On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, John runs through the most popular home based careers for physicians.  He starts by explaining why home based careers are so attractive.

Then he describes the benefits and challenges of each one.

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.

Why Work from Home?

There are three main benefits to choosing a home-based career:

1. Convenience

When you work from home, you’re able to handle household responsibilities. Navigating childcare or adult caretaking responsibilities may make this type of career necessary.

2. Cost Savings

Eliminating your commute means you’ll save time, and reduce gasoline and auto maintenance costs, saving you thousands of dollars each year. And the time not spent commuting can be spent working and enhancing your income.

3. Flexibility

Home based careers offer the most flexibility. Though some require working 8-hour days, most will allow you to choose your hours. And you might be able to work from anywhere in the world, even while traveling. Or at odd hours, if you prefer.

Popular Home-based Careers

Here are the factors to consider when seeking one of these popular home based careers:

• Chart Review: Performing chart reviews can be done for utilization management, disability and worker’s compensation assessments, expert witness consulting, clinical documentation, and quality improvement. You can work anywhere that has access to the Internet and phone service. Some jobs require work during regular business hours.
• Medical writing: As a freelancer, you must set up your own business, and find work, initially. But once you develop relationships with several editors, you should be able to generate regular income, working from anywhere in the world. You must have the self-discipline to meet regular deadlines.
• Telemedicine: This is an especially flexible career. You must ensure that you are working with a reputable company. You can start by supplementing your income by moonlighting. And you need to take the necessary steps to manage your liability exposure. You can boost your income by working when other physicians are not working, such as during weekends and holidays.
• Consulting: If you're a consultant working from home, you will likely be freelancing, rather than working for a large consulting firm. You may have to do some traveling and speaking to build your authority and market yourself. But once you get started, most of your business can be done from home.
• Coaching: Coaching is similar to consulting. But the term is usually used with life, health, wellness, and business coaching of individuals or small groups. It can be face-to-face, but remote coaching is much more common. You must choose a coaching field based on your personal expertise, or obtain formal training, and possibly certification.

Summary

Home based careers offer a great deal of flexibility. There are several attractive options to consider. The income levels might start out at the lower end of a clinical salary. But busy coaches, consultants, writers, chart reviewers, and telemedicine providers will experience improving revenues as they streamline their businesses and increase their customer or patient base. 

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The post Popular Home Based Careers You Will Love – A PNC Classic from 2020 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Interview with Dr. Jonathan Vitale – 345

In today's episode, we present Dr. Jonathan Vitale's inspirational masterclass on securing your first utilization management job from the 2023 Nonclinical Career Summit.

Dr. Vitale shares his journey, emphasizing the appeal of UM's remote nature, stable hours, and reduced stress compared to traditional clinical practice.

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, go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/sponsorships OR contact us at john@nonclinicalphysicians.com (include SPONSOR in the Subject Line).

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.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale's First Utilization Management Job

Dr. Vitale shares his journey from traditional family medicine to becoming a manager of utilization management physicians, highlighting the pivotal moments in this nonclinical career path. He discusses how his early exposure to utilization management, driven by family experiences with insurance rejections, sparked his curiosity and ultimately guided his transition from clinical practice to a leadership role in UM.

Through anecdotes and reflections on his career trajectory, Dr. Vitale provides a compelling narrative that inspires physicians to explore alternative paths.

Navigating Utilization Management: Roles, Compensation, and Application Process

Delving into utilization management (UM) careers, Jonathan provides a comprehensive overview of its definition, functions, and significance within healthcare organizations. He lists the primary goals of UM, emphasizing its role in ensuring the appropriateness, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of healthcare services while minimizing potential harm to patients.

By delineating the three main categories of UM companies and elucidating the key responsibilities associated with each, Dr. Vitale equips aspiring UM professionals with a foundational understanding essential for navigating this dynamic field.

Jonathan's Advice on Overcoming Fear of Rejection

Apply, apply, apply. The clients that I work with, one of the biggest hurdles we have to get over is they fear rejection so much. I say, ‘My gosh, I was rejected hundreds of times. I didn't even get to rejected status. I was just ghosted. My application would just go into the big dark oasis and nothing ever happened.' And I just got over it. And after a while I started celebrating rejections because every rejection is one step closer to an acceptance.

Summary

In his insightful discussion, Dr. Jonathan Vitale shared his journey from family medicine to managing UM physicians, highlighting the appeal of remote work, balanced hours, and reduced stress in UM roles. Dr. Vitale also offered practical advice on gaining UM experience, building CVs, and navigating the application process.

You can contact him through his email drjonathan@drjonathan.com, or check his website drjonathan.com. He also encouraged joining the supportive community of Remote Careers for Physicians on Facebook.

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:

• Dr. Jonathan Vitale's Website
• Remote Careers for Physicians on Facebook
• Reserve Your Free Spot at the 2024 Nonclinical Career Summit
• Dr. Debra Blaine's Coaching Services

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

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 345

How to Secure Your First Utilization Management Job

- Presentation by Dr. Jonathan Vitale

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: I'm going to talk about myself a little bit and how I got to what I do today, and then I'm going to talk about what is UM or utilization management. I'll talk about the types of UM, the day-to-day of a UM doctor, then the compensation, which everybody is very interested in, the application process, how to get experience so that you can apply, how to build your CV, how to get appropriate coaching if you need that. And then I'm happy to answer any questions.

Again, I'm Dr. Jonathan Vitale. I am a board certified family physician. I had a pretty traditional journey to being a family physician, and today I'm a manager of utilization management physicians at one of the top health insurance companies in the country.

I'll tell you a little bit about my journey and how I got there. I had a pretty typical path to becoming a family doctor, except I picked up a master's in counseling before medical school. And after medical school I did residency in Chicago and family medicine, and then I moved to New York City where I live now for my first attending job at kind of a concierge clinic that I thought I would enjoy because I really did not like the traditional doctor's schedule, the traditional working nights and weekends, working a lot.

And after doing that for really just a few years, I decided that I needed to transition. I was very fortunate and one of the very fortunate people to have heard about UM very early on. I actually knew about it when I was in high school because my brother has type one diabetes, and my parents would always be getting rejections from the insurance companies. And I always wondered why, and I would ask my mother, and she would tell me that they had doctors working at insurance companies making decisions.

I'm one of the very lucky people who knew about UM, and was intrigued by it very early on, although that's probably only about 1% of UM docs who knew what it was before they became burnt out.

But another thing I wanted to say is welcome to everybody to this amazing community. The community of nonclinical, or as I call us non-traditional physicians. It is a very, very warm community. It's a very welcoming community, and it's a community of people who really want to help you transition into a job that you love.

What I've kind of came to the realization of early in my medical career was that doctors in general, from day one of saying you're a pre-med, day one of deciding your pre-med, you are overworked, you are underappreciated, you are underpaid. And that continues for the 10 or 15 years it takes you from day one of pre-med to becoming an attending. And I think that what happens is a lot of people just become very used to being treated that way. That's why so many doctors do so much extra work for free. Name another profession where you work extra hours and aren't paid for it, or you're doing your charts at night, not paid for it, or on weekends not paid for it or taking call nights and weekends, not paid for it.

And I never understood that, and it always bothered me immensely because I think physicians are amazing. We have so much to offer and we should be fairly compensated and respected for that. And that was one of the things that got me into wanting to transition. And also my background as a counselor is really what got me interested in and after I got there coaching other physicians on how they too can get there.

What I do today in addition to my utilization management job is I also coach physicians. Specifically I help people get remote careers, mostly in UM, but I do know about other fields as well. You can always reach me at drjonathan.com or email me at drjonathan@drjonathan.com, or please, as John mentioned, join our Facebook group of Remote Careers for Physicians, which is a wonderful community of physicians helping out physicians who are interested in remote careers.

I always joke that I was into remote careers before being in a remote career was cool. I started that remote careers Facebook group in 2018, and since the pandemic, it's exploded. Nowadays everybody wants a remote career, it seems like, and I think it's as best of a time as any to transition into this field. But I'm especially going to be talking about tonight utilization management.

So, what is utilization management? It's also called utilization review. But for tonight, we're going to call it UM or utilization management. The best definition I could find is it's a systematic approach used by healthcare organizations, insurance companies, and other stakeholders to evaluate and manage the appropriateness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of healthcare services.

The primary goal of UM is to ensure that patients receive the right care at the right time in the right setting, while minimizing unnecessary treatment costs and potential harm. Another way I think about it is we reduce fraud, waste, and abuse. Probably mostly waste. Probably 80% of what we deal with are waste, wasteful orders, or wasteful requests, et cetera, which we'll talk more about later.

There's really three main buckets of UM companies, and I always like to be very general about how I describe this. And then we'll move down into some specifics. There's private UM companies. These are those third party companies that I always talk about, which are good companies to try to get experience with. Those are superfluous. Many of them are listed in nairo.org, which we'll talk about later. Then there's healthcare systems or hospital systems, which also hire UM nurses and UM doctors.

And then probably the most common for full-time docs would be insurance companies. Insurance companies also hire their own UM nurses, their own UM doctors, their own UM physical therapists, pharmacists, et cetera. And these are the big names you've all heard of. This is your Aetnas, your Humanas, your Uniteds, your Anthems, your Kaisers. They all hire their own UM clinicians to work for them.

And what you do in UM is usually one of three things. There's prior authorizations. Everybody has heard about a prior auth. Everybody knows what a prior auth is. There's certainly a lot of attention in the news nowadays around prior auths and reducing the paperwork associated with prior authorizations. But there's a lot of UM that goes along with that.

A physician orders a test, a study, a medication, a home health service, which I'm involved with. And the prior auth physician determines whether or not that meets certain criteria, and most importantly, whether or not it is medically necessary. That's prior auth. And there's also concurrent reviews. This is very common in the hospital setting. When we're talking about bed days and how long a patient can stay in a hospital, how is this patient doing day to day? They're checking in to see if they can extend and give them more days or if they're suitable to go home or go to rehab or go to a different level of care. That's called concurrent reviews.

And then the final one is probably the smallest, and those are retrospective reviews. Those are done when the service has already been provided, already been rendered, and now they're reviewing it on the backend to see if it was medically necessary and if it fit the guidelines.

The reason why a lot of people go into UM is really primarily I would say what attracts people is the lifestyle, meaning it's typically remote. It's typically 40 hours a week when you're in a full-time gig. It's a typically salaried position. Typically, not always. Also, you have very low liability. Basically, you're not practicing medicine. You don't need malpractice insurance, you carry errors in emissions insurance. It's interesting work. It's a very comfortable pace and you're not patient facing. It's a much lower, lower stress job. And you have typically, generally speaking, nights and weekends off and holidays off.

In terms of compensation, and this is a very hot topic. I'm asked this all the time. There's really not good national average data. I will tell you what I see because I look at hundreds of positions for UM all the time. And I would say there's a very big range. I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but generally if you're a full-time UM physician and you're in one of the primary care areas, you're typically talking about the lower to mid $200,000 range as a W2 base salary. I've seen it all the way up to $300,000, maybe a little bit more for people like an oncologist or people with very, very high demand skills.

But keep in mind, in addition to that, first of all, that's 40 hours a week, but in addition to that base salary, we're also talking about merit increases, which typically happen every year on the order of usually around 2% to 3%, but it can be more than that. In addition to that, you're talking about quarterly or annual bonuses, and you're also talking about usually a stock gift if you work at a large insurance company as I do.

There's a lot of additional compensation that's also very attractive. So, always keep that in mind. I always like people to keep that in mind when they're saying, "Hey, but I make all so much more money than that." I say, "Yeah, but you probably work 80 hours a week and are a hundred times more stressed." So, keep that in mind.

Some other things I wanted to talk about is basically the process of what your typical day looks like when you're doing most UM. And I'm going to talk about full-time jobs, and then we'll talk about the gigs. The full-time jobs, which are kind of the cream of the crop of UM, which are those very, very highly desired 40 hour a week full-time jobs, which are very competitive, is you typically have a set number of cases that you're reviewing per day. You're not chained to your desk. It's not like it is in most clinical practices where every second of your time is scheduled and monitored and you need to be patient facing in order to bill. No, you typically have a set number of cases that you're attempting to get through. Sometimes there's peer-to-peers involved as well. And sometimes you have a few meetings and things like that when you're at the basic medical director level. Medical director is entry level for utilization management.

And then there are also opportunities to grow, kind of like Marie was talking about at MSL. There's some opportunities to grow into more of a team lead and manage a team. And then there's opportunities for being a manager and managing a larger team, which that's what I do. I manage a large team of UM physicians and I also hire them and interview them.

And then there is also the opportunity to branch out into other fields in health insurance companies, which other people are talking about in their lectures tonight. I won't get too much into that.

Something I do want to talk about is some of the other gigs in utilization management. There are small companies, usually these third party companies that exist and they do certain reviews. They may be doing reviews for a certain procedure, they may be doing reviews for a certain medication. And what they'll do is they'll have a panel of doctors of 1099 or independent contractor physicians who they will reach out to and say, "Hey, we have this request for this medication. Can you review it for us? And we'll pay you X number of dollars." It's usually very low, by the way. It's usually like $20, $30. And those companies exist and they are superfluous.

And a lot of physicians look at that and say, "I'm not doing that." And I say, "You don't understand. You have to do that. You do that to get experience. You don't do that to make money. You do it as a side gig while you're still in your other clinical job so that you can get some experience under your belt in doing UM so that you can put that on your CV." And that's why you do those roles for six to 12 months so that you can actually have some experience to talk about when you apply for those big full-time positions.

Now, how do you get these gigs? It's pretty simple. I talk about it all the time on Remote Careers. You just go to nairo.org, the National Association of Independent Review Organization. You click on members, again, you don't become a member, you click on members and you scroll all the way down and it lists the logos of 20 or 30 of these companies.

You go to every one of those individual company websites and you navigate the website and you click on apply to be on the physician panel, and you submit your CV to every one of them. And I guarantee you, at least two or three of them will contact you within the week and put you on their panel. And that means you are now getting UM experience. That's a great way to get you UM experience. Yes, it does take a lot of time to sign up for all of them. I never said it would be easy. And it's a great way to get your first step in the door.

I always say this. My specialty is helping doctors who have no other experience, no outside experience. Normal, average doctors. I guess no doctor is average. We're all awesome. But I would say regular doctors into the world of UM who have no prior or outside experience. No connections, nothing else. That's what I help people to do because that's how I got involved.

After you have that, the next thing that you need to do after you've done that for six or 12 months, that's when you're able to actually apply to these full-time UM gigs that most people want. Like every other non-traditional job, especially nowadays, it is very competitive. However, what I can say, and I think this is really, really important, that it's not that it's super, super competitive, which it is, but it's more so the fact that doctors are used to it being ridiculously easy to get a job. If you're a regular traditional outpatient family doctor, been working at your clinic for 10 years, and now you want to move to a different city next week, and you want a job there, all you have to do is send out an email with your CV to a couple people, and you'll probably get a hundred job offers the same week.

That's how it is for clinical doctors. We're very spoiled. But that is not how it is when you make the transition. And that's something that you really have to psychologically get behind and understand that for many people it's going to take a year, sometimes two years, to actually make that transition to get enough applications in to get rejected enough. As you always hear me on Facebook, for those who follow me, I always say to people, you haven't been rejected enough yet. That's your main problem. It takes a lot of rejection, a lot of getting ghosted before you get your position. But you will get there. Don't worry, you will get there. It's just a process.

The thing that you also want to do is you want to work on your CV, and there's lots of coaches to help you with this. I'm one of them, but there's certainly many other coaches who can help you with this, many of whom you're hearing about these past three nights. And you also want to work very hard on your interview skills, and coaches can help you with that. I can certainly help as can all the other coaches.

And what you want to do is you want to make it your job to every day apply and send in your CV to openings for utilization management. These are typically listed. I like to keep things simple. They're typically listed on Indeed, on LinkedIn and also on the private insurance company's websites.

What I encourage people to do who are interested in a life of UM is every single day, it only probably takes about an hour out of your day, you want to be visiting every one of those websites, and you want to be searching, you want to save this in search, you want to be searching for medical director utilization review, utilization management, utilization review, physician, physician reviewer, MD reviewer. All those synonymous terms that a lot of companies use. And then you want to be looking for those positions and you want to be submitting your CV.

Yes, absolutely. Networking is great. If you can do that, if you have any contacts, if you network through LinkedIn, if you network through one of these conferences through a SEEK conference for anything like that, that's wonderful. But what I can tell you is that in the UM world, things move very quickly and that works both in your favor and against your favor.

Let me be more specific about timing. I always talk about when I first got into UM about how I applied for a year and got rejected probably over a thousand times. At least hundreds and hundreds of times I was rejected or ghosted. And what I've learned now that I'm a hiring manager for UM is that timing is everything.

Let me be more specific on that. Many times these UM companies, especially the insurance companies, which are the largest employer of UM docs, are always trying to get more business. They're always trying to get more contracts. They're always trying to expand their geography. They're always trying to do UM for another network, for another geographic location. They have business folks who that's all they do is try to broaden their business.

And as you guys know, anybody who's worked in business, business is a tough field. Things move very fast and sometimes very unexpected. You can literally be at a job or I can literally be in a position and I can literally hear one day, "Hey, you know what? We finally got that contract we've been after for eight months or 12 months. Now we have a need for five other doctors on your team, as we call them FTEs, full-time equivalents, five FTEs on your team. And you need to get them up and trained and ready to go as soon as humanly possible because we're going to start getting UM cases from that network in three months. And we got to be ready to go."

This is the kind of thing that happens. So, what am I doing? We're posting it on our website. And the first good CV I get who is board certified, who's got some decent experience, I am scheduling them for an interview. But let me tell you what though. That same candidate, if they applied two weeks before, they probably would've gotten either ghosted or rejected. Again, I don't write the rules, ladies and gentlemen, I'm just telling you what they are.

The HR oasis for these big companies is don't assume that they're going to put your CV on hold. Don't assume that every job listed currently is available. That's another one. Don't assume that you're going to even hear back. That's why my best advice is it's a numbers game. When the new positions come up, is why you have to be checking every single day. You need to be applying for that new position, because that happens all the time in UM. And which is good news for people like us, because it means there are definitely jobs that open up and that need good folks.

But the flip side of that though is let's say that you have 20 years of UM experience, 20 years of clinical experience, and you're the most competent UM doc in the world, and you reach out to me and send me your CV today. I'd say "I can't do anything with this but thank you." Because we don't have any openings, I'd say just keep monitoring our website. That's how it works at a lot of the large health insurance companies. Yes, there's other things that happen at smaller companies where they may keep things on hold, but I'm just telling you how it works at the large health insurance companies. That's why I always say to people, and you see me say this on Facebook and everywhere else. Apply, apply, apply.

The clients that I work with, one of the biggest hurdles we have to get over is they fear rejection so much. I say, "My gosh, I was rejected hundreds of times. I didn't even get to rejected status. I was just ghosted. My application would just go into the big dark oasis and nothing ever happened." And I just got over it. And after a while I started celebrating rejections because every rejection is one step closer to an acceptance. And these jobs, especially UM jobs, as Marie was talking about MSL jobs, they're very competitive. There's more docs than ever that are looking to make a transition. The other thing is doctors are looking to make a transition earlier and earlier in their careers.

My team, I would say on a whole, at this point, we have about 25 docs on my team. And we are all stages of our career. There's people who are in their early career, mid-career, late career. There's people who are post-retirement who just do this for fun. If that tells you anything about the job as well.

So, it is difficult to get a position, but it's definitely not impossible. It just takes persistence and there's so many people who are there to help you.

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The post How To Secure Your First Utilization Management Job appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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:

• How to Go from Surviving to Thriving in a Remote Healthcare Job – 278
• Why Part Time Remote Medical Director Is a Great Job – 240
• How to Find a Top Remote Nonclinical Career – 188
• How Do I Generate Awesome Income with Telemedicine Services? – 222
• What Is the Latest Telemedicine-Supported Specialty? – 173
• How to Use Consulting and Advising to Find Freedom – 249
• Why You Must Consider Starting a Medical Legal Consulting Business – 281
• How to Be the Best Expert Witness Consultant – 262
• How to Be a Life Coach and Professional Artist – 158
• How to Be a Shrewd Business Coach and Consultant – 111
• NewScr!pt

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

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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

In today's episode, Dr. Frieda Wiley shares her secrets for thriving in a remote healthcare job.

Frieda is a pharmacist who worked remotely for several years and is the author of Telecommuting Psychosis: From Surviving to Thriving While Working in Your Pajama Pants.

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.

Telecommuting Psychosis?

Telecommuting Psychosis is not a recognized clinical condition. However, Dr. Wiley used it in order to draw attention to the potentially severe consequences that can occur from the isolation and lack of direct human contact that results from working remotely.

Frieda wrote the book to shed light on this issue, and to share techniques for preventing and reversing the adverse effects. Simple self-care measures that are described in the book can greatly help to eliminate these effects. 

Effects of Working Remotely

The drawbacks of working remotely in healthcare vary depending on your field and industry. But some of the more common psychological effects include:

1. depression,
2. feelings of isolation,
3. trouble unplugging from the online world,
4. lack of external stimulation, and
5. feeling invisible

There are direct medical effects resulting from long hours spent working remotely, such as elevated lipid levels, heart disease, low vitamin D levels, and weight gain. And there is the frequently encountered reduction in career advancement due to less direct interaction with supervisors and others in the workplace hierarchy. 

Dr. Frieda Wiley's Advice

 Just know that you have to be your own advocate for your work environment and for your health and that there's no shame in seeking help.

Thriving in a Remote Healthcare Job

Dr. Wiley has several suggestions for thriving in a remote job. To maintain mental health be sure to manage your social health, use an accountability partner, create a social calendar to enhance human interactions, develop a daily mindfulness practice, and “become a tourist in your own town.”

To improve your physical health you should first check the ergonomics of your remote working environment, schedule physical activity and formal exercise, supplement Vitamin D if needed, and take breaks every 20 minutes to address eye strain and dryness.

Properly integrate childcare into your workday, if necessary. Keep workspace separate from other areas. And set boundaries with friends and people who live with you. 

Summary

Dr. Wiley addresses these topics and others in much more detail in her book. Go to her website to order it. If you have any questions regarding any of these subjects or would need coaching on how to identify and deal with the drawbacks of working remotely, you may use the contact form on her website, or send her an email at frieda@friedawiley.com.

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:

• Telecommuting Psychosis: From Surviving to Thriving While Working in Your Pajama Pants
• Dr. Frieda Wiley's LinkedIn Page
• Add Discipline to Creativity to Be a Successful Medical Writer – 179
• How to Shine as a Technical Medical Writer – 155
• How to Become a Medical Writer with Dr. Mandy Armitage – 022
• How to Find Freedom as a Freelance Medical Writer with Dr. Emma Nichols – 056
• NewScr!pt

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 278

How to Go from Surviving to Thriving in a Remote Healthcare Job

- Interview with Dr. Frieda Wiley

John: When I was thinking about bringing on today's guest, I was really positive about it for a number of reasons. When I was chief medical officer at the hospital I worked at for 14 years, one of the people I worked most closely with was a pharmacist, a PharmD like our guest today who ran the pharmacy department at the hospital, and the whole system for that matter.

I'm also very fond of writers, medical writers in particular. And so, I'm really pleased to be able to have today's guest join us and talk a lot about these different things and about a book that she just recently wrote and published. So, with that, I'll say thanks for joining us today, Dr. Frieda Wiley.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Thank you for having me.

John: All right. Most of my guests are usually physicians, although anyone dealing with nonclinical careers comes on the podcast that we can get on here to learn something from. Obviously, Frieda is a PharmD not an MD, but like I say, I have a very strong affinity for pharmacists because I worked with so many in the past.

But the thing is, I was not aware of a couple of things. Of course, I knew that there were non-physicians that do medical writing. There are actually people that aren't even clinicians that do medical writing. So, I'm interested to hear about that from Frieda today.

And the other is this whole concept of telecommuting and telemedicine, telehealth. I guess I kind of knew in the back of my mind if pharmacists did that, but I really had no idea the scope and the amount that they did. I'm looking forward to learn about that and about some of the downsides of telecommuting. I guess you would put telehealth in that category. A lot to talk about today. Tell us a little bit about your background, your education, Frieda, and then your early clinical work.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Sure. As you mentioned, I am a pharmacist by terminal training. I actually had a previous career as a chemist in the aerospace industry. It's a brief career as a break between degrees. So, my undergraduate degrees are in biochemistry and Spanish.

John: Interesting.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah, I mixed it all in there. And when I went to pharmacy school, I kind of focused more on industry. That was my goal to actually work in the pharmaceutical industry. And that was really my introduction into medical writing. I went into standard or more traditional pharmacy practice I should say when I started.

So, I started as a community pharmacist originally as a floating pharmacist where I was traveling to different pharmacies and leaving other pharmacists who were on vacation or gotten sick. I was working for a small grocery store chain that was based predominantly in East Texas, rural areas. And about three months into that I was approached by management to work in medication therapy management, which ultimately became my introduction into remote work because I became a hybrid worker. Because I was a floating pharmacist who already had experience with different stores in different regions, different pharmacies. It made sense to have me travel to these different pharmacies and meet with patients 101 to review their medications. And because there wasn't a central office and I had a lot of administrative work to take care of phone calls, paperwork and things of that nature, then I worked from home at a regional office one to two days a week.

John: Okay. Yeah. So, you got a little taste of that at that point.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Right. And then I stayed in that role for about another year and then transitioned into working for a managed care firm where I did the exact same thing but in a completely remote setting. I was hired originally as a Spanish speaking pharmacist, serving the greater New York City population. And originally, I was under the impression I was going to have to move to Hoboken, New Jersey or somewhere in the New York City vicinity for that job and obviously become licensed in that area.

Telemedicine laws, as I'm sure you're aware, can be different, a little bit more flexible when it comes to licensure per state. And so, when the company found out that I had some remote experience already under my belt, they pitched me the idea of being fully remote because they wanted to get a head start and they knew it would take me a while to relocate.

John: Okay. I was just to say that can sound quite attractive. And again, I have to remember that there's probably different roles in let's say pharmacy and pharmacy services versus let's say a physician. But the physicians I talk to, they're like, "Oh yeah, the thing I love about telemedicine is I have more control. I can do it when I want to do it. And I don't have to really worry about getting dressed up and putting on a tie or whatever." But it sounds attractive, I would think to you as well. But I think you then later learned there were some downsides to it.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. There are downsides to it. And I think it depends on the industry you're in and the type of work that you do. There are many other areas in which there are pharmacists who are involved in patient care working remotely and using telemedicine. But in my case, I wasn't able to work what I wanted to. In my first pharmacy job, I set my own schedule because I'm scheduling appointments with patients and different things.

Well, in this case, they had the administrative part already taken care of and my entire work day was scheduled from 08:00 to 05:00. It became frustrating when it came to networking and what if I needed to go to the doctor. I would have to take vacation leave in order to do that because I didn't have the flexibility in my schedule that other telecommunicators sometimes enjoy.

John: Yeah. Actually, that reminds me of another example. And I do think there are some physicians who are locked into those kinds of schedules as well and other clinicians. For example, one of my children is a social worker and she ended up wanting to work remotely because she was moving at several different times. And she's starting to do, basically, it was utilization and case management type job remotely.

But you're right, they supplied the computer, she couldn't leave the house when she was working. She had set hours. So actually, it made her life no more flexible or easy to adjust to things than it was when she was driving into work. It's not always what you think. And some of those are definitely locked into a normal 09:00 to 05:00 routine, which can be more than 09:00 to 05:00. In fact, in a lot of these cases, they have a certain number of cases they have to do. And if they don't get it done in their eight hours, they might end up working nine or 10 hours. I don't know if that applied to you or not.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: In some cases, it did because, especially towards the end of the year with that particular company, they had numbers to meet and for some reason they realized that first year that we were way behind on our numbers in September. So, then our working hours were extended and, in some cases, we had to work weekends. So that quality of life that originally attracted me to that position, it went away very quickly.

John: Okay. Now I would like to put a pause on talking about this particular part of your life and how it led to writing the book only because I wanted to get a glimpse into this because you did mention, of course, that you were working at the pharma companies and you've done medical writing. And I'll just tell the listeners and I'm going to bring up your website right now, friedawiley.com. It is a place where you can purchase the book that we're going to be talking about.

But it's a good example for people that are interested in medical writing or maybe they're just getting into medical writing, it's an excellent website. It kind of puts everything out in different pages as an overview of what you do. You've got testimonials, I believe. You've got examples of the kind of writing you do. You've got a tab that says portfolio, for example. So, tell us how you got into medical writing, just a glimpse of some of the writing you've done and who you've done writing for.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. As I kind of alluded to earlier, when I was in pharmacy school, I had some rotations in the pharmaceutical industry, and specifically back when they still had a pharmaceutical division before they divested. And even though my internships were mainly in regulatory affairs, there were times where I supported the medical writing team, especially during that second summer, which introduced me to the concept. I'd never heard of it at that point.

And so, when I began practicing, I started freelancing while I was practicing. And it started out with, I remember sitting in a doctor's office one time and I saw this magazine. And at the time it really looked more like a slightly more glorified patient handout. I remember reading the content thinking I could do this. I had already written some pamphlets and things when I was on rotation with Indian Health Services. And I saw that as kind of a translation of that.

And so, I actually reached out to the company and I told them who I was and what I wanted to do. Not really the best approach. I really didn't understand the concept of pitching and things like that, but I didn't really hear anything else from them until a year later. And the editor reached out to me and said, "I'm sorry it took so long to get back to you, but we'd be interested in having you write for us."

And then also with doing the medication therapy management, because I was responsible for creating documents that went to the patient back then, this was before the government had set standards for how the documentation would look and different things like that. So, I had to come up with my own templates. I had to come up with a core messaging and phrasing that I might want to use, and then also customize the information that was included, going to each patient as well as to the prescriber.

That skillset helps me become bilingual, not just Spanish English, but in terms of being able to communicate in plain and scientific language. And I leveraged that as I pursued other writing opportunities.

John: Another example of each one of us has certain skills that we accumulate over time, and your set of skills might be different from mine, but they can all be leveraged in a different way for a particular job or series of jobs. It's just a good example of someone who's been a freelance writer, that's made a good living and enjoyed it and leveraged their clinical background and so forth. That was like I said, one of the reasons I wanted to have you come on and talk about that a little bit. What kind of writing have you done besides what you just described? Just some samples of some of the kind of writing that you've participated in.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Right, sure. I have written slide decks. I've written needs assessments, advisory board summaries, executive summaries that they require. I have written scripts not only for presentations, but also for e-learning, webinars, different things like that. I have also written patient handouts as well as marketing information that would go to physicians as well as general audiences.

John: Yeah, I think it's easy to say, okay, wait, I can only write, let's say maybe CME manuscripts and maybe something for the public. But there's so many different variations, and I've heard this before, needs assessment, learning needs, slide decks. And you're doing something for the advisory board, is that what you said?

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yes.

John: Those things are beautiful, awesome presentations. You've got to really have some skills to do that.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Thank you.

John: Because I've been on the receiving end of some of their presentations and they're almost overwhelming sometimes and the way they're created. There's a lot of information and it's very professional. It kind of ties into what you did later and what we're talking about today is writing your book. Obviously, you're a writer, you know how to write, and so you leveraged that to write something that wasn't in that category of medical writing, per se.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yes. I loved writing as a child, and that was sort of a childhood dream. And it's one of those things where as you get older and you find out the whole thing that you can do anything is kind of a myth. I had "writing a book" as one of my goals, especially once I started medical writing. It rehashed that dream. And when I became a fully remote employee, I noticed that I just didn't feel as awesome as I did when I went to the office every day. Every job, every setting has its stressors, but I started to notice that I wasn't going out as much. I wasn't socializing as much. I was depressed. I became depressed. I felt isolated even more so because initially I was the only remote worker on my team, and everybody else was in New Jersey and New York. That didn't help either.

And this was back before most companies had the infrastructure to support different types of engagement. So, all of our meetings, I would dial in via phone, a lot of times the call quality would be bad. And because my voice doesn't carry very well and everybody starts talking, I would get drowned out. I would just kind of sit there twiddling my thumbs until there was a break.

John: Yeah.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. That's what prompted me. I started journaling initially because I reached out to people and I was telling people, family, members and trusted friends "Look, something's not right. I don't feel myself." And people, we're dismissive because the thought is "You have the dream job when you work from home."

John: Yeah. Well, let me mention the name of the book now before I forget to do that. "Telecommuting Psychosis: From Surviving to Thriving While Working in Your Pajama Pants." You can get that book if it's intriguing, which it sounds to me. I've looked at it and at friedawiley.com/book. So, if you go to her website, you want to look at all the other information if you want to be a medical writer, but then she also has a page with the book on it where you can order it or you can go directly to Amazon. But that sounds pretty extreme "Telecommuting Psychosis." That's a little more than feeling something wasn't just right. So, how did we get to that point?

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Right. Yes, as an obvious disclaimer that it's not an official clinical term, it doesn't show up in the DSM-5 for whatever. But the reason why I chose that title was to call some attention to the situation. And kind of extrapolating from the concept of postpartum psychosis versus depression.

No, I didn't have thoughts of harming myself or harming someone else, but I did reach a point of just extreme mania where I was frustrated. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that nobody seemed to understand or empathize with what I was going through. And I later came to realize that the telecommuting concept, the mental fallout that occurs with it, is something that oftentimes people sweep under the rug.

At the time when I became an overnight telecommuter, unexpectedly, like many people during the pandemic, I didn't have the luxury of having this open forum where people spoke out about it and supported each other. There were very few studies available at the time that talked about it. The pandemic changed that. So, that was also to finish the book because suddenly I had the data to back up everything that I had been saying.

John: Then you applied the skills as a researcher that you did for your medical writing obviously for this book. I'm trying to think what's the easiest way to go through this in not great detail, but what are some of the common effects, adverse effects, and then later we can talk about ways to counteract them or prevent them. And I know you had the eight or nine myths that you talk about, which maybe also relates to that. So, go ahead and just tell us more about this topic and the potential adverse effects of it.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: It's many of the things that I mentioned earlier. The isolation, the depression. And obviously with depression and having a sedentary job and all of that, then you can also expect to see an increase in poor outcomes, poor biomarkers and different things like that. So, LDL, heart disease and things that fall out from that. The lack of vitamin D because you're not getting outside as much or you're not getting outside during the peak hours in which your body would absorb natural vitamin D that has been linked to heart disease, cancer, mental illnesses. We know that people who live in Scandinavian parts of this world are actually more likely to have heart disease and schizophrenia. And there have been studies to show that there's an association between those conditions and the lack of vitamin D. So, those are just a few of many examples.

John: Since you found the research that people are starting to recognize this, are you and others recommending certain ways to counteract these things? Just take it from there.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. A lot of it, unfortunately, has to do with self-management. Acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step, or saying that something's not right. Because mental health still carries a stigma. The pandemic helped to erase some of that, but we have to create a safe space for people to say that they're not okay and to seek help.

So, my goal with the book was to take the guesswork out. Start paying attention. We need to be more self-aware. Are you taking breaks? You need to be taking breaks every 20 minutes or so anyway for your eye health. That's one part of it. And making sure that you're moving, making sure that you are sticking to a plan, make up a plan for yourself where you make sure that you are chunking your time, you're managing your time wisely. And part of that includes the self-care element. Self-care not only in terms of physical health, but mental, because it all works together.

John: It's easy to say of course, but I know for a fact that I should exercise three times a week minimum, probably every day. But it's like you almost have to pick your phone up and put it in there as a scheduled event. And if you can do that, great. And you're talking about the same thing. And if you're at a job that doesn't allow that or doesn't enable you to do that, then you should seriously think about not doing that job and finding an employer that has a little more flexibility and allows you the freedom or a little bit of those breaks. On a 09:00 to 05:00 job, you should have 30 to 60 minutes for lunch, for example.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. And you raise a point about putting it in your phone or scheduling it. And I was serious when I said that. Sometimes it's an accountability thing. Having an accountability partner that can be very helpful. One of the things that I did pre pandemic is I used to drop in on teleworking groups. For example, I used to go to one in particular that would meet up in different places in Austin when I was in the Washington DC metropolitan area. It was during the pandemic. And so, the co-working groups had all gone remote if they were still active, but we still had times where we would work together. And sometimes that would include scheduling little mini breaks where we would do meditation exercises or get a move around scheduling into the breaks, all system socializing, because still some type of human interaction is very important. We're not meant to be isolated from each other.

John: Yeah, absolutely. Let me do this. There's so much in the book that you address in terms of recognizing and then trying to take these steps to prevent it. Again, let's talk directly to the listeners here. You're doing some kind of at home remote work similar to what Frieda has described. Because we tend to ignore how we're feeling, we tend to ignore what's happening to us. Again, maybe two or three of the symptoms or two or three physical findings that you think people better get to stop and think about this and get the book and figure out how to overcome it.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. One side would be noticing that you're not moving around as much anymore and may start to have weight gain. Maybe your back starts to hurt. That's another thing. You have to be your own ergonomics adjuster. You have to figure all of that out. And so, being mindful of that. And you may also notice that if you're not careful, seriously, a few days may go by without leaving the house. Especially if let's say the kids take the bus home or they're driving, why do you need to leave the house? You can have your groceries delivered.

So, making sure that you're keeping track of that. Have I left the house today? Have I socialized outside of my work socializing and thinking about, "Okay, well before the pandemic or before I went remote, what did my social life look like?" Because it's those little interactions sometimes that really add up. And that's something that I really started to miss. And it applies to people, regardless of whether you're introverted or extroverted. I am very introverted. And so, that's another reason why it really threw me off because I was used to doing my own thing and being okay with it.

John: Yeah. I can imagine, I can think of an example like going to the coffee shop. If I'm at home for a week, I would miss that. I don't go every day, but I know when I do go and I am an introvert, I just like to fool around in a sense verbally with the people behind the counter, whatever's going on, mention something. Not political, not controversial. Just to have that interaction with another human being. It's just kind of fun.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. The casual banter. And I even talked about that in the book because I missed that as well. So, then you have to think about, "Okay, yes, this is my new office now, maybe it's not going to be the same experience as what it was when I was driving every day, but how can I recreate some of that or capture some of those elements?"

John: It does remind me a lot about the whole issue of burnout and medical care and healthcare in general. And we can get into a very deep hole, deep in the burnout syndrome before we even realize that we are. And so, this sounds like it's the same thing.

One of the things that I tell my listeners and coaches, mentees and so forth, is that it does make a difference where you work. And some places are awesome to work for and some are terrible because they ignore things like this. Are there any ways to figure out as you're looking? Because a remote job still sounds good. I can be home, maybe I have to be home when my kids get home and or I have an elderly parent I'm helping to take care of. I need to be nearby. Okay, fine. But what can I look for in an employer or let's say if you're a freelancer, it's a little different, but you're still a 1099 employee in a sense. What do I look for?

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. I actually included a little questionnaire at the back of the book to help readers. So, a lot of it starts with the interview process. You need to be very specific and focused about the questions that you ask, making sure you have a really good understanding of that working environment. So, asking what the level of engagement looks like. How do I interact with other employees?

And this may sound obvious now, but because of my frame of reference, it really wasn't. Find out if you are going to be on a team where there are other remote workers. That's important just because of employee conflict, jealousy, animosity, backlash, things like that. Finding out what sorts of infrastructure they have in place that will support remote workers.

And also, there are different things you can talk about to try to get a full understanding of your work. Sometimes the hiring manager will give clues that they maybe are a micromanager or don't really respect work-life balance. So, what I have found is that sometimes the core messaging and the core values that may show up on a company's website may not necessarily align with the role that you're in. It really depends on who your direct line of management is and how much they are working to support that culture. And then of course, if you're able to talk to people within the company offline, and also reviews. So, the nice thing now is if there are so many company reviews that you can kind of do some research and that will also help guide some of those questions that you want to ask.

John: Yeah, that makes sense. And it's related to looking for any job really, to try and get some honest feedback from maybe people that weren't set up to interview you or for you to meet, but that are just there. Like in a hospital you go talk to just some of the nurses or some of the staff or the maintenance man or whatever. Just because you need some hopefully unbiased feedback before you make a final decision.

All right. Tell us again where the website is and the name of the book and all that, because we don't want to forget about that before we let you go.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. The website is friedawiley.com and the book is called "Telecommuting Psychosis: From Surviving to Thriving While Working in Your Pajama Pants."

John: Okay. And they can get it by going directly to Amazon or going to your website.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Both. Go to my website if you can't remember the title and it will take you straight to the Amazon page.

John: Okay, great. And of course, I'll put links in my show notes. I have a last question. If someone who has maybe not done telehealth or telemedicine or telecommuting or remote job, any last bits of advice for them before they take the plunge?

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Yeah. Don't be afraid of it just because I wrote a book about losing my mind. Just know that you have to be your own advocate for your work environment and for your health and that there's no shame in seeking help.

John: Excellent. Thanks. Thanks for that. That's very useful. And I will also remind you, my listeners here in the nonclinical nation, to go to the website if you're a medical writer or a fledgling medical writer because you'll get a lot of good ideas from what Frieda has done. And yeah, pick up the book while you're there.

All right. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate this Frieda, and hopefully we can keep in touch. Do you have any plans to write a new book anytime in the near future?

Dr. Frieda Wiley: I actually have some children's books in the works, so I'm excited about those.

John: Just let me know. I have no problem sending out a little announcement in the podcast or in my emails if you get those published. So, keep us informed.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Thank you. And thank you for this opportunity.

John: You're welcome. All right. Bye-bye.

Dr. Frieda Wiley: Bye-bye.

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The post How to Go from Surviving to Thriving in a Remote Healthcare Job – 278 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

In this week’s interview, Dr. Jonathan Vitale explains how he found his remote nonclinical career.

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.

Finding a Remote Nonclinical Career on Facebook

Jonathan is the founder of Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook Group with over 8,000 physician members. He has helped dozens of physicians transition into utilization management, telemedicine, expert witness consulting, insurance work, pharma, executive leadership, freelance consulting, medical education, medical writing, and medical media.

His work focuses on the psychological, logistical, financial, professional, and personal aspects of physician career transition.

Life is meant to be awesome. – Dr. Jonathan Vitale 

His preferred remote nonclinical career is utilization management. During our conversation, he explains why he thinks it is such a good option. And he tells us who is most suited for this job.

Coaching 

With the growing demand for career coaching for physicians, I have noticed a new trend. And I think it is a good one: physician coaches who specialize in a career niche. I’ve interviewed three coaches who specialize in the pharma and medical device industry. And now we have been introduced to Jonathan Vitale who focuses on UM careers.

Physicians have such a vast skillset. – Dr. Jonathan Vitale

They can all coach in areas outside of their niche, including a different remote nonclinical career. But if you’re committed to quickly finding a utilization management job, a coach like Jonathan Vitale is the way to go.

Summary

As we noted during the interview, you can find him at www.drjonathan.com if you need a coach. Be sure to check out the Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook Group. And if you’d like to hear Jonathan’s musical side, go to TheRealDrJonathan on Instagram.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode that you can download or read.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Dr. Jonathan Vitale's Website
• Dr. Jonathan Vitale on Instagram
• Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook Group
• Is One of These Popular Home-Based Careers for You – PNC Podcast Episode #142
• How to Secure a Rewarding Medical Director Position – PNC Podcast Episode #88

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

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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PNC Podcast Episode 188

How to Find a Top Remote Nonclinical Career - Interview with Dr. Jonathan Vitale

John: Okay, listeners. I know that many of you are anxious to find a nonclinical job in utilization management or another remote career. And if you're one of those, then today's guest is here just for you. So, Dr. Jonathan Vitale, welcome to the PNC podcast.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Hi. Well, thank you so much for having me, John. I really appreciate it. I've been a fan of your podcast for a while. It's good to be on.

John: I was looking around Facebook as I do, this is back a while ago and I noticed this new site. So, I was like, “Wow, there is a Remote Careers for Physicians Facebook group”. And it had a few thousand members and now it's over 8,000 members and I thought, “Okay, I've got to get this guy on the podcast”.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Yeah, it's funny. We started that group a little over two years ago well before the pandemic, Remote Careers for Physicians and it has really taken off since the pandemic as more and more people are looking for remote careers. So, it's a great group.

John: Yeah. I've been in there a few times and I would recommend it to everyone that's interested. And you've talked about all kinds of careers in there. Utilization Management comes up quite a bit and I know you're an expert in that, but why don't you go ahead and tell us briefly about your educational background and kind of segue into your clinical practice and then into what you're doing more recently?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Sure. My background in medicine is pretty traditional. I was a psychology major in college. I did all the pre-reqs during college. Then I went and got a two year master's degree in counseling. And immediately after that, I went to medical school. And then immediately after that, I went to a family medicine residency in Chicago. After residency, I spent about a year in Chicago doing locums work, a little bit of telemedicine work as well. And then I moved to New York City where I live today. And I got a job at a more concierge style, outpatient family medicine practice, where I worked for about a year and a half. And then after that is when I made the transition into utilization management where I've been working full-time for the past five years almost. So here I am today.

John: Okay. So, I have a question. What prompted you to make that transition? We get a lot of guests on here that either they got burnt out or they just realized I chose this career basically when I was a kid and it's not what I thought it was going to be. And so, let's look for something different.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: That's a really great question. I think that Utilization Management draws physicians from a lot of different places in their life. For me, I was a little bit unique in that my entire life I've always wanted to be a doctor, but I've always also had other interests. I've had a lot of interest in business my entire life. I've had a lot of interest in politics, in policy. I've had interest in how health insurance worked and how health care dollars were spent in this country.

So, I actually got a little bit interested in UM as early as being a medical student where I started reading about it. And I never really pictured myself sitting in a clinic or sitting in a hospital for the rest of my career. I knew that would be something that would be a little bit boring for me and not really for me. And it wouldn't use every part of my interest. It wouldn't cover all of my interests.

So, that's really what drew me to utilization management, being able to use many different parts of my brain, whether it’d be the medical part, the ethical part, the business part, and also my part-time life as a musician. I knew I wanted a lot of flexibility in my day-to-day life. And I knew that utilization management was one of those ways that I would be able to get that flexibility. Then the more common thing that I went through was even when I worked at this more concierge style practice where I was only working four days a week, only seeing 14 or so patients a day, I still got very burned out from that.

As a family doctor, there's a lot that goes on in medicine today, where it's a very tough daily grind for really anybody in medicine, but especially primary care. And I just wasn't completely fulfilled by it. So, that's how I got to where I am today. And interestingly, I'm more fulfilled than ever.

John: Awesome. That's great. When you talk about that and think about even in med school, that is what you might do later with a little bit more multiple kinds of interests. I was in a conversation the other day with Dr. Heidi Moawad. She is one of my guests from the past and she's a writer and so forth. And we were talking about how most physicians don't think about anything after clinical practice. Like there nothing exists and yet there are thousands and thousands of jobs just open waiting for a physician to step in and they have to be a physician with experience to do those jobs.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah. You know what's crazy about it? And I talk about this all the time. Physician Hood is one of those few careers where everybody assumes, you're going to be sitting in a clinic or a hospital for the rest of your career. People don't think that for lawyers. Probably half of lawyers don't practice law or a lot of other jobs too. Pharmacists, who a ton of them work for a big pharma work in business, or people who are even in the military and they just do the military for a few years and then they go off and do something else.

But for some reason, physicians are always assumed to have to do the daily grind of traditional medicine every day for the rest of their career. And it's really too bad because physicians have so much knowledge and so many skills that are really needed in so many other jobs. And that's why all these groups exist so that physicians A) understand that and B) can figure out how to get those jobs as well.

John: Yeah, that is a good point. Well, we're not going to let you get past the fact that you transitioned to UM without hearing a little bit more about how you personally made the transition. How did you find the job? How did you prepare for the job? Who did you reach out to? Did you use a recruiter? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah. And this is what I like talking about the most, because for everybody listening, I'm just a regular doctor. I had no connections, none at all. And I didn't even have that much experience, in post residency medicine. But what I did is I basically went online and would apply every day on Indeed and on LinkedIn. And that was basically the two places I would look. And I did that for months and months and months, and I got more rejection emails or as I call them, I was ghosted more times that I can even count. And what happened though and this was probably a stroke of luck, was that having applied for months and months and months, probably over six months at this point, I got a gig 10 hours a week, doing Medicare reviews for a company based out of Florida.

And so, that allowed me to dip my toe into the water. So, I was working, doing this 10 hours a week while I was in a full-time clinical practice. And that was really just a stroke of luck. It was a newer company. They needed people. They knew I wasn't that experienced, but they took a risk.

Then after that, after doing that job for probably a year or so, I was like this is really interesting work. I kept applying on Indeed for a full-time role. I kept applying. And that gave me a little bit of credential because I was able to put that small gig on my CV, which is always the key. And I teach people how to do this, how to get those small gigs that give them experience in UM. And another flu guy called or another stroke of luck. I got an interview with a smaller company based out of Tennessee that was looking for physician reviewers. And I started with them, I think 20 hours a week. And then after about six months, they asked me to come on full time and I've been there ever since.

My journey was pretty traditional because I went through the whole application process, kept applying, kept applying, had no connections. I think what physicians forget, they always say, “Wow, it's so hard to get a job in a non-traditional career. It's so hard to get a job in UM”. My answer to that is it's not that it's hard, it's that it's not very easy. And physicians are used to getting a job in clinical medicine very easily. And in the non-traditional world, it's not like that. It takes a while, but you can still get those jobs, just takes persistence.

John: Now, I don't want to go into everything you teach your clients because we're going to talk about your coaching in a minute. But you probably don't advise people to just take your path, just start applying. So, what would be one, just one sort of thing that would accelerate their process, that you would share with us now? Like here's how you can prepare or maybe a place you'd look besides LinkedIn or Indeed. Any advice?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah. So, my biggest advice for people who really want to do UM and they're really interested in it is to get experience doing it. And there's some really easy ways to do that. There's the NAIRO website, for instance, nairo.org. And if you go there and you click on members, it has a lot of companies that hire physicians to do PRN physician reviews of all sorts. And these are jobs that don't require any experience. So long as you are board certified, they'll put you on their panel. And after you're on that panel for a while, you'll get a handful of these cases that you'll be able to do just to put something on your CV. And after you do that, you're going to have a lot more likelihood of getting your foot in the door to these real UM gigs that are part-time or full-time. So that's always my biggest advice to people.

The other piece of advice I have is Facebook is an amazing resource nowadays, all the physician groups, of course, there's my group, there's your group. There's a lot of groups on Facebook where you can go in and ask doctors what they're doing, reach out to people who are doing work that you want to do. Try to make connections is the thing I say. And it's so easy to do nowadays on LinkedIn or Facebook. Make a connection. Don't do what I did, which is I didn't have any connections, I just blindly kept applying every day. You can do that, but it's going to be much easier if you can get a connection. That's what I would say.

John: Can you imagine doing this 20, 30 years ago? You had no internet, no applications. It'd be crazy. But I do want to ask you, what do you like about it so much? Why do you think it's a good option for physicians and what do you find that's compelling for you?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Well, I think it's a great job because it uses so many areas of your brain. As I said before, you're not just thinking like a doctor, but you're also thinking like a business person, you're also thinking like a financial person. But at the end of the day, you're always making the ethical decision. And so, I consider people in UM kind of physician advocates. We're working to make sure that patients get the care they need. And this is at a very high level and oftentimes these patients are very sick and need a lot of services, and we're trying to make sure that they can get the care they need while we're also reducing the fraud waste and abuse that happens in the system. So, if you're looking for that sort of satisfaction, I think it really gives you that.

The other thing is, I think that UM is a great job for people who are self-motivated, who don't mind working from home, but nowadays most of these jobs are from home, who are so good at self-policing and self-pacing because you're not really monitored that heavily and you have to usually get through a certain amount of volume.

And I think it's good for people who want more flexibility in their life, who want to maybe spend more time with their family, spend more time on hobbies, spend more time on other things in their life, maybe some business side things that they're doing. And I think it's also great for people who want a very stable schedule. They want to work 40 hours a week. They don't want call. They don't want nights. They don't want weekends. So, there are so many different people who do well in UM and I've worked with many of them over the years. And it's a really great profession for people who just aren't fully satisfied doing the daily grind of clinical medicine.

John: I just have to maybe jump in here about asking you a question. I assume the pay is decent compared to what you're doing as a physician and if you take into account the lack of call, the lack of late hours, the lack of all the weekends and all that. And once you're in it and you have experience, there's some upward mobility there in terms of your pay.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yes. That's something I like to talk about because if you're a clinical physician and you're employed as most physicians are, you're probably not going to see too much opportunity for things like bonuses, unless you're working at a RVU system, but even then, as I always say, doctors are treated a lot better in the nonclinical world than they are in the clinical world.

In terms of pay, I always say that it's probably on average around a family physician, outpatient family physician salary, but you can easily get above that. And there are usually opportunities for bonuses, yearly bonuses. And also, usually there's a percentage increasing your salary every year, a small one, but still a notable one.

And you're exactly right. If you take into account the fact that you're never on call, that you have a corporate vacation, which is four weeks, you have time for all sorts of things. If you take all that into consideration, it's worth it. It's really worth it. I won't lie. If you're a super specialist and you're going into UM, you're probably going to take a bit of a pay cut, but it's going to be made up for in terms of your lifestyle, in my opinion.

John: Yeah, yeah. And it's funny because I know so many clinicians who have four weeks of vacation. They're lucky if they ever take it. It's like, “Oh, well, we can't get coverage”. Well, what is the point of having a contract? And the other thing about the contract is there's no pay raise in the contract. If it's a two-year contract, it's fixed. If it's a three-year contract, it's fixed. I've had people come back. I was a CMO at a hospital. It's like, “Well, don't I get a cost of living? - You're on a contract, man. That's not built in”. If you were an employee, you'd be in a much better position in the sense that if you have like what everybody else in the organization gets, which is a salary increase and all that.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah, you are exactly right. So, if physicians have also a utilization management, I think it depends on the company you work for, of course, but there can be opportunity for vertical movement, to become the intro level position in utilization management as medical director, but then there's often opportunities to be a senior medical director, regional medical director, depending on how big the company is. And then of course receiving more executive roles, like CMO, things like that. And then of course the pay is different for each of those. So, there is opportunity for a lot of professional growth in most UM companies, not all.

John: And then if you keep looking, you go from one job and find the next one. But I'm going to segue now into your Facebook group, because you've got over 8,000 physicians in there looking for the right answer for themselves. So, I want to know, what have you learned in running the Facebook group and what other are the common remote or home-based careers that seem to crop up in there?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Well, I've learned a lot from running that group. I think the biggest thing I've learned is that what a big desire there is for remote careers and non-traditional careers for physicians. We have over 8,000 physicians in our group from all over the world. And most of them have never had a remote job. They're trying to get one, they're trying to learn more about it.

And so, that's really fantastic that there's such a desire, but also the best thing about the group is physicians helping each other. Everybody's trying to help each other, everybody's giving each other leads. And that makes me feel very good that physicians are so good to each other. Because for people like me who used not to be that happy in my job, I want to make sure that I can do what I can to make sure other physicians get to make the transition I made and get to become happy again. It's kind of important and it is great how physicians look out for each other. So, the group has been just a lot of fun and a real great place for anybody to join, to get information.

The jobs that we talk about the most in the group, certainly utilization management is the number one thing we talk about. I think it's a very common path for physicians interested in non-traditional careers to go into. But we also talk a lot about the industry jobs in pharma, which is big nowadays. So many opportunities there. And we have a lot of people in the group who talk a lot about that. Many of whom you've had on your podcast.

Also, I would say medical writing is something that a lot of people are interested in nowadays. Whether it's medical education writing or writing for various outlets or media, things like that, that's always a popular one.

And then interestingly, a lot of people are interested in telemedicine, which is of course still clinical. But the opportunities for telemedicine nowadays have just exploded because of the pandemic. So, a lot of our docs really enjoy doing a little bit of telemedicine as well. So those are the main ones in our group.

John: Yeah, I focus on nonclinical careers, but I always include locums and telemedicine because you get the flexibility, the telemedicine is home based. So even though it's still clinical, that is very attractive. I noticed in the group that I'm the admin for the PNC Hunters, that we get people in UM who will say, “Hey, my company is hiring”. So, do you get a lot of those posts?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: We do. I wish my Facebook group existed when I was applying because it’s a great way to get leads. It's the Facebook group. The company I work for, we've hired doctors through my Facebook group as well. So, I make those postings too. So yes, definitely join and use it as part of your job search, those Facebook groups.

John: All right. So that's Remote Careers for Physicians. Just look it up on Facebook. Because I wanted to segue now into the last part to talk about what you're doing outside of that Facebook group, in the coaching with physicians who are looking for nonclinical careers. I'm assuming that a big chunk of that might be for those who are definitely interested in UM, but tell us more about the coaching that you're doing. And that's at drjonathan.com.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Correct. I started doing some coaching about two years ago. Again, I have a background in counseling. So, I saw that there was a big need for physicians who really need that one-on-one attention. And that's what I started doing.

So, what I do is I help physicians who are in a traditional job and they're just not happy for whatever reason. I help them figure out what they don't want to do with the rest of their life. Which is oftentimes more important than figuring out what you do want to do. And then I help them understand what all their options are. And then I help them to transition into that.

And yes, most of the people I work with are interested in UM, but there are so many aspects to making a career transition like this that I help out with. There are psychological aspects, there's financial aspects, family aspects, geographic, legal, licensure aspects. All those things that doctors have to think about. And that's what I work with people on. So, reach out to me at drjonathan.com. If you want to make an appointment, I'd love to speak with everybody.

John: You make a good point because it's not a matter of just saying, “Well, let's see, what's my passion? I can figure that out”. But you also have, “Well, do you have any money saved up and what's it going to do to the paying back your student loans?” And psychologically, what's going to be the impact when your family looks at you like you're crazy.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: That's right. Yeah. These are all extremely important. These are more important even than figuring out what you don't want to do and what you do want to do. Yeah, because I always say to people, look how long can you go without having an income. Because you have to be prepared for this to take six months, for this to take even a year, sometimes longer in some cases. And unfortunately, physicians are notorious for not being great with money. But there are a lot of great physician finance groups.

John: There are plenty of those.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Plenty of those. So, we're getting a lot better at it, but it's something I help physicians with as well to make that transition.

John: That's awesome. That's cool. So, we'll put links to everything in there and actually, I'll put a link to NAIRO, which you mentioned earlier and whatever else came up during our conversation.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yes. It’s a great site.

John: No, this is good because as far as I can tell, it's the most popular nonclinical, that's an informal observation job. And to know that there's someone out there that has expertise specifically in how to transition in that is very helpful.

Well, Jonathan, we're going to run out of time pretty soon here. So, anything else that you haven't told us that you want to tell us or any words of advice for the listeners?

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Well, my words of advice for everybody who's interested is, go on the Facebook groups and just learn more about all that's available. Even if you think you're happy in what you're doing now, just go and learn about it and see.

The other thing is it allows you to have a lot of time to do other things. So again, I'm a big musician. You can check out my work at therealdrjonathan on Instagram. I appreciate being here and I really hope people reach out to me or reach out to our Facebook groups if you're at all interested because I want to help and all the doctors in our group want to help you too, to make sure that you're in a career that you love.

John: It's going to be interesting to see where this goes 10 years from now.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: It will be.

John: We're in a flux right now when people are scurrying around and trying to find out what they can do besides clinical, if that's what they're interested in. So, I really appreciate those words of wisdom and advice. That was awesome. I think this gives people hope because it sounds like there's a way to make that transition. There's help out there.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah. There's always hope. And there's so many people willing to help you out there. A lot of physician coaches other than me and these Facebook groups. And don't forget, physicians have such a vast skill set. They just have to figure out how to best market themselves and how to apply it. Because really life is meant to be awesome. And you have to be in a job that you really enjoy going to, and that you feel that you're making a difference because that's what being a doctor is all about. Because at the end of the day, we're either directly or indirectly all working to make sure that patients get great care. And that's what all these jobs are about. So, don't be afraid to explore them.

John: Yeah. We're not talking about dropping everything and opening a hot dog stand. We're taking that medical knowledge, all that education, all that experience, the leadership, the management, and applying it in another way.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Yeah, absolutely. I would say there's a lot of parts to the moving wheels of medicine. It's not just sitting in a clinic or sitting in a hospital. There are so many other moving parts where we need good doctors to make sure that our patients are getting good care, that's affordable and accessible.

John: All right. Well, that sounds like a good note to end on. So, with that, Jonathan, thanks so much for being here today. And I will just say goodbye.

Dr. Jonathan Vitale: Well, thank you so much, John. Thanks for having me.

John: You're welcome. Take care.

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The post How to Find a Top Remote Nonclinical Career – 188 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

On this week’s episode of the PNC podcast, John runs through the most popular home based careers for physicians.  He starts by explaining why home based careers are so attractive.

Then he describes the benefits and challenges of each one.

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Why Work from Home?

There are three main benefits to choosing a home-based career:

1. Convenience

When you work from home, you’re able to handle household responsibilities. And navigating childcare or adult caretaking responsibilities may make this type of career a necessity.

2. Cost Savings

Eliminating your commute means you’ll save time, and reduce gasoline and auto maintenance costs, saving you thousands of dollars each year. And the time not spent commuting can be spent working and enhancing your income.

3. Flexibility

Home based careers offer the most flexibility. Though some require working 8-hour days, most will allow you to choose your hours. And you might be able to work from anywhere in the world, even while traveling. Or at odd hours, if you prefer.

Popular Home-based Careers

Here are the factors to consider when seeking one of these popular home based careers:

• Chart Review: Performing chart reviews can be done for utilization management, disability and worker’s compensation assessments, expert witness consulting, clinical documentation, and quality improvement. You can work anywhere that has access to the Internet and phone service. Some jobs require work during regular business hours.
• Medical writing: As a freelancer, you must set up your own business, and find work, initially. But once you develop relationships with several editors, you should be able to generate regular income, working from anywhere in the world. You must have the self-discipline to meet regular deadlines.
• Telemedicine: This is an especially flexible career. You must ensure that you are working with a reputable company. You can start by supplementing your income by moonlighting. And you need to take the necessary steps to manage your liability exposure. You can boost your income by working when other physicians are not working, such as during weekends and holidays.
• Consulting: If you're a consultant working from home, you will likely be freelancing, rather than working for a large consulting firm. You may have to do some traveling and speaking to build your authority and market yourself. But once you get started, most of your business can be done from home.
• Coaching: Coaching is similar to consulting. But the term is usually used with life, health, wellness, and business coaching of individuals or small groups. It can be face-to-face, but remote coaching is much more common. You must choose a coaching field based on your personal expertise, or obtain formal training, and possibly certification.

Summary

Home based careers offer a great deal of flexibility. And there are several attractive options to consider. The income levels might start out at the lower end of a clinical salary. But busy coaches, consultants, writers, chart reviewers, and telemedicine providers will enjoy improving revenues as they streamline their businesses and increase their customer or patient base. If you haven't already done so, you can listen using the player above, or through iTunes and other players.

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The post Is One of These Popular Home Based Careers for You? – 142 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.