Interview with Dr. Adam Robison – Episode 333

In today's episode, Dr. Adam Robison explains how he was able to found a start-up, AI Medica, while practicing hospital medicine full-time.

This interview will reveal the impact of AI Medica's software on healthcare efficiency, its integration with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), and its role in enhancing clinical decision-making. Adam provides his firsthand account of navigating the complexities of healthcare technology while practicing medicine.

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Revolutionizing Healthcare Efficiency with AI Medica

During our interview, the founder of AI Medica discusses the journey of his software optimization company and its groundbreaking role in transforming healthcare data accessibility. With a focus on integrating with Electronic Health Records (EHRs), AI Medica streamlines medical calculations, provides coding review, and enhances clinical decision-making while using your EHR.

Navigating Entrepreneurship in Healthcare Technology

Adam also delves into the challenges of founding a company while maintaining a thriving clinical career. From overcoming the limitations of existing EHR systems to securing investments and building a business, he shares insights from his entrepreneurial journey. During our conversation, he highlighted the major steps he followed: 

1. Identifying a universal problem,
2. Leveraging personal experience,
3. Describing the technological solution,
4. Collaborating and investing,
5. Navigating the complexities,
6. Continuous learning, and
7. Balancing clinical practice and entrepreneurship.

These steps resulted in the creation of AI Medica, a company poised to streamline healthcare data accessibility and decision-making. Doing so, helps physicians work more efficiently and improve quality of care.

Summary

To learn more about AI Medica and connect with Dr. Adam Robison, you can visit the official AI Medica website. For inquiries and demonstrations, you can contact Adam directly via email at adam@aimedica.ai. Additionally, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn for further information.

AI Medica offers a revolutionary solution to streamline healthcare data accessibility within Electronic Health Records (EHRs), making clinical workflows more efficient for physicians. If you're interested in exploring how AI Medica's tools can benefit your healthcare institution or clinical practice, feel free to reach out and schedule a demonstration.

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:

• AI Medica website
• Apply Discovery, Innovation, Value, and Execution to Launch Your Business – 319
• Here is the Designer of the Best Medical Image Repository Ever – 125
• Top Five Start-Up Secrets for the Physician Entrepreneur – 087
• How Blockchain Technology Can Protect Your Credentials with Dr. Leah Houston – 045

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 333

How to Practice Hospital Medicine and Found a Startup

- Interview with Dr. Adam Robison

John: I'm really happy to meet today's guest because besides being a hardworking hospitalist, he's a hospital manager and leader and founder of an EHR optimization startup company, which we'll talk about for sure. Hello, Dr. Adam Robison. Thanks for coming today.

Dr. Adam Robison: Thank you so much for having me.

John: I am very happy that you're here. This is going to be very interesting. People know that I have an affinity for hospital management work. I was a CMO of a hospital and I know a lot of physicians are always trying to get away from it, but I always like to talk to people like yourself who are in hospital leadership positions and of course, also an entrepreneur. So this is going to be fantastic.

Let's just start by you telling us a little bit about your background, education and clinical career, and then we'll get into the other stuff after that.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. My name is Adam Robison, like you said. I am an internal medicine doctor. I trained at the University of Louisville. I'm a big Cards fan. We did pretty good this year in football, so I was pretty happy about that. I've been working as a hospitalist clinically for the past seven and a half, almost eight years now. I work in a small community hospital out in the middle of nowhere in Idaho, in Twin Falls, Idaho. It's a great place to practice and I've been out here for a while and we are here for quite some time.

On top of that, I do work as a lead hospitalist for my group. There's about 120 providers and we cover about four or five sites right now. And so, that's been interesting work. I took that role all about almost three years ago, right at the middle kind of beginning stages of COVID. That was a very interesting time to take over as a leader of a large hospitalist group and try to navigate through that. That was good learning experience.

John: Yeah. I'm tempted to say, "Well, okay, how did you solve all those problems of people being too sick to work and not having enough PPE?" But we won't get into that. But it's been interesting, huh?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah, it's been interesting work. And then yeah, as you said I did found a software optimization company about five years ago, almost five years ago, 2019. And so, that's been a lot of work too. It's been a lot of interesting stuff that keeps me busy and a lot of different things to focus my attention on for sure.

John: Well, it's that second part that really got me interested. And I think our listeners are interested in things like outside work, side gig, side jobs, new careers, passive income, active income. Tell me what inspired you to start a new company? We'll see if your story jives with the others I've heard in terms of what makes people do crazy things like that.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. I've been happily married for almost 20 years, and my wife, I asked her one day this crazy idea. I said, "Hey, I want to take some money. And I have this idea of how to make the EHR better." And she said, we'll have at it. And so, basically I remember sitting in front of my computer, I was using Epic at the time, using an electronic health record and going "I have to go to a third party website to finish some work. I have to go outside the EHR on a regular basis." I'm like "I have to take data from here and go kind of chart and go over here. This seems kind of stupid. Is there a better way of doing this?"

And so, initially I tried to do what I did initially within the EHR with some templates and stuff like that. And what I was looking to do wasn't actually possible within the EHR framework, the logic and the kind of advanced computing I wanted done. And so, that's what caused me to think about is there a way of doing this? And I did a lot of research. I was reading all sorts of websites, educating myself on interoperability standards. How does that work? Is there ways of doing this outside the EHR without really tight integration customized integration? And then that's what we came across. I came across something called HL7, which if you're out there is fire. And then we learned a lot about that. Really what was interesting to me was a problem that I had clinically and could I solve it. And that's what led me to found the company, realizing that we are founding a company to develop the software and to go from there. So, that's what we did.

John: That is the common thread that I've heard before. I talked to an urologist who started a company producing underwear for patients, and whatever, other different entrepreneurs. And it's always that itch that has to be scratched. You have a problem, but you're on your own, and it's like there's got to be a solution to this problem. That is very consistent. But I'm sure the way you went about it is going to be different from others because there's a myriad number of ways of doing that. We'll get into what it does exactly, but what was your next step? You had this idea, what did you do?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. Whenever you have any idea, we're trying to find is there a market out there for it? Is this something that people would buy? Is this a universal or at least a broad enough problem that people run into it? I talked to lots of different physicians and people I knew, people at different hospitals I had connections with and asked them "Is this a similar problem you run into, or am I just dumb and nobody else has it?" And see if somebody else has already had a good solution for that. And realize, no, this is a fairly universal problem that everybody else has experienced. There's not a lot of solutions out there in the market. And so, that's when I go, okay. Now I don't know how to code or software. I don't have any experience with that. And I knew it would probably take me quite some time to do that. That's when I was looking around for people that knew how to do that and I was able to find some developers that had some of those skills. So, it's a lot.

There's stories about how to get licensing and getting approval through different EHR vendors. That was an interesting experience to go through, to try to convince a certain ethic that I was a company and that I wanted a license to put myself on there. Learning how to navigate all that, security protocols, yada, yada, yada. Just a lot of learning new things that I didn't know before.

John: Interesting. I just want to make sure I didn't miss another point. You checked around to see if this was a universal problem, and did that include other EHRs and the one that you were using?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. I talked to a bunch of physicians because of what I have learned about, and it sounds like you talked to other doctors that have used this, but physicians are the best people at solving physician problems. Not some sort of a Silicon Valley startup by two guys out of their twenties. Like "Oh, they know how to fix our problems for us." It needs to be physicians fixing physician problems. And so, I talked to a bunch of other doctors that have been in a myriad of different EHRs. I talked to people that used the big ones in the market as well as like the VA. A bunch of colleagues worked at the VA. Is this something that you'd experienced out there? And it was a pretty universal experience.

