have to testify in court. But eventually it will probably happen if you do it long term. You obviously need to be licensed because you need to be in practice and you probably need to be board certified to do that.

Now, there's a different type of expert consulting called medical-legal consulting, specifically as a terms coined by Dr. Armin Feldman, who to some extent has actually created this specialty. And what's nice about medical-legal consulting is it still pays very well, probably double what you would make an hourly basis as a physician.

But it does not require testimony in court. It does not require even doing a deposition. And you're not acting as an expert witness. What you're doing is you're reviewing records here, organizing records, summarizing records, and then providing feedback to the attorney about whether the case should be pursued or not.

And these cases, which usually fall into this category are personal injury cases, workers' comp, automobile accidents, which is a type of personal injury. And so, you're putting what can sometimes be a very complex situation and in which an insurance company has refused payment or the insurance company of a business has refused payment. You've heard of these cases, you've probably been involved in these cases where one of your patients gets injured and it's sometimes hard to know for sure how much is organic, how much is secondary gain, are there ways to sort that out?

And so, Dr. Feldman came up with this pre-litigation medical-legal consulting where you as a physician will help to sort through that. And the thing about this is you don't necessarily have to be in active practice to do this. You just need to have a medical degree. It helps to be board certified in something. You don't necessarily have to maintain your maintenance of certification because when you're doing these reviews, you've narrowed your focus now down to injuries. And really you just need to know the basic physiology and the basic approach to evaluation and treatment. You can learn as you go and you can become an expert in this area with just a little bit of time and effort. And you're not worried about having this go to court. If one of these does go to court and you need a medical expert, then that will be an expert witness consult that will take care of them.

But as a physician, you can analyze, and again, some nurses do this as well looking at it from the nursing standpoint, but physicians are in a particularly good position to say that within a reasonable degree of medical certainty, either A, this is caused by the accident or isn't. B, what are some of the unrecognized illnesses?

And your main goal is to try to maximize the support and the payments to the patient. And if you look at it from that perspective, you're not trying to gain the system or take advantage of the insurance company or the employer. Usually workers' comp covers this obviously, but you're just trying to make sure that all those things that resulted from the accident, from whatever happened, are fairly compensated. And we've all seen patients who have what seemed to be a minor accident and then a year or two later they're still having problems.

They might have developed some long-term complication, what we used to call reflex sympathetic dystrophy, which is severely debilitating. And there have been many times where patients were not compensated and didn't receive the care they needed for something that was a delayed result of an injury like that. So, it's really an interesting area.

Again, it involves interpreting and advising and translating information and then putting things into a report. Both of these that I've talked about today are good ways to reduce your burnout, do something that you enjoy, apply all the medical knowledge that you have garnered over the years to a particular field. And in the case of expert witness, over time you can cut back your clinical time to 10 or 20 or less hours a week, do some expert witness consulting and make a better income than you would have burning both ends of the candle doing clinical work.

And in the medical-legal consulting, again, you could do that part-time, you could do it full-time and you can definitely make a lot of income without the stress of working in a high pressure corporate style environment.

Now I want to talk to you a little bit about some resources that we have available to us. And some of these I have promoted in the past. I'm not an affiliate for either of these experts I'm going to mention, but let me just tell you what I know here. If you're interested in becoming an expert witness, there are courses you can take to build the business standpoint how to do that legally and how to set up things as well as understanding how attorneys think, how they speak and being able to talk their language.

I've had Dr. Gretchen Green on my podcast two or three times, and she produces a very, very good expert witness course. I think it's completed over four or five weeks. It's rather intense. It has a lot of homework, it has a lot of supporting materials. Really she's been doing this now for three or four years and I've spoken with some of her graduates and they are definitely pleased with it. So, you can find that at theexpertresource.com/enroll if you want to learn specifically about that course. Because I think she has some other courses.

Now, there's also another resource for becoming an expert witness, which is SEAK. It's the same organization that puts on an annual nonclinical career meeting on a weekend in October. I think they're up to the 14th or 15th iteration of that. But one of the things they're also well known for is teaching physicians how to learn to be an expert witness. They have resources where you can get your name put in these directories that they then share with attorneys.

There's a lot out there about becoming an expert witness. And rather than struggle through it, you'd probably be best to take advantage of one of these resources. I think the SEAK resources mainly are on a CD or online, although I think they also have a live version of that. That's just something to think about as you can kind of morph your practice into half expert witness, half regular clinical practice.

Now on the other side, medical-legal consulting, Dr. Armin Feldman has his course. He does it in different ways. I actually took his course over a period of four or five weeks. There was a series of videos although he also sometimes does a live version of that. He also has a one year coaching program where he'll walk you through the entire process. I think it's a combination of videos and a lot of coaching from him to where you can have your practice set up.

This could be something for people that are in active practice, something where you're maybe semi-retired and there are definitely retired physicians who do this as well. As long as you stay current in this particular field, you can write wonderful reports, really help your attorneys to decide whether to move forward, whether to settle and you help get your attorney client's patients all the help they need for some long chronic result of an injury that occurred either through an auto accident or work related.

Dr. Feldman's website is mdbizcon.com. If you go there, there is a little intro where you'll learn more about it and they'll give you an opportunity to learn in a really quick fashion. Again, I took the course. I have, I don't know how many files that I've downloaded and went through multiple times. He walks you through, he shows you how to create letters to generate business. So you've got setting up the business, marketing, and so forth.

A lot of things Gretchen Green talks about in her course. It's pretty similar no matter what sort of side gig you're doing, you got usually involved in setting up an LLC and setting up your accounting and then doing marketing, creating all the fields, maybe setting up a website. And these are the kind of things that they both talk about in their respective courses.

The other thing that Armin has, which is really interesting, is he created a podcast which is designed for the attorneys themselves so that they understand how to work with a medical legal consultant and help them understand the lingo that we're using. And that podcast is called Physicians Helping Attorneys Helping People, although if you look up Physicians Helping Attorneys, you'll get to it. I think it's got at least 30 or 40 episodes now. It was just started about a year or so ago. I've listened to just about every episode. It's extremely interesting and very helpful and for no cost whatsoever you can really get an idea of what a medical-legal consultant does in this role.

I'm just looking at my notes here to see if I forgot anything. Nope, I think that's it. Remember that in a lot of your nonclinical jobs, you're going to end up being in the middle as a consultant who does interpretations and helps other people understand the other side of the equation of whatever it is you're talking about. And specifically the medical-legal has a lot of opportunities. And you might consider expert witness consulting or medical legal pre-litigation consulting.

All right, with that, I will close for today and I hope to see you next week.

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Disclaimers:

Many of the links that I refer you to are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

 
 

The post Expert Witness or Medical Legal Consulting: Which Should You Pursue? appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/expert-witness-or-medical-legal-consulting/feed/ 0 20920 5 Reasons to Consider a Healthcare Management Consulting Job – 302 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/healthcare-management-consulting/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/healthcare-management-consulting/#respond Tue, 30 May 2023 12:00:17 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=17557 Discover Healthcare Management Consulting In today's episode, John presents a career not previously highlighted: healthcare management consulting. John will focus on the role of employed physician consultants within the vast landscape of national and international healthcare consulting firms. These firms address hospitals' (and other healthcare organizations') needs and provide innovative solutions to tackle [...]

The post 5 Reasons to Consider a Healthcare Management Consulting Job – 302 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> Discover Healthcare Management Consulting

In today's episode, John presents a career not previously highlighted: healthcare management consulting.

John will focus on the role of employed physician consultants within the vast landscape of national and international healthcare consulting firms. These firms address hospitals' (and other healthcare organizations') needs and provide innovative solutions to tackle complex challenges.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

Job Advantages Uncovered

When it comes to healthcare management consulting, there is often a focus on independent consulting roles, but the realm of employed healthcare management consulting jobs holds its own unique advantages. In these positions, professionals have the opportunity to leverage their medical expertise and practical communication skills to offer valuable solutions and advice to healthcare organizations.

  1.  High demand for these services – so new consultants are constantly being recruited.
  2.  Jobs are available for experienced and novice physicians, even those without board certification.
  3.  The pay is good and the benefits are very good.
  4.  Opportunity for professional growth and development.
  5.  These roles offer exposure to diverse fields (start-ups, hospital management, pharma, practice management).

Industry-Leading Healthcare Management Consulting Firms

John provided a list of national and international healthcare management consulting firms that offer specialized services in these domains, including the demand for physician consultants within these teams in a list. But here are some of the larger consulting firms:

Summary

John sheds light on the lesser-explored field of healthcare management consulting jobs with prominent national and international firms. Drawing from his experience as a hospital CMO, he highlights the prevalence of consulting firms within healthcare organizations. And he notes that most of these firms employ physician consultants.

To further assist readers, he generously provides a complimentary downloadable list featuring 25 major healthcare management consulting firms.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 302

5 Reasons to Consider a Healthcare Management Consulting Job

John: Today before we get to our main topic, let me ask you a question. What do the following services all have in common? Coding and documentation integrity, health informatics, strategic planning, revenue cycle expertise, evaluating vendors. Let me add some more to those. New service lines. Operational efficiency, utilization review, and case management. Well, you may recognize that those are all very important topics. They're very important fields and expertise that will allow hospitals to perform well. You find those in other businesses as well, other parts of healthcare, but definitely hospitals.

Second thing is though there are national international healthcare management consulting firms that provide consulting services in those areas for hospitals and actually for other healthcare related businesses like large practices. And many of those consulting teams hire and employ physician consultants.

I've talked to you about physician consulting as like a small business. You can do expert witness consulting, you can help practices if you're an expert in marketing and promotion. But there's this whole other side of consulting where you are employed. So, that's what I'm going to talk about today, positions as an employed physician consultant.

The thing is, the physicians who do these jobs are employed by one of these typically large national or international healthcare management consulting companies. Sometimes I just call them management companies, sometimes just healthcare management companies. There's even the smaller kind of niche companies that will focus on one or two specific domains, but there are a lot of these firms. Actually later on today's episode, I'm going to list some of those for you. And I have at the end a downloadable resource with 25 of the largest and most well-known healthcare management firms. So, listen to the end and I'll tell you how you can get that.

But anyway, these consulting firms assist hospitals and other healthcare organizations in solving problems. The reason I'm kind of familiar with this, and in some ways very comfortable with and very familiar with it is because when I was a hospital chief medical officer, I interacted with a number of different firms that came in to help us. And it was interesting because we normally had 2, 3, 4 of these consulting firms in there helping us with something or another. At any given time you could come in and last year's firm is gone, and now we have a new problem and the new ones come in.

And so, I'll give you some examples. We had a firm come in and help us implement our first lean process improvement program. We did that for the laboratory. It was an inpatient laboratory, which also did outpatient labs. And that was an area where lean process improvement, which was adopted from Toyota, was first applied in healthcare. Now you see it all over the place. You also see Six Sigma. Sometimes they're connected or combined into a single kind of process improvement approach to the hospital environment and also other big healthcare firms outside the hospital. So, that was a big one.

When we were looking at selecting our first hospital-wide electronic health record, we had consultants come in and help us with that. When we decided to start an open heart program, which we didn't have at the time, we were a medium size community hospital. Most of the places we could send patients to that needed open heart were at least an hour away. We were a little bit isolated. So we decided at one point to start our own program, and we had a firm come in and help us plan that. So you can think about that.

Any new service line, it's likely you can hire some consulting firm to come in, help you do the groundwork and implement that program. Now you have to pay for that, obviously, but usually when you get these companies in, that allows you to implement a lot quicker because you're using a lot of expertise that they already have that you don't have.

When we were looking at selecting the best inpatient management quality tool that would integrate with our EHR sometimes we would have a firm come in and help us walk through that process. We had the same thing done by multiple consultants over a period of 10 or 15 years to help us with our CDI program, to help us look at the models we were using for utilization management and case management.

We had consultants come in and help us with our bond issue. Even as a medium size community hospital, yes, we could issue bonds and people would buy those bonds that would provide money for investments at the hospital. And now that was one that probably didn't have any physicians on the team since it was strictly kind of a banking and financial situation. But there's always something going on at the hospital.

When you're starting a new service line or a new program, like when hospitalist programs first came out, there were a lot of consultants helping with that. When observation units first came out. And now every time there's a new type of service line, I can guarantee you there's going to be a management consulting firm that can help you with that, and they're going to be physicians on that team generally.

It's a big area. And one of the things I wanted to talk about is really why you would consider a job on one of these teams and what of the advantages are? Because I really haven't spent any time on that particular topic, I don't think I've spoken with an employed management consultant on this program ever.

I ran into a physician who was working for McKinsey a few years back and talked to him about what he was doing, but he was not able to come on the podcast. I think at the time when I invited him, he was having some health issues. So, I never really found another guest. I'm just going to tackle this topic today. I'm not going to get into great depth, but I'll give you some resources and some advice and I'm going to start by talking about five benefits of this job, or what are the five good strong points that make this job attractive to physicians who are looking to get out of the grind of everyday clinical care.

Now the first thing I'm going to mention is most of these jobs are full-time. Most of them require a little bit of on-the-job training because they're going to utilize your expertise in medicine, your knowledge of healthcare, your knowledge of the system, particularly in the United States and what's specific to it. But it's like you already have some transferrable skills that can be applied. But let me tell you the five really interesting benefits of considering this job and landing a job like this that you might want to keep in mind as you're thinking about doing it.

First of all, there's a huge demand for these services. In other words, not just for the physician components, but there's always new things coming up in healthcare. A lot of it's been driven in the past by new regulations by the federal government. We are super highly regulated and every time there's a new rule, like when Medicare was putting in the new quality metrics and length of stay, penalties, and coding and documentation changes and when quality measures are implemented, it takes time to learn those things.

And you can do it on your own if you have enough expertise in-house, but a lot of times it's quicker, easier, obviously a little more expensive to hire a firm to help you do those things. So, there's always a high demand. These healthcare management consulting firms are very large, some of them billion dollar companies and they have different subgroups within them, different divisions, different departments that some address mainly the financials. Some address more of the quality, some address more of the informatics.

And then you also have the niche companies that really only focus on one or two of those areas. But someone might say, "Well, they do consulting for revenue cycle." Well, revenue cycle covers a lot of different things, and part of revenue cycle is directly related to coding, documentation utilization and so forth. Some of it's just financial in terms of accounts receivable and how to do billing better and so forth.

But there's always jobs there for physicians. Because of that, these things are changing constantly. There's always new types of consulting being developed to meet those demands. And so, there's always lots of new jobs. Partly it's because healthcare is complex and partly because federal government and other agencies are imposing new requirements for you to meet.

I think it's built in. They do that on purpose so they can pay you less, whether you're a hospital or a physician until you get caught up. And then once you master that, they add new rules to make it more difficult again. So it's not a great system, but there is a great demand for meeting the growing changes in the healthcare environment to get paid and to be able to remain in compliance with certain rules and regulations.

That's number one. Always a high demand for new things coming down the pike. Number two, consulting jobs for physicians in these companies include jobs for both seasoned, board certified, very experienced physicians. I've worked with them. And those that are fresh out of med school even that don't have residency. In fact, that consultant I talked about earlier, a few minutes ago, he told me that there are many times where they want the novice physicians, they just want the medical school education background, understanding of how to read articles and interpret research and quantitatively and qualitatively understand working with patients, but in some ways they don't want them to have bad habits that you can get in practice.

If you've been in practice for 20 or 30 years, you're going to have certain ways of doing things. You're going to be used to being in charge. And on a lot of these teams, they don't want you to be in charge. They want you to be a member of the team that can help to do your part, focus on your specific area, then work together with the rest of the members of the team, to provide the services that your client basically has arranged to get from the company.

Anyway, you can be at any stage in your career and you'll probably be able to find a company that's looking for a physician with your background, expertise and amount of education. The pay is good, it's competitive. If you go in straight out of medical school, of course, you're not going to make the same as someone with a longer history of employment. But the only way they're going to get a physician with 20 years of experience is to pay them a salary that makes a commensurate with that.

Now, the salary is what I tell people of course, always, is consider the time you're spending and the other aspects of work. You're not going to need liability insurance. All your expenses are paid. So you might want to compare let's say a $200,000 job in consulting and be equivalent to a $250,000 job clinical where you're actually working 60 hours a week and doing charts at night and being on call and so forth. So, always keep that in mind. But the pay and the benefits are really good.

There's a lot of room for advancement. So, that's the fourth issue. A lot of room for advancement. As you learn these new skills which I'm going to talk about in a second, you'll have the ability to move up and be a senior member of the team, more pay, more benefits, things like deferred compensation and more vacation, things like that.

And then that brings me to the fifth benefit of working for one of these companies is you will learn a lot of new, very useful transferable skills that will set you up to do things in other companies. It'll set you up to work and move to. Maybe you start a niche company and then you move up to a larger company where you can head a department or lead a division if you're talking about CDI or something like that.

But you'll learn how to do project management. You'll learn how to work on an interdisciplinary team other than a healthcare team where there's a different relationship. You might learn sales and marketing, you'll learn about finances. You'll probably learn something about human resources. These are all skills that would become very useful if you go to another company that does healthcare consulting.

If you go to hospital management or large group management or maybe a startup, these can be very valuable skills and attitudes that open up doors to the business world that wouldn't normally come from just say working as a clinician.

Those are five of the big benefits that I'm aware of. I think you should consider a job in one of these large firms. And what I would do to get started, if you're thinking about this, is just start to look at some of these firms. I'll mention some of the companies now that hire consultants and hire physicians to be consultants. IBM has all kinds of divisions doing consulting, and some of it's in healthcare consulting. The big names we usually hear are Accenture, Deloitte used to be Deloitte & Touche, McKinsey, Huron. Really there's at least 25 very large national and some of them are international.

And so, I have created a list of those firms. You can go to them, look at their websites, go to their career sections or career pages, start to look at the job descriptions, look at what the requirements are. Again, depending on the niche and the area that you're looking at. Some will require more experience than others. There isn't really any special degree that you would need. You don't have to have an MBA or an MHA. That's not necessarily going to help you. They've already got the finance people and the sales people.

Oh, that's another thing, maybe I mentioned. But sales and marketing you'll learn because a lot of times you'll be doing pitches. And so, that might come in handy for starting your own business or heading up a startup or something like that, or being on the board of a startup.

That's pretty much all I wanted to say today. I would say go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/healthcare-management-consulting. That's the blog post for today's episode. And then I'll have a link there to related content as well as a link to this free downloadable list of 25 national and international healthcare management consulting firms with links to both their main site and their career pages. And you can use that.

You can also look them up on LinkedIn and learn more that way, or search on LinkedIn for healthcare management companies or healthcare management consulting companies. Before I go, I want to let you know that we're running a promotion for access to the 2023 New Script Summit recordings. We finished the summit a month or so ago. We have 12 fantastic lectures with a live Q&A for 10 of those, actually 11. The other one was a recorded Q&A. They're really fantastic. There's a lot of information there. I don't expect you to buy it just based on this, but if you go to nonclinicalcareersummit.com you will get the page where you'll see that you can get all 12 of those lifetime access to those recordings for $249.

You can get a discount if you join NewScript. You can go to newscript.app. Join NewScript and there will be some promotions going on in the near future where NewScript members can get a discount 15% on that. But either way, if you want to just buy it directly, go to nonclinicalcareersummit.com and buy the all access pass for $249.

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Many of the links that I refer you to are affiliate links. That means that I receive a payment from the seller if you purchase the affiliate item using my link. Doing so has no effect on the price you are charged. And I only promote products and services that I believe are of high quality and will be useful to you.

The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post 5 Reasons to Consider a Healthcare Management Consulting Job – 302 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/healthcare-management-consulting/feed/ 0 17557 The 5 Most Popular Home Based and Remote Careers – 291 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/home-based-and-remote-careers/ https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/home-based-and-remote-careers/#respond Tue, 14 Mar 2023 13:30:54 +0000 https://nonclinicalphysicians.com/?p=12824 This List Keeps Growing In today's show, John will provide an in-depth overview of some of the popular home based and remote careers. There have been some significant developments in recent years. Multiple podcast guests have addressed remote careers and utilization management, in general, consulting, coaching, and so on. Our Sponsor We're proud [...]

The post The 5 Most Popular Home Based and Remote Careers – 291 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

]]> This List Keeps Growing

In today's show, John will provide an in-depth overview of some of the popular home based and remote careers.

There have been some significant developments in recent years. Multiple podcast guests have addressed remote careers and utilization management, in general, consulting, coaching, and so on.

Our Sponsor

We're proud to have the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program, offered by the Haslam College of Business, as the sponsor of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest-running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country. It has over 700 graduates. And, the program only takes one year to complete. 

By joining the UT Physician Executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to find a career that you love. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office at (865) 974-6526 or go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

Benefits of a Remote or Home Based Job

Being able to work remotely or from home has several benefits:

  • flexibility
  • convenience
  • lower costs for transportation
  • availability for family members

Categories of home based and remote careers:

  1. Chart reviews

    This includes utilization management, medical legal consultant, expert witness, clinical documentation improvement, and quality improvement.

  2. Medical writing

    There are several major categories of writing, namely: technical medical writing (CROs and pharma companies), medical communication (marketing agencies), continuing medical education and continuing education for other healthcare professions, patient education, and journalistic writing for clinicians or for the general public.

  3. Telemedicine

    This includes direct primary care services, specialty consults by expert physicians to other physicians, remote patient monitoring, remote imaging, and remote medical director services.

  4. Consulting

    The options here are to develop your own freelance consulting business or work for a large national or international consulting firm, much of which can be done from home.

  5. Coaching

    You can do one-on-one coaching and progress to group coaching remotely. You can work as an employee or as a freelancer.

Summary

There are both positive and negative aspects to working remotely. There is less structure with home based and remote careers, but with increased freedom and flexibility.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

EXCLUSIVE: Get a daily dose of inspiration, information, news, training opportunities, and amusing stories by CLICKING HERE.

Links for Today's Episode:

Download This Episode:

Right Click Here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 291

5 Most Popular Home Based and Remote Careers

John: These are the most popular home-based and remote careers. And this is going to be an overview. There have been some new things that have come up in the last few years, and that's why I wanted to revisit this topic. I've had several guests who have talked about remote careers and utilization management, generally, consulting, coaching, and some of the other things we're going to talk about today. But today I want to also go ahead and give a broader overview and maybe mention some types of jobs that we haven't really specifically talked about in the past.

Before I do that, I do want to talk about the benefits of a remote or a home-based job. They're pretty self-evident. I could skip this part, but just to remind you of the convenience, for example, with childcare. It doesn't mean that you can work at home and attend to an issue, or an emergency while you're working. But being at home and working from home remotely allows you if you have school-aged kids and they need a little bit of supervision, but pretty much have things to do on their own, you're available.

Especially, this is true when you have other members of your family who need care and you can't be gone for days and weeks at a time or gone 8, 9, 10, 12 hours a day when maybe your next-door neighbor happens it'd be your senior mother or father or down the street, somebody close by. And it's nice to have someone like you at home working, but available if there's an issue if there's a problem. And so, it's convenient in that sense also.

Then there are cost savings. If you don't have to pay for a car and gasoline insurance upkeep on the car and so forth, it's going to save you a significant amount of money. In fact, one of the best advice I've ever heard is for someone new starting their career, one of the things you can do to maintain balance in your finances is trying to find a job or move your home to within walking distance of that job. And you can avoid all that expense and get a little bit of exercise at the same time.

Obviously, it's more flexible. And the flexibility means, okay, in the middle of the day, maybe you can answer the door and accept the package. Maybe you can let in a contractor who has to spend an hour or two in your garage fixing something and then you go back to work. So, having someone at home, it just adds a lot more flexibility.

In one form of that flexibility is the ability to travel. We are calling it home based or remote careers, but it can be remote from anywhere. A couple of examples. Probably the most extreme example is Dr. Chelsea Turgeon, who I've interviewed here on the podcast before. And she's also a mentor for the upcoming summit that I mentioned earlier.

And basically for the last four years, she's lived in various international locations building and now serving her consulting business. She consults mostly with people in the United States, but she does live in the United States. I don't think she's lived in the United States in over four years. I believe most of her travel's been in Europe, also the Far East. She worked in Korea for a year teaching English. I think she's lived in Central and South America.

And she continues to travel. She was actually changing her location monthly and now she's settling down to a one-year position in another foreign country. But she's able to work and make a really good living remotely while she's traveling. We've heard about my colleague at NewScript who oftentimes does telemedicine while he's on the road, whether it's in the East or in the West Coast or Texas or Florida. And so, that's a really good benefit for these kinds of remote careers.

Okay, let's get into the options. Some of these are going to be reviewed I'm sure again because I've had guests in the past who have done some of these jobs and we've talked about them specifically. But again, since we're doing an overview, I want to try to include everything that might fall into this category.

Some form of chart review. That's kind of a generic term, but it does cover a lot of things. I'll get into the specifics, but let me go over the major five because I did say we're going to have five categories or five jobs today. And the reality is I'm going to be talking about a lot more than five jobs, but there are five general categories of jobs.

The first is chart reviews, and the second is some form of medical writing. Third is telemedicine and telehealth, fourth is consulting, and fifth is coaching. So, you've probably heard me talk about all those and I've addressed specifics, but there have been some new things that have come up. So I thought I would expand on each of these and tell you what kinds of jobs are in these major categories.

So let's start with chart reviews. Again, I was starting to talk about utilization management. We've talked about that a lot. There's more utilization management typically if you're working for an insurance company or a third party that's providing those benefits management. But it is reviewing records a lot of times, and then sometimes you'll actually have to pick the phone and call somebody or receive a call from someone who's appealing something.

You're in the comfort of your own home. My daughter is a social worker and she does utilization review for mental health, or she had before remotely. And so, she was at home checking these things, approving, disapproving, calling, and sometimes attending. The same thing that a physician would do in this position. Sometimes it doesn't require actually calling different types of utilization management jobs, benefits management, case management, and so forth. But sometimes it does.

Then we have disability workers comp, which is basically a subset of utilization management, but there are different rules and sometimes it's just an up or down call on whether someone qualifies for disability for a certain type of insurance or whether they qualify for workman's comp when it turns out the accident they were involved with occurred in a time when they weren't at work, or the nature of it is an illness, not so much an accident. And so, they're definitely jobs in that arena that are slightly different from the usual UM jobs.

Then we've got all the medical legal type expertise or the typical classic expert witness. That part of their job is just doing a chart review and providing an opinion. In some cases they have to do a deposition, but those are usually remote or online as well. In rare cases, they will have to testify in court. And even some of those situations were able to be done remotely, especially during the pandemic, although I think that's more 50-50 or less in terms of you might actually have to show up in court, maybe even travel if you're working on a case that's at distance from your home. But technically speaking, that is a remote job. It doesn't require an office. Usually it's part-time because most expert witnesses also continue to practice part-time.

And then there's the other version of that, another form of forensic medicine called medical legal consulting, which is also done from home. It involves usually worker's comp and personal injury. It's pre-litigation. It does not involve depositions or testifying in court. It's almost completely remote, although in some cases you'll want to interview the client of the attorney who you're serving, which will mean either a Zoom call or a possible face-to-face. And there are rare occasions when you might have to go into the attorney's office to meet with a patient.

And then if you're doing something called an IME - Independent or insurance medical exam rebuttal, you might need to actually attend the IME visit. So, it's 99% or 95 plus percent remote, but sometimes you might have to do those other types of activities for that particular type of legal witness.

Another type is clinical documentation. Couldn't do this in the past when we had all paper charts, but now that all of our charts are electronic, you can review that chart anywhere. And as a result, a lot of CDI, clinical documentation improvement, or clinical documentation integrity jobs are remote. You can work remotely for an insurance company. You can work remotely as an employee for a third-party CDI service company and you can be a solo consultant. You can work one-on-one as a freelancer doing CDI for one or two or multiple hospitals. So, that's another type of chart review.

And then there are some chart reviews that are mainly focused on quality improvement. I think some governmental agencies like Public Aid and Medicare will sometimes ask for quality improvement reviews for various reasons. A lot of state licensing boards will hire people to review charts for purposes of determining whether there is a quality issue with one of its licensed physicians in that state. And there are other opportunities like that. There are some chart reviews you can do remotely that don't involve a lot of interaction with other people. You don't have to show up. And so, keep that in mind.

All right, the next big category we mentioned is medical writer. I've talked a lot in the past about medical writing and medical writers. You can categorize these by either freelance or employed. In freelance, you're starting slowly. You're learning how to be a medical writer. You're contacting different editors and publishers, and you're starting to write, you're creating a portfolio and eventually, you're just writing after you develop these relationships with these companies, usually if you have four to six or seven publishers that you work with or less oftentimes. You can have a regular income, lot of stability, and you can get paid well because a lot of times you'll get paid let's say as a CME writer, the hourly rate might be less because you're creating let's say a new CME program or event. It could be an enduring material, which basically is something that's available online or on paper.

But when it comes time to renew those things, a lot of times the upgrade and the review and the editing are very minimal. And you can actually make more money per hour doing that because you were the original author, it makes it a lot easier to do that second and third time around.

You can do the same thing as an employee. And remember, there are five or six major categories of writing, everything from technical writing for a pharma company or medical device company or, for a CRO (contract research organization,) which works for the pharma companies. And you've got the technical, then you've got things like educational. You can do CME or CE for different clinicians. You can write educational for patient education, put together brochures, and other forms of education for patients that different organizations need to produce and customize over time.

Then you can do more journalistic type of writing for physicians and other clinicians. Updates on certain medical conditions. There are a lot of articles written about COVID, for example, during the pandemic and still to this day. And then there's also education for the public and journalistic writing and newspapers and magazines and health magazines and all kinds of things like that. And again, you can develop relationships as a freelancer or you can go work for those companies.

And then you can also find a job as an editor who is really oftentimes called the medical director, for lack of a better term I guess. And that means you could be doing the classic editing that you would do, overseeing someone else's writing, but you might also be part of the management process for reviewing and coordinating with the other writers at your company.

I had a guest who went from really full-time podiatrist and she happened to have some leadership positions at the podiatry association that she was a member of, and she had been hired in as an editor for one of the podiatry magazines that get sent to physicians to podiatrists. So, don't forget about those editorial-type jobs other than just the writing jobs.

All right, telemedicine. This is a big area, but I wanted to mention it because it's not nonclinical, it's obviously clinical, but it's non-traditional. We always talk about non-traditional remote jobs and home-based jobs. So you've got the classical type of telemedicine jobs. You can do those either freelance or as an employee, just like most of these jobs can be done.

And we usually push the freelance version of this because it has a lot more flexibility, and takes more upfront work. It's fairly straightforward to obtain a list of the top 10 telemedicine providers, maybe talk to your friends about the ones that seem to be the best to work for, apply, get a job, and then they just start sending you, and you agree to a certain schedule and you just start seeing patients online in various ways, which I'll talk about in the moment.

But the freelance type where you're independent, you work for multiple platforms, and you're not really constrained with other things that you can do, there's no non-compete when you're freelance, generally if you sign the right kind of contract. So, being employed is fine, it's a good way to get your foot in the door. But as colleagues and NewScript mentors like Dr. Cherisa Sandrow have taught us and actually teaches others to do, the freelance form of this is usually much more lucrative. You can often work 20 or 30 hours a week and make a full-time salary. So, that's what we usually recommend.

Now the freelance form of that is being a primary care physician and doing one-on-one short visits, much like you would do in urgent care, not actually face-to-face, but remotely. That's probably the most common and the most lucrative. But there are other things that you can do. You can be involved in remote patient monitoring. RPM - Remote patient monitoring. Usually, the actual monitoring would be done by another type of clinician, a nurse, or a technician technologist. But a lot of times with the RPM, they'll need medical directors and need physicians to supervise and to create protocols and things like that.

So, keep your eyes open for remote patient monitoring companies that are growing. There aren't a lot of them, they're not that active, but I'm sure they will be more and more active over time. If you're a radiologist, you can do remote imaging. That actually was one of the earliest forms of telemedicine.

I've had a guest that came from Doctors For Providers. Actually two guests, the two co-owners. And this is a way to provide remote supervision. So, I'm including this as a form of telemedicine. I don't know if technically it is, but there are urgent care centers that employ PAs and NPs. There are independent APNs in certain states who have their own clinics. There are some legal constraints here. And buyer beware, make sure that your malpractice is covered completely and that you're not getting into a high-risk situation.

But there are many physicians currently doing remote monitoring, and collaboration supervision. They might be doing chart reviews to help with the quality improvement for the staff at the remote site, and they never set foot on the site, and they can do this even while they're working another job. Because as long as you can break away and do some collaboration and consultation, and also if you're doing chart reviews or doing reviews protocols, those are all done on unscheduled time at your own pace.

I would just remind everyone that telehealth is a huge field and there's a lot more to it than just face-to-face visits. The remote consultations also include specialists consulting with primaries, so they're not actually seeing the patient, but they're communicating with you as a primary if that's what you're doing to help you address a problem. And then obviously they can do remote consultations with patients as well, but sometimes I prefer just to work with the physicians rather than the patients in some situations.

Okay, now we've used the term consulting, but this time I'm going to focus specifically on the classical form of consulting, which again is either freelance or employed. Now, I threw boutique in here too because that's a term that's thrown around. But basically, the freelance is a one-person shop. Most of the time you have an area that you're an expert in, that you're passionate about. It could be inside the bubble of a medicine, inside direct patient care or it could be outside. Maybe you are an expert at marketing your practice. And so, you develop some courses, some consultation, and you can do these things remotely to help other practices do their marketing in an efficient and effective way.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have these national and international healthcare consulting firms. Places you may have heard like IBM has a large component, $50 billion-plus per year. Accenture, Deloitte, McKenzie, Ernst & Young, Huron. I've lifted these here. There are at least 40 more that do consulting to hospitals and health systems and large groups and telemedicine companies and other consulting firms and other delivery firms in healthcare and pharma and you name it.

I put the boutique in because you could start out as free freelance and then if you're doing that, let's say that marketing, you might end up hiring a copywriter part-time. You might end up hiring a social media expert. You might end up hiring an email expert. And then you're doing the basic marketing. And so, now you've developed a small free-standing consulting firm, which from the hospital side, health system side that I was involved with. And we would decide, do we want to get one of these huge international or national firms, or we want to find a boutique firm that has a smaller crew, but they're more focused on a very specific problem. So, that's another great remote and home based career. When you're doing freelance, it's probably more remote and more home based. When you work for a large firm, sometimes you do have an office to go to from time to time, and you do travel quite a bit. So, it might only be partially home based.

And the last category that I want to talk about today is coaching. 10 years ago, I think we were not aware that there were that many physician coaches around and there were some people who have been coaches for a long time, physicians coaching other physicians that are quite iconic. I won't mention any names, but nowadays there are literally thousands of physicians who are doing coaching.

There's a fuzzy line between coaching and consulting. But when we talk about coaching, we're talking about mostly starting with one-on-one coaching. It can be life coaching, it can be career coaching. There are at least 10 types of coaching, and there are probably more that I haven't even seen or heard about in the past.

But business coaching, professional coaching, and then even what you do as a consultant in a way is a form of coaching. But I've even seen yoga coaches in our physicians, meditation coaches, and success coaches. I've interviewed many coaches, and several of the coaches, in fact, at the summit that's coming up in April about seven or eight of the people that are presenting their formal job as coaching and training other people to do things that they've done and that they're experts. So we have a telemedicine coach and we have a locums coach and we have a pharma coach and so forth.

I won't get into the names right now, but suffice it to say it's a very popular type of job and it's one where you become an expert in something and you're just going to do one-on-one and help to train them. You can be employed. There are firms that employ physician coaches and that takes away some of the risks of building a business.

Most coaches that I know are either freelance or run some kind of a coaching business, and they may actually recruit other coaches, although they may not truly employ them. They might be more of a 1099-type relationship. So, technically, they're even sort of semi-freelance, although they have that relationship and they get some of their clients from this coaching company, they both exist.

And sometimes being employed first, as long as you don't have some kind of an exclusive contract that goes beyond a year or so, then you can move from employed to freelance if you want to do that.

Most coaching starts out as one-to-one. It oftentimes moves into group coaching. I've interviewed several successful very busy coaches, whether it's Heather Fork or Katrina Ubell who coaches for weight loss, or you name it, people that coach for doing real estate and coaches for starting a practice, coaches for being a medical legal consultant or for being an expert witness. There are all kinds of coaches and there's a blurry wall between coaching and consulting.

That's really what I wanted to do today. I've probably described at least 30 or 40 jobs depending on how you want to break it down.

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