John: Tell us about the company. Let's start there. Tell us what the company is designed to do, or what kind of product or service it provides. And then I'll come back to some of these little questions in here.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. The problem that we're trying to solve was how to get data out of the EHR. It was the problem. That's a big issue. Healthcare data and how it's siloed right now is a big problem. And that's why I touched on briefly something called the HL7, which is a group, they develop these interoperability standards. It was very serendipitous timing with what I was trying to do, because during that same time, the 21st Century Cures Act had come out. And the 21st Century Cures Act for those that are familiar opens up the chart. For a lot of physicians, that meant that patients now could access certain notes in real time, which has got a lot of physicians from heartburn. All of a sudden the chart became a lot more. It used to be My Note, now it became the patient's note as well as My Note. And that was some heartburn around that.

But if you actually looked into what the 21st Century Cures Act was doing, it wasn't just making notes available to our patients, even though that's how we allowed, as physicians interpreted, it actually made the data in the EHR transparent and accessible. It had to be accessible. And it turns out, the government had adopted these things called the HL7, the standard called FHIR. And it just happened the same time while that was going on that I was trying to look to solve the same problem of how to pull data out of the EHR and do something with it meaningfully.

And so, what our tool does is it integrates directly with the patient's chart. It looks at what's going on with the patient's chart, and then pulls all the information that would be relevant to pull out, reviews the chart essentially for the user, and then provides information like MELD scores and things of that nature as well as coding recommendations all within the context of the patient's chart.

John: Interesting. Because earlier I was going to jump on the bandwagon and bad mouth some of the EHRs and EMRs. It's like you would think after helping physicians doing this for 10 or 15 years, they would've figured this out. But what you're telling me was the system wasn't necessarily ready for it and it became ready as this was implemented.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. It's been interesting. I will tell a story. I have a good friend of mine who's not a physician, and him and his wife, they recently had a child and they were receiving care locally to smaller hospitals. But the child's medical condition required it to go to seek care at a tertiary care center. And what they described, even though both centers used the same EHR, they're separate EHR instances. And so, the mother and the child had two separate records that were actually very important, but then needed to talk to each other because the conditions they were seeking care for were the same at both sites. And this is just recently.

And so, for whatever reason, there hasn't been a lot of interest in the major EHR vendors to make even within their own EHR network or broadly between EHRs, that hasn't really been an interest that they've wanted to go down either maybe for economic reasons or technical reasons, for whatever reason that may be. That interoperability standard piece has been a big problem. And they haven't been willing to fix it and the Cures Act did mandate they had to open that up. But it's going to be important on companies like mine and other companies out there to do that work for them.

John: Okay. That's good. That things are progressing, and like you say, your timing was perfect. Now, I was looking at your website and reading a little bit about this, so I just want to make it clear for the listeners because some of them might actually need to use this tool at some point or tell their hospital or somebody about it. There are different kinds of metrics, there's algorithms, there's sometimes formulas that have to be used by a clinician and trying to do something. And right now you have to either do that by hand or use a separate piece of software or an app on your phone or something, and you're integrating that. So, give us more about how that works and why it's potentially a profound app.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. Our two applications right now, we have two software pieces called Aicalc, Aicode that live within our Aimedica platform. And what they do is the Aicalc, you can imagine it just being your medical calculator, your cirrhosis scores, your chads bask, you name it. There's a million of these out. And they're actually propagating pretty rapidly now. With the advent of big data and smart computers, these models are coming out pretty rapidly. And our software basically looks at the patient's context, what kind of medical problems they have, is there other criteria, and says, oh, not only we'll calculate, oh, patient's cirrhosis, you'll need a MELD score. And then we'll give you the most up to date MELD score, give you that sort of stuff. You don't have to click around. You just click the button. You don't have to think of why you need the MELD score. We'll just review the patient chart and give you all the relevant scores and pull the data in to calculate the scores for you automatically.

Again, one thing I say to people all the time, I use this tool every day in my practice. I developed it for myself, and so I'm constantly trying to improve it. And then we also do the same thing with medical diagnosis codes. We try to optimize the best highest weighted codes for DRG waiting for hospitalizations, which is important because we can look at a patient's chart and say, "Oh, the patient actually meets sepsis criteria and you are treating of infections. That should be the code you put in the chart. Let's provide that." And that has a huge ramification. And anybody knows in the healthcare space, those DRG waiting is huge for hospitalizations reimbursement.

John: Yeah, absolutely. And someone like you, or many hospitalists kind of have looked at the Medicare guidelines and they realize that for some DRG level, whatever, it's like a three paragraph description of what goes into it. Oh, yeah, we have time to really learn all that.

Dr. Adam Robison: Doctors don't care. I tell us that you've got to optimize it and make it easy for me because I don't care if the patient needs sepsis or pneumonia or what. I know they have an infection, I know I want to treat it and I'm going to treat them appropriately. And I don't really care what came from the chart. All I care is that my patient got better because I gave appropriate care.

John: Well, this is really going to impact the CDI people, if this is going to really help them a lot. So, that's interesting. It sounds to me this business really is like a software business. And you said you're not a programmer.

Dr. Adam Robison: No.

John: So, how did you overcome that issue?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. It was interesting. I had this idea, I got to fix this problem. This is a universal problem, how do I fix it? Well, oddly enough, I had been reading in our local newspaper, and I came across this guy here locally that I knew. I didn't know him at the time that he had a development for hire company. And so, I just kind of reached out to him and I said, "Hey, I got this problem. What do you think?" And he said, "Oh, yeah, I could do that. And by the way, I'm a partner of a venture fund. Let's see how this goes. And we may invest in your company if you like the idea." And so, I pitch it to them. And then that was kind of very serendipitous. We build a minimum viable product. And after they were comfortable with me and they're kind of filling me out to see if I was not as a fly by night operation, they decided to invest in the company my idea with me as well. And so, that was how we got married with a venture fund. It was very interesting how that kind of worked out. But just from a paper article, I just happened to come across it.

John: Sometimes things just work out. I always say the RAS in our brain, the reticular activating system, once you're thinking about something, it finds things that you otherwise would never notice. Now, how did you sort of protect or did you the intellectual property of the fact that you had come up with this idea? Was it built in your partnership? How do you do that?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. That's an interesting thing. That's something we've still wrestled. When you develop software, you really can't patent software unless your approach is really unique. If you developed blockchain, if that's a whole new software thing, you could potentially pat that. But just patenting software, it's almost like copywriting software. You can copyright it, but anybody can write a piece of code. It's not a unique idea if you're writing this code using a typical programming language. That was a difficult problem. We have now developed a proprietary knowledge base and an ontology, if you will, that is IP and that is patentable. And we will be patenting that.

What has helped us right now and why we're five years into this right now, or almost five years into it, is what I'm doing is so ends up being very technically difficult. We have a bit of a mode around us because even the developers I hired, they didn't know how to do this because it's not a skillset you can hire off the shelf. And so, it was going through a lot of that. It's ended up been, like I said, a lot of it is been very serendipitous that turns out this isn't something you can even hire very easily for. And we had to train a lot of people up and work through it. But I think one thing we did was when protected the IP, we had that written to our contract with the development company. This is our stuff. And we had all well demark within the contract negotiations.

John: On the plus side, the more complicated it is, the less competitors you'll probably have doing it.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. And we're many years into this. At this point, in this SMART on FHIR space, and unfortunately I'm saying it on a widely broadcast podcast. It is a brand new space. People are starting to understand and realize that that's how you talk to these EHRs. And what's great about it's EHR agnostic. Every EHR has to be compatible with these standards.

John: Now, one thing I'm not an expert on at all, and I've heard there's different ways of getting investors, like venture capital, angel investing, this kind of thing. But did you end up just getting the one entity to support this when you got your partner? Or did you go beyond that?

Dr. Adam Robison: No. We've had a raise. We've done a few raises now. It's been interesting. That's been a lot of work to raise money. I funded the initial development of the minimum viable product, but to actually bring on employees full time, that's not something I could afford to do. I don't have those kind of deep pockets. And so, what we did, we raised it through the initial investor network that we were introduced for that venture fund, and then raise through their network. And that got us a certain point.

And then when you raise money, every time you raise money, you're looking to say, "I'm going to raise money to hit these milestones." And so, every time we raise money, "This money was raised to hit these milestones. We've hit those milestones, now help us, we're going to raise money again to hit these milestones." You're trying to show forward momentum every time you're raising money that you've got this money. We did X, Y, Z with this money, and now we're going to do these next set of milestones, which you're going to further grow the company or hit these metrics and milestones. When we've raised money through different networks, that's how we've done it. And so, that's where we're at right now. We've raised I think about a million and a half over the last two years to expedite development and move to things forward.

John: Nice. Yeah, it's not like something you can build in your basement.

Dr. Adam Robison: No. And it's a lot of learning. I think anybody looking to start a business, just be prepared to learn a lot, because even though you may be smart as a doctor and you're very intelligent, be prepared to be very humble because you have literally no idea. You're going to have to learn a lot, fly by the seat of your pants. And that's kind of why people become entrepreneurs. They are interested in learning that stuff. But yeah, I've had to learn a lot and I've made a lot of dumb mistakes and all sorts of stuff. Lots of stories to share about that.

John: Oh, I can imagine. But it can be exciting and physicians can learn anything really as long as you have the time. That might be an issue for you as the thing gets bigger. Tell us where it is right now. You've been doing this for five years. Obviously, there was a whole ramp up. Do you have clients? Is this being live? Is it working?

Dr. Adam Robison: Oh yeah. Like I said, we have two clients right now. We have two head systems right now. The biggest thing actually, we just finished up our installation at the VA. That was a big deal to get our software working. If you're familiar with the VA or worked at VA, they have an antiquated system called CPRS. It's been around for a long time. And they've just recently built on a platform onto their CPRS that's called Lighthouse, that's compatible with SMART on FHIR. And so, our tool, we're the first third party vendor. They were looking for a solution like ours, and we met them and talked to them and they talked to some other people that could do something similar, but we were a better fit just because of our tight integration with the SMART on FHIR standards. And that has allowed us to work with them.

We just finished our deploy there. We are in the process of several other health systems. We have relationships with the biopharmaceutical company as well as a clinical research company that's looking to use our tool to help automate and augment a data retrieval from the EHR to help expedite clinical research. And so, that's what we're working now.

John: Okay. Is it to the point now where some of the medical caregivers, the physicians, APNs, whoever, are they seeing the benefits at this point?

Dr. Adam Robison: Oh yeah, we have. People love the tool. It's being used. We have some business intelligence software. We monitor the use of software, how are people using it so we can make sure we can improve it. It's not quite exponential growth in users, but we're seeing lots of people using it almost on a regular basis. And it's now becoming the way you do things now with our sites, because why would you go to a third party website or go to some other site if it can go to HER? And it's a button click, you don't have to do more work. So, it's obviously much more efficient.

John: Yeah. Nice. Do you have different formulas or different tools available over time? Or is there a list of 10 or 20 or 1,000?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. Right now we have 50 or 60 medical functions automated within the chart. The ones that are commonly used. We're adding more as they come out in literature writing more. We're branching up a behavioral health space now with some of those assessments that need to be done. They're often done on paper or through PDF forms, so we're bringing them to the platform as well.

We are really just looking depending on what the clients need. Really I tell people all the time, the hardest part with this is actually just being integrated in the EHR and getting data out of it. For building a medical function, a medical calculator form, you need to get data out of HER. That's easy now. We can build that in a few days. You name it, we can build it because that's not hard. The hard part is actually integrating the EHR. That's the hard part.

John: I like that interface. That might not be the right term. But are you doing studies to see if this improves the efficiency of the physicians?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah, we will be. That's going to be next year. We have a couple sites that are interested in doing that. Our Richmond VA site, which we're in the process of finalizing that, they're interested in doing that kind of work. We'll be working with them to hopefully show that this is efficient, which anecdotally, of course it is. But we'll be able to show that and prove that with the data collected.

John: Yeah. The thing I hear from physicians, I have to go home and do an hour or two of notes or whatever. Now that's oftentimes the clinic, but still even hospital notes sometimes, you just can't get them done. You have to go back. Do you have a lot of capacity now? If people listen to this, we don't have a million listeners, but a lot of these physicians might still be working clinically. How do they get ahold of you or the Aimedica to learn more about this? Is it ready for that?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. We're ready. We're actively taking on clients now. Like I said, we're in the process. That's going to be our big Q1 push. We had a couple clients that we're working with. Now, we're ready to go live with everybody else. And so, that's Q1, we're working on lining them up. You go to website aimedica.ai. It's easy. Easy website to remember. Just go there to contact our page, we'll be happy to do a demo for our clients.

John: Okay, aimedica.ai.

Dr. Adam Robison: That's correct.

John: All right. And if they have more questions, they can throw a note in LinkedIn to you, perhaps. Do you have time for that?

Dr. Adam Robison: Yes. Or you can email me at adam@aimedica.ai. It's very easy.

John: All right. This has been very interesting. I don't think I have a lot of other questions. Let me ask you this. What if I was going to go to my local hospital and say, "Hey, this thing sounds pretty cool." Who would I go to?

Dr. Adam Robison: You want to go to your chief information officer. They would request us through. Most of the EHR vendors have some sort of app store lineup that we would go through.

John: And what kind of presentation do you do at a system or at a hospital in terms of do you go on site, do you do it online? Do you just send some written materials? I'm just curious about how you're handling that part.

Dr. Adam Robison: Yeah. Typically, we'll do a demo on Zoom or some sort of video conferencing site. Wherever they want to use, we'll use that and we'll demo the software in a real environment so you can see how it works.

John: All right. Did I forget to ask any questions or is there anything else you want to tell us either about juggling being a hospitalist and a co-founder? Technically you do have a partner, but you were the one that created it, so I guess you are the founder. Juggling those things or about Aimedica?

Dr. Adam Robison: No. I do have hobbies that I use to not do work. I think it's important to have those so you're not doing it. I play piano. I do a couple of things to get my mind off when I have a couple minutes of downtime, which is I think important as you're looking to try to do other things with your time.

John: What do you think is going to happen with you? If this gets really big, it's going to take more and more management. Hopefully your employer at the hospital is not listening, but they probably know you got this thing going on. What do you kind of think will happen long term? Are you going to become like a CMIO in a hospital informatics in this technology? Or do both for a long time? What do you think?

Dr. Adam Robison: I'll tell you John. I actually love being a clinical doctor. I love taking care of patients. Maybe not as much as I've had in the past. I'd probably wind that down a little bit because I do work quite a bit. What I see myself probably doing the next 5, 10 years as they see guys up and it's profitable and we're able to keep lights on, is probably work for them full-time and work for my company full-time and then still see patients. Because as a chief medical officer of the company and using the tool, I find by me using the product and practicing patients, I really understand what are the problems we're trying to solve. I feel like if I remove myself from clinical practice 100%, my utility, the company to help make these tools better, I think it becomes limited as well.

John: That reminds me. Cleveland Clinic, it's a pretty big place. And I don't know about the current CEO, but the former CEO is still clinically practicing while he was running that monstrosity. So, you can keep practicing probably as long as you like, and if you're enjoying it.

Dr. Adam Robison: I do enjoy it.

John: All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have. I really appreciate that. I'm going to put the links in the show notes. Again, it's Aimedica and I've been talking to Dr. Adam Robison. I'm going to have to have you come back in a couple years and see where things have gone. And maybe by then I'll have invested in it as it'll be a listed stock or something. All right. Thanks for being here, Adam. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Adam Robison: Absolutely. Thank you.

John: Okay. Bye-bye.

Dr. Adam Robison: Bye.

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The post How to Practice Hospital Medicine and Found a Startup appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Interview with Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters

In today's episode, Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters explains the 4 important factors to consider to successfully launch your business. She is a consultant for “sciencepreneurs,” helping them design successful commercialization strategies.

Dr. Hein-Peters is a physician with over 30 years of experience working for pharmaceutical and medical device companies. She helped introduce new drugs and vaccines to the market. Her career highlights the impactful nature of nonclinical careers like hers. In her case, she helped develop and market innovations that reduce disease prevalence and mortality.

Our Episode Sponsor

This week's episode sponsor is the From Here to There: Leveraging Virtual Medicine Program from Sandrow Consulting.

Are you ready to say goodbye to burnout, take control of your schedule, increase your earnings, and enjoy more quality time with your family? You’re probably wondering how to do that without getting a new certification or learning a whole new set of nonclinical skills.

Here's the answer: The quickest way to achieve more freedom and joy is to leverage virtual medicine.

Dr. Cherisa Sandrow and I discussed this in Podcast Episode 266. Cherisa and her team are now preparing to relaunch their comprehensive program for building and running your own telehealth business.

If you want to learn the tools and skills you need to live life on your own terms – then you should check it out today. After completing the 10-week program, you’ll be ready to take your career to the next level.

The program starts soon, and there are a limited number of openings. To help you get a glimpse into the program, Sandrow Consulting is offering a series of FREE Webinars. Go to nonclinicalphysicians.com/freedom to sign up and learn why telehealth is the quickest way to begin your career journey.

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.

Launch Your Business: A Conversation with Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters embarked on a remarkable journey from her beginnings as a psychiatrist to her current role as an advisor and consultant in the dynamic realm of MedTech and digital tech startups. Her transition was driven by a passion for healthcare innovation in the pharmaceutical and medical device industries.

Over the course of three decades, she played pivotal roles in launching groundbreaking drugs and vaccines that visibly impacted disease rates and mortality.

Recognizing that innovation thrives in startups, Dr. Hein-Peters pivoted to support emerging companies in achieving their strategic goals. Her mission became clear: to bridge the gap between innovative ideas and commercial success.

Drawing from her wealth of knowledge, she developed a strategic framework called DIVE (Discovery, Innovation, Value, and Execution) to guide startups to launch their business through the steps needed to bring healthcare solutions to the market. Kasia helps those whom she calls sciencepreneurs translate their innovative visions into tangible successes.

Seize the Moment: Empowering Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

It's a difficult but rewarding path. And I would say that with the most structured approach, diving into it, it's not so difficult. I am encouraging everyone who thinks about entrepreneurship to try to dive with my help. – Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters

Summary

The BEST way to contact her is to connect with Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters on LinkedIn.

You can also explore her website, abantescientific.com, for valuable healthcare entrepreneurship resources that will help you launch your business. She highlights common pitfalls in healthcare startups and the key role of marketing. Dr. Hein-Peters also discusses the growing impact of Artificial Intelligence in healthcare, making her an invaluable resource for clinicians interested in AI applications.

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. Kasia Hein-Peters LinkedIn Profile
• Abante Scientific
• How to Be an Orthopedic Surgeon and Venture Capitalist – 117
• How Revenue Cycle AI Can Save Small Group Practices – 205
• From Here to There: Leveraging Virtual Medicine – 10-Week Comprehensive Telehealth Program
• NewScr!pt

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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 319

Apply Discovery, Innovation, Value and Execution to Launch Your Business

- Interview with Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters

John: I'm really excited about having today's guest here. She started as a psychiatrist, moved into the pharma industry. We did a lot with marketing and promotion of new drugs. And lately, in the last, I don't know, since 2014, she's been involved with consulting and teaching entrepreneurs how to start and promote their businesses. So, with that, let me just introduce Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters. Hello and welcome.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm really honored.

John: Oh, this is going to be fun because we do have physicians who are thinking "I'm just kind of ready to move beyond my clinical practice", whether it's because of burnout or because they have a great idea. We've interviewed many entrepreneurs in the past, people that have done startups and even involved venture capital and so forth. You have a lot of experience and you have a model I want to talk about today. So why don't you start by just telling us a little bit about your background, and then we'll go from there.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Great, thank you. As you already said, I am trained as a physician and did residency in psychiatry, and it was a long time ago in Poland. And there after a few years of practicing as a psychiatrist, I started working for the pharmaceutical industry and eventually moved to the United States with my employer. I worked for Merck, I worked for Eli Lilly, Sanofi, Novartis. And finally I worked for a medical device company called Terumo. It's a Japanese company. All in the United States.

And it was probably very lucky in my career because I was always doing very interesting things. And this is introducing new drugs and new medical devices to the market. And what really kept me in the industry for so many years, about 30 years, is the fact that we did have a massive impact on diseases and mortality. And especially my 12 years in companies that manufacture vaccines was very rewarding because each time when you introduce a vaccine on a massive scale, the disease starts going down and it's very visible and it's visible rather quickly. So I think very rewarding career and a lot of product launches.

John: Now, the vaccines that you work on, just to kind of give us some kind of conception of this. Were those vaccines that we would recognize? Were they pretty niche or were they something that's pretty broadly?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: One definitely you would recognize. It was Gardasil in 2006, the cervical cancer vaccine. And then other vaccines that I launched was one of the meningitis vaccines. I launched one of the combination pediatric vaccines, but they are probably not so easy to recognize. And also at dengue vaccine, which was not launched in the US. It was launched in dengue endemic countries.

John: Yeah. There's been a lot of controversy with COVID vaccines but we sometimes forget if you go back, vaccines have improved health and preventive a lot of disease when it's done properly.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Exactly, yes. Yes. That's very true.

John: Now you decided though, at some point, like you said, you were doing this for I don't know, 30 years, more or less, and then you started taking that knowledge and helping others. So how did that happen?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: It was also kind of a reflection during the pandemic. And this was somehow based also on the COVID vaccines. I think we all probably noticed that the most successful companies that introduced the COVID vaccines were actually starting companies. And I obviously don't forget that BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to get a bigger scale, and it worked very successfully. But Moderna and BioNTech are the big heroes of developing very new and very effective COVID vaccines and very quickly. While some very established companies, vaccine manufacturers actually didn't, despite trying.

And actually to some degree, it proves the point that the real breakthrough innovation is happening in startups. Bigger companies are very good at taking some of the innovation that was developed, turning them into platforms, optimizing these platforms. But breakthrough innovation happens in startups, and yet, startups are not very successful. Only 10% of new technologies actually are successful in the market. Because there are also many other companies like Moderna and BioNTech, and they did not succeed.

I kind of always knew that breakthrough innovation happens mostly in startups and smaller companies. But I think at this point I said that I really want to make these smaller companies, emerging companies more successful. Because on one hand, they develop these breakthrough innovations. On the other hand, they are at a disadvantage versus bigger companies who have thousands of people and million dollars in budgets.

So, how can I use the knowledge that I acquired over the last 30 years and really help the startup founders to be more successful with their breakthrough innovations? This was the goal of leading the corporate world and working with them.

John: Okay. You identified a lot of the success strategies and tactics and so forth. I think basically from what I know, just looking at your website and LinkedIn where people can find you, which we'll talk about later is that you've actually kind of developed a model that you use when you're helping these entrepreneurs. I suppose each one's a little different as to what they really need, but I thought it would be interesting to hear at least an overview of your model and might give people ideas of how they can help their own businesses.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yeah, definitely. I come at this with the idea that you should not divide your strategy too much between different functions. Sometimes during many incubators that these founders belong to, they are taught the IP strategy and the regulatory strategy and the commercial strategy, and yet another strategy. And this all feels a little bit separated different strategies.

What I try to do is to show the founders that they really need to have one well connected horizontal strategy. I call it horizontal because it connects all these different aspects of the strategy, but at the same time, they cannot disintegrate into silos. This has to be connected.

I developed a framework that I call DIVE, and it stands for Discovery, Innovation, Value and Execution. And these are four aspects that any enterprise strategy, any startup strategy should have.

Discovery is for market discovery. What do you need to know about the market, your future customers, the patient journey, the unmet need? How do you understand it on a qualitative level, but also how do you quantify the unmet need, which then leads to quantifying the market? That's one big piece. And you have to do it all the time. You have to be connected with the market all the time.

The biggest piece of the discovery comes at the beginning when a startup founder, a sciencepreneurs, as I call them, starts developing a kind of focusing on the specific unmet need, trying to understand it better, and then trying to develop the product. When the product gets into the research and development, I call it innovation phase, because you really are developing an innovative product and how to develop the innovative product.

What are these unique things that your product needs to have to be differentiated in the market? Then the value piece is still a marketing strategy. How do you increase the value of your product or service if you are maybe a SaaS company, your product or service in the marketplace? So that's a classical marketing strategy.

And then execution is how do you execute your strategy. There are two aspects of it. There's a go-to market strategy, and then there is a scaling up of the company. This all kind of constitutes the company strategy, and as I said, it has to be one whole strategy well connected between different functions than kind of contribute to it.

John: A question that came up when I was thinking about this, and as you were talking is I guess what I don't quite understand, and you can explain is what type of clients would you be dealing with? In other words, where do they come from? Are there many physicians involved in this? Just sort of describe the type of people and clients that you work with.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I specifically address my consulting to people who may not have in the past a very deep commercial experience. I think as I mentioned before, I call them sciencepreneurs. These are the doctors, scientists, engineers, some data scientists who have fantastic ideas. They do have some understanding of the healthcare ecosystem, and they do have understanding of the unmet need. But they actually never commercialize the product.

And I think that lack of commercialization experience may negatively influence even the way how they develop their product. I think I mostly address this DIVE framework to people who have scientific minds and want to continue doing science. I'm trying to avoid the marketing lingo. I'm trying to avoid some buzzwords. I'm not trying to teach in the marketing per se. I'm trying to show them how to think strategically about the entire enterprise and different steps that they have to take on their path toward successfully commercializing their product.

John: Interesting. Now, some of the guests I've had, and actually listeners have talked to me about, it seems like one of the biggest struggles is putting that all together when you're looking for cash, you're looking for an investor. And there's different types. I'm not an expert by any means. So, I'm assuming that what you're doing is assisting in that because you're helping them sort of structure and strategically plan and do all these things. How does that help with getting money? And are these angel investors, are these some kind of private equity? Is it all in between? It'd be kind of interesting to hear what your comments are about that.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: It actually helps enormously because there are many consultants who focus on pitch decks, and they say "I will help you with the pitch deck." Fine. They are probably very good communication specialist, and they can help with the pitch decks. I'm not saying that founders shouldn't do it, they should.

However, without a strong strategy behind a pitch deck, we are still pitching maybe the wrong strategy, and it's visible to investors. I think that the pitch deck has two components, actually. It has a strategic component and it has a communication component. And I think that we shouldn't forget about that. So I do help with pitch decks as well. But I always try to reorient the founder on having a really good strategy, really well communicated, and not just a well communicated, but strategy, because it'll not get them funding anyway. Because the investors, they can see through it.

John: Can you give us some examples? It may not have to be the examples of someone you're actually working with now, because that would probably not be appropriate, but I'm just trying to visualize what kind of life scientists or physician entrepreneurs would maybe get to a point where they might say "I need some help." Just examples, maybe from the past.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I will tell you what questions I'm getting, what discussions I'm getting into the most. One discussion I'm very frequently getting into when I discuss the strategy with sciencepreneurs is actually the regulatory strategy. And I'm talking specifically about devices that are FDA regulated.

And so, this question comes up with early startups because they are trying to design their data generation strategy for clinical trials if they have to do clinical trials or any other demonstration project. And the discussion that we typically have is "What is the goal of your regulatory strategy?" And they're like, "Oh, I want to get my product to the market as soon as I can."

But then what is your differentiation of your product? What is your label? What your label will say about your product? And they frequently choose that path of the least resistance which is somehow understandable. But on the other hand, they're losing the ability to drive the value of the product in the market through a very strong label.

That's usually the first discussion that we have. Is it better to get to market fast but have an undifferentiated product? Or is it better to get the market a little later, will cost a little more, but then having a differentiated product? And that's a trade-off, but that's very rarely on top of their mind because many regulatory consultants, maybe they don't ask them the right questions. They say how can I get to the market fastest, not how can I be the most successful in the market. That's a very interesting question that comes up.

The second type of questions come around go-to market strategy. Is it better to position my product in the outpatient clinic? Is it that position in an inpatient setting? And there are a lot of data that have to come into informing a decision like that. That can be both, but it probably cannot be both at the same time, because again, companies have to prioritize which market segments they want to go after.

And here we are frequently dealing with FOMO, the fear of missing out. It almost feels like if I pick one market segment, I will lose the opportunities in the other. But it's really not true. Especially a small company, focusing the resources in one market segment that has reasonable potential and high ability to win is a better strategy than trying to scratch the surface of multiple market segments. I think these are types of decisions and discussions that I am having most of the time with the founders.

John: Now, you kind of touched on the idea of going in the wrong direction. Maybe even I could take it from another perspective and look at it differently, just simply, what are the most common mistakes that you see? Maybe you've already mentioned a couple of them, but what would you say are the mistakes that really overzealous entrepreneurs say, "Okay, I'm going to bring this new device?" And I do want to ask you about AI in a minute, but what are those mistakes that you've identified?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I think a very classical mistake is to focus on product at the expense of focusing on the commercial strategy. And again, commercial strategy does influence the product development. So let's not forget about that. That's why developing at least some basics of the future commercial strategy early on, during product development is necessary. And I see that the founders frequently try to do it in a very linear way. "I do my product first. I don't have time now to focus on commercial. I'll do it later. Let me focus on the product first."

I understand that of course, there is a time when the most of the focus is on the developing of the product, but this has to be with a specific goal in mind. So, how will I market this product? What will be my profile target? What is my target product profile in the market? So, is my minimum viable product actually differentiated enough that I will succeed when I launch it?

All these questions should be answered earlier. And then obviously a company should focus on the product development, but not really push the commercial discussion for later. That's one. The second really big mistake is to jump from product development to sales immediately. So if a founder has a product, it's reaching the regulatory stage, most likely will be approved.

And then they start thinking about sales without thinking about marketing. What does it do to a product? Marketing is the return on investment function. Marketing helps founders to get the highest return with the lowest investment. While if you skip this stage, basically do not develop the value piece in the DIVE framework, jump directly to execution, I think that there's a lot of churn happening with the sales team who doesn't necessarily have clarity about the target segment, may not have clarity about messages, may not have clarity about target customer personas, et cetera.

Because that's all the value development piece. That's another one. Thinking that sales and marketing is one, but it's not. Marketing is a very separate function, and marketing also helps to develop the market itself. Sometimes there needs to be some medical education for prescribers because it's a new solution.

AI is actually a great example of somehow this thing that's coming at us and very few prescribers, clinicians understand that, understand how it works. It's kind of a black box for many. So, how do we educate them in a way that makes them comfortable using some of the AI enabled solutions?

John: Okay. AI. You brought AI up. Because I do have several listeners actually, people that I've been on Mastermind calls with that are really interested in AI. Some have certifications in various types of AI, I guess. But what is going on? How can physicians get more involved in AI if it's something that really interests them? Do you have any advice about that?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I do actually, and I'd like to recommend the organization that is called AIMed, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. This organization runs trainings and conferences specifically for physicians. I know that there's a lot of education and events around AI. I would say that many of them are highly technical and their audience is mostly people that already have some data science background or IT background. And they're run by data scientists and IT specialists.

Now AIMed took a different approach and I think it's much more suitable for doctors. It's actually doctors in collaboration with data scientists who run these programs. And they are specifically meant for doctors and also for healthcare administration. So I think that's a good organization to be associated with. And in addition to that, there is kind of a sister organization called ABAIM, American Board of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine that runs trainings and board certifications for physicians. So, that's the one that I did.

Obviously, it does explain the technology behind, but is much more focused on the clinical uses of AI. And I think that's what physicians need. They need to understand where AI is really good already, where is it going and how they can kind of start using this without creating risk for their practices or clinics.

John: Okay. I'll put links in the show notes to those organizations if the people have a specific interest in AI. So, what kind of client that might be listening, we have physicians who have some clinical background. Not all of them, some of them have done med school and really didn't do a residency. They could be doing different things, but I know some of them are interested in starting their own businesses or developing a startup. What would be the ideal person to come to you? Someone who hasn't even started yet, or someone who really has something, they have an idea, they maybe have a prototype if it's a product or if it's a software or whatever? And how far along in that journey would they probably be most help by getting someone like you to help them kind of pull it together? Because most of us have some kind of narrow focus, as you said.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yeah. I think that the services that I offer and help that I offer to sciencepreneurs can help them at any stage. And I think it's very important to adjust what I do to what they need. I would say that anyone can contact me, and we definitely can have a discussion. There are no strings attached. I will not try to sell them services that they don't need. I will try to assess their strategic thinking at the stage where they are and see if I can help them at that stage.

Now, some of my more developed services are better suited for companies that already exist. A company needs to exist, and I can help with things like building capabilities, assessing their capabilities versus their strategy. Is there any gap there? Building capabilities, scaling up the company.

I think probably the most value they can get from my services is when they start scaling up the company and when they start thinking about commercialization. These two stages. Now if they want to pick up my brain at earlier stages, I'm very happy to have a chat.

John: Okay. You can be found on LinkedIn.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yes.

John: And then you have a website?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I do have a website, abantescientific.com. I just would like to say that I'm redeveloping it right now, so it's not completely to date in terms of my services. That's why I encourage to connect with me through LinkedIn at this point. My website should be much better developed within a month or so.

John: Now, the other thing I would mention because we talked about it and you have actually done some live events and actually created something that's even asynchronous. It's courses or something like that.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yeah.

John: Which you say right now, you can get them to that if they need that or if you feel that's appropriate, but first contact you and then see if they're appropriate for using those kind of resources. Is that correct?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yes, definitely. I have also some free resources that I'm very willing to share. I have a newsletter on LinkedIn as well that I encourage everyone to subscribe to. It's specifically meant for founders of life science and digital health startups. And there are a lot of free resources that I'm very, very willing to share.

John: Okay. If somebody out there is really creative, they've got some great ideas, maybe they've already started developing a new business, something in tech, something related to delivering whether it's medical devices or pharmaceuticals or tech, then it would make sense to at least follow you on LinkedIn and then at some point even reach out and pick your brain and maybe even engage you for consulting, if they think that's useful.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yes. Or just an initial discussion. As I said, I don't charge anything just to chat with someone about the strategy and understand them a little better and maybe give some expert advice during the initial conversation as well. And then if we find out that I can help, then we can definitely sign some consulting agreement, and I'll be very happy to help.

John: I think that's really useful because I get calls sometimes and they'll say "I'm interested in doing this. And I started working on it, but I don't really know where to go and I don't really have any of that expertise." And so this is a good resource to have. I'll definitely put your LinkedIn and the website at least for now, because you know what? Once it's on there, it's on there forever.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yes.

John: Hopefully that will get them wherever they need to go, even a year from now. All right. I think we've covered everything I want to talk about today. Any last minute advice or just last advice for people that have been sort of thinking about doing something crazy with a new device or a new business and they've just been putting it off? In any words of wisdom or encouragement?

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: I think it's a very rewarding path. It's a difficult but rewarding path. And I would say that with the most structured approach, diving into it, it's not so difficult. I am encouraging everyone who thinks about entrepreneurship to try to dive with my help.

John: Can they, at least at the beginning, do this thing part-time and try and see if they're getting some traction before giving up other income? Even though it may be burning out a little bit, but I would think you could at least start part-time.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yes, it's possible. And I see a lot of founders starting part-time. It's very difficult to quit your job and put all your eggs in one basket, especially it's so risky. I actually wouldn't even recommend that. I think doing this part-time is fine at the beginning.

John: And then you can just get a sense of okay, this looks like it's going to catch on. It looks like it's going to be successful. Nothing's guaranteed, but at least then you have something to base a more reasonable decision on.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Yeah.

John: All right, Kasia. This has been really interesting and fun. I thank you very much for being with me today. I'm going to have to check back with you in about a year from now or so and see how things are going.

Dr. Kasia Hein-Peters: Very gladly. Thank you, John, for inviting me. It was a pleasure.

John: You're welcome. Bye-bye.

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The post Apply Discovery, Innovation, Value, and Execution to Launch Your Business – 319 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Is it possible to establish a concierge practice while still in training? Dr. Brook Choulet is still in her child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship and runs a growing practice in Scottsdale Arizona.

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.

How to Establish a Concierge Practice 

Brook starts by explaining why she started her concierge practice. Then she explains how she boot-strapped the practice, starting with just one associate, while still in residency. She also explains the basic steps, from forming an LLC to finding her first location to see patients.

Just go for it… If I can do it with very little experience… then I have no doubt anyone can do it at any stage of their career. – Dr. Brook Choulet

We also discuss which other specialties would work best in a concierge model like hers. She runs a cash-only practice and is funding the growth of the business organically. And she explains how this model eliminates most of the headaches of typical employment.

Growing Her Business

Brook has hired therapists and wellness experts to meet the needs of her patients and clients. She started by sharing office space and has now moved the business into a dedicated office. The practice is now expanding to a second location.

Summary

If a psychiatric resident can open a concierge practice, certainly other physicians should explore this type of practice. It generally provides for a more balanced lifestyle that can also be quite lucrative. As the physician shortage grows, and insurance deductibles increase, patients will be more willing to use a direct-pay model to meet their healthcare needs.

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

Links for Today's Episode:

• Choulet Wellness
• Brook Choulet MD Website
• Dr. Brook Choulet's LinkedIn Page
• Entrepreneur and Business Owner – Interview with Dr. Mike Woo-Ming – 019
• How to Help Committed Colleagues Heal the World – 186
• Can Meditation Offer Help for Burned-Out Physicians? – 172

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 210

Want to Establish a Concierge Practice Before Finishing Your Fellowship?

Interview with Dr. Brook Choulet

John: When we as physicians become bored or frustrated with our practice or burnt out, our first instinct might be to leave clinical medicine. But we should stop to consider whether a different boss or maybe different partners or a different department in a big company or a different corporation or practice setting itself might be a really effective alternative. I know we talk about nonclinical careers here, but definitely non-traditional practice is another alternative. So, today we're speaking with a physician who has created a practice that avoids many of the traps of corporate medicine while she's still in training, if you can believe that. So, Dr. Brook Choulet, welcome to the podcast.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Thank you so much for having me here today.

John: Once I heard your story and I was talking with Brent Lacey, one of my podcasting friends, I thought this is really interesting because the things that you've implemented, I think are very instructive for many physicians who maybe feel trapped. And I thought, "Wow, this will be very good to share". Before we get into the specifics, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and education?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. And after many winters, my family moved to California. I finished high school in California, and then I ended up going to Kansas City, Missouri for the six-year bachelor MD program. My mom had actually done the same program and she really thought it was valuable and a good use of time. So, I was excited to head out there. I spent several winters again in Kansas City, and then I matched out in Phoenix for adult psychiatry residency at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Phoenix. I did three years there, and then I transitioned to a child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship. And I'm currently in my last year of fellowship.

John: Awesome. That should be keeping you pretty busy but I think you have some other what we might call a side hustle or side gigs that you've been doing. Why don't you tell us what those are?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure, just to name a few. The first thing I did when the pandemic hit was I used some of that downtime when the clinic was in transition and residency to become a real estate agent. And that initially took me about a month and a half to complete that process and get my Arizona real estate license.

Then I started kind of thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life after I was done with training and really decided I wanted to build a practice where things were on my terms and not the insurance company's terms. And I could actually spend time with my patients and spend valuable time hearing what was going on, hearing what their current life situation is. And that really led me to build this concierge psychiatry practice out here in Scottsdale. I started working on that in residency and it kind of took off from there.

John: Help define for us what concierge psychiatry would be?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure. There are a lot of different definitions of what concierge medicine is. I think to a lot of people, they might assume that it's a membership-based practice where you pay a retainer or you pay a certain monthly fee for access to the clinic. I think that psychiatry is such a unique field where you really have to connect with the person and the physician that you're going to. I wanted to avoid that model and I ended up just choosing a fee for service hourly rate model to really give not only the patients flexibility of where they wanted to get their treatment but also to make it more approachable for many patients who might struggle with the thought of a large retainer or membership-based fee.

John: Okay. That's awesome. And listeners, I want to make it clear. We are not going to go back and talk about real estate today. We're going to be talking about this aspect of concierge practice and maybe the general topic of just designing a practice that really meets your needs as a physician, rather than being sucked into corporate medicine, I guess, as some of us call it.

So, your concierge model is you have an hourly rate and you deal directly with patients. What about the payment? Is there any middleman in that payment model or not?

Dr. Brook Choulet: The clinic collects payments directly through credit card, we use Square and we use an EMR system where actually Square is integrated into the EMR system. So, there are actually no manual payments being run. You can set up a service, set up the price for it. And an hour after that visit it automatically charges for that service fee. And it really cuts out even anyone in the clinic having to run cards.

John: There's no billing per se or anything like that. Can patients take the information and then file a claim with their insurance company if they have one?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yeah. There are a couple of companies out there. There are reimbursed five, better claims and they can assist kind of expediting that out of network claim, but that is up to the patient to do that part. The clinic is just responsible for providing that superbill.

John: That sounds like how it was maybe 30, 40 years ago when we would just have a paper, superbill and we would give it to the patient and say, "Well, this is what you owe us". And going through this, the rigmarole of trying to build these days, oftentimes even a small practice has hired like two or three people just to do that.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yes, that is exactly why I looked at several different systems. And I really wanted to make things as efficient as possible, both on the clinic end and for the patients, because even nowadays I get invoices from outpatient clinics that are coming in paper mail, it has some access code. It wants you to go to a website, enter it, manually enter the payment. And for both the clinic and the patient, that seems really inefficient.

John: From what I know a practice like that is, like you said, it's more efficient and I use the word parsimonious, but you don't have to have a lot of staff to run it because you're spending the time with the patient generally and you have maybe a little bit of support. Tell us what that practice actually looks like in terms of staffing at this point.

Dr. Brook Choulet: We actually just went through a little bit of a hiccup, where the one staff we did have decided not to answer the phone and that's a pretty critical role in a clinic where we are providing such a high level of service. And so, we're currently in transition, but we have new staff starting on Monday. To answer your question, other than the physicians and the therapists that are talking directly to their patients, we just have one other staff member at all times.

John: There was a model in family medicine a while back, I forget what we called it, but it basically eliminated all the support. And there was actually a physician who was answering the phones, doing the billing, and running the EMR, but it was very limited and he spent basically 90% of his time seeing patients and didn't have to leave and have a receptionist, even though the office was open four or five days a week. There are ways of doing this in an efficient way that still serves patients very well. right.

I feel like there's still a lot of unknowns in how you put this together. How did this come about? You were in your residency, now you're in your fellowship. Maybe walk us through the steps, the "a-ha" moment, or what really inspired you to do this. And then what were some of the smaller steps in making this happen?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure. The smaller step is kind of what happened initially. That's building an LLC, getting a tax ID, opening a bank account. Kind of just some of those basic necessities of starting a business. Then you have to have your malpractice in place, consult some attorneys to figure out a business structure since there are so many different ways to structure a business. I think that's really critical. Without that step, you don't know where to go and don't know how to hire people. So, I think that was a big step.

And then really how this came about was almost random if you want to say. I had already started the practice myself, just seeing patients. I have an office and executive suites, very low overhead, just kind of doing my own thing. I was getting a facial and talking to the girl that was doing the facial about how unhappy she was in her current location. Just hearing some of the struggles she was going through. And I was talking to her about my desire or passion to build a large wellness center here.

We started talking and I kind of offered her a position on the spot. I'm like, I think it would be great if you join the center. I am not sure what I'm building yet, but I think you'd be a great addition. So, that's really the moment that put almost all the pressure on me. Like now I have to figure something out. I have to expand. Executive suites won't work because, in the state of Arizona, you need a sink and an aesthetician's room and executive suites don't have sinks. So, I started considering a larger plan. So, it really kind of grew from that point.

John: Okay. So, you're hitting on different things, mental health and then wellness and aesthetics. Has that grown from there to more services? You mentioned earlier like a therapist. So how does it kind of look now from the involvement of staff?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Initially it was really just me. Then I started talking to the facialist and then I started thinking, "Well, now we're focusing on mental and physical health and mind and body wellness and seeking inner peace and self-love and gratitude". So, I started thinking of what other services would be nice for that kind of space. Because right now, in Scottsdale at least, there are a lot of therapy clinics with a lot of therapists. And there are a lot of psychiatry clinics with psychiatrists, but there's no kind of wellness center with those two. And then separately, there are meds that fall on almost every block of Scottsdale. So, it grew into adding therapists, the facial aesthetician, a nutrition coach, and gathered this big team of people. And we're planning to move into a large space on north Scottsdale Road in November.

John: Okay. Is it the kind of thing where the patients will, and I guess clients if you're talking more of the med spa type thing, but they'll kind of self-select what they need and want? If you've got therapists, of course, there's going to be a lot of overlap with the psychiatry side of things. So, how do you anticipate that will work or has it worked?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure. I think a lot of times people have been calling saying, "I'm looking for a psychiatrist" and then you kind of triage them on the phone "Are you looking for medication management? Are you looking for therapy?" And then come to find out, maybe they meant therapy. So, I think the triaging part is really important because sometimes clients won't know what they're calling for. They'll just call because they want one of the services and then it's kind of our job to help match them to what they're looking for.

I think that's where that staff is really critical to the whole process because a lot of the private psychiatrists, at least here, will have all their new patient calls go to voicemail. And then they'll just answer them at the end of the day. But what I'm finding these days, as people want that kind of instant reward or instant kind of answer, so when they call, they really expect to talk to someone and that's something I wanted to provide.

John: Well, we all have our own experiences and our families and so forth where there's a need and when you need help, you need help. You want to get some kind of an answer or direction, even if the answer is "Well, we can't help you, but we can send you somewhere else". And it always amazed me why the psychiatrist didn't have closer relationships with therapists because invariably, oftentimes they're going to be making a referral, and pretty much they might give you a list or something and say, "Well, here pick one". It just doesn't make sense.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Right. I totally agree. It's much nicer for not only us because we know who the patient's seeing, we know kind of what their care looks like, but it's also nice that they can schedule their med check and then the next hour, they can see their therapist in the same office. One other reason I started considering some of those other services to add is that sometimes I have a lot of teens coming in and their parents are just usually waiting in the waiting room. So, if there's some other service they can be doing or preoccupying their time and making it a fun experience for them too, I think that's the ultimate bull.

John: How do you find time to organize and run this thing while you're in fellowship now? Or how did you do that when you were in your residency?

Dr. Brook Choulet: I now wake up very early. I go to bed very late. But pretty much outside of the hours where I was in residency year and fellowship, I'm constantly taking meetings on the phone, making sure admin stuff is running smoothly, making sure the people that are working at the clinic are happy because ultimately all I want is for this to be a happy positive environment where both the patients and the staff are really happy being there. That's my ultimate goal.

John: Now I'm going to digress for one minute because I forget sometimes that I have listeners who have never started a business. Maybe they went straight out of residency and they're working for somebody. And let me just run this by you. I mean, this is what I've done. If I want to start a business, I go to my accountant. I say I need an LLC or whatever structure you'd tell me. And I need a license to open a business in Illinois. And then I get an accountant to help me set up my books. That's basically it. Is that pretty much the same in Arizona?

Dr. Brook Choulet: It's pretty similar. Actually, what I tell all my friends too, who dabble in real estate or a side hustle or whatever it is, is make your own LLC. Don't pay someone else to do it. I think it took me a grand total of 25 minutes to fill out the form online. And you have an active LLC. Maybe in Arizona, they have a nice online system. I don't know what it is, but it was pretty simple. So, you do that, you talk to an accountant, you talk to an attorney and you open a bank account and you are kind of ready to roll.

John: Yeah. I think people think it's some kind of big mystery, but we have the benefit in most states in the United States that opening a business is easy. Now you still got to follow all the rules where it might get a little complicated later on. But if you have a good attorney and a good accountant, you can pretty much manage anything.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Right. And I tell people starting out too, if you go to executive suites and you rent an office there, you don't need a business license because the suite itself has the business license and you're just renting space out of there. So that is the lowest overhead way you could really get started with about $1,500 a month really, with all the things you need to kind of put in place between the suite, the accounting, all of these various aspects, and you could start out with pretty low overhead.

John: Okay. We're past that part. You've got this vision and you've started this. Now, you said you're in the process of moving into a bigger space now, where most everyone is going to be located, co-located.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yes. We are moving into an office that's about 2,800 square feet and it has eight offices total. Everyone will be able to finally all be together rather than some of us are virtual right now, some have an office here. So, it'll be nice to be in the same space and for all of our clients to just come there.

John: What do you envision this will look like? Pick your number, two years from now, five years from now?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yeah. I'm really hoping to have multiple locations in the next few years. I know I'm working with my mom right now who's a concierge psychiatrist on opening something similar there. So hopefully within the next year, we'll have something in San Diego as well.

John: Okay. Now we had talked a little bit before the interview. You brought up your mom as being a concierge psychiatrist, but from what I remember, her practice is different from what you're doing. And so, maybe you can compare and contrast the two and maybe the pros and cons if there are.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Sure. That's kind of where I got my idea of how to start everything really. She is in LA Jolla. Her name's Donna Kashani, she's an MD. She rented an executive suite and she does all of her own calls, billing, scheduling. It's really only her. She has someone that helps out with the billing at times. But other than that, she's the only one in communication with her patients.

John: And how long has she been doing that?

Dr. Brook Choulet: She has been doing that since we moved from Cleveland. So over 20 years.

John: Okay. I'm kind of working my way to asking you a leading question or one that will take some brainstorming. Maybe what other kinds of physicians do you think this would be doable for? We know concierge practices exist, but given that you're in the middle of it and kind of have lived it, do you think this translates to other specialties?

Dr. Brook Choulet: It definitely does. I did some coaching with someone in Florida who is an obesity medicine. My husband is also boarded in obesity as well as internal medicine. And obesity is something that could do really well. And I think it's a boutique practice. You just need an office. You need very minimal supplies and little overhead costs. So, I think that would be a good one. Integrative medicine, lifestyle medicine, functional medicine. And then really, I think some of the subspecialties could also probably do that, like endocrinology, rheumatology, maybe some of those too.

John: Okay. And I think what I was going to mention before when you were talking about the structure is basically, this is a cash-based business of which you've just mentioned others, the weight loss or the obesity and med spas and all that. So, would it be possible for an internist or a family physician who just wants to keep a small cadre of patients, would you say for them, would it be more of a membership model or the hourly type of model or either?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Right. I think that's why you do see so many internists and primary care docs with the retainer model because it's a little bit easier with internal medicine to know what you'll need throughout the year. You need an annual physical and you need certain kinds of sick visits, certain lab work. So, I think it's kind of a little bit more tangible to figure out what a package should include for internal medicine. With psychiatry, I have some patients I see every week, some patients I see every two weeks, some I see every month or every three months. So, to give a price on what that would actually look like would be really difficult. So, I think if a psychiatrist were to do a retainer model, they would have to have a kind of based number of services included and then an additional rate for any add-ons throughout the year.

John: All right. Well, before we get too far, I want to go ahead and put in the websites that the listeners might want to check out just to get an idea of what you're doing. And even if they're in the area, they could even look you up. So, you have your professional website brookchouletmd.com, which I think would probably have more directions to other things and links and so forth. But as far as the practice, it's at chouletwellness.com. Is that right?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yes, that's correct.

John: It's very professionally done and very interesting. Well, stepping back, what do you think about physicians in general? Just sort of taking the bull by the horn and just trying to do something that isn't the standard cookie-cutter approach to medicine in general.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yeah, I think it's amazing. I think at any point in anyone's career, whether you're in training, out of training, looking towards retirement, it's never too late. And I think it goes to show I'm kind of telling my mom like, "Hey, it's time to do something like this in San Diego". And she's used to her ways of doing things and it may seem really kind of scary or unknown to a lot of people, but once you start moving through it, you'll figure it out and put the pieces in place. So, I think it's amazing to kind of get out of corporate medicine and just make your own schedule and decide what you think would be a good work environment to go to every day.

John: It's hard to do because we sort of have this tunnel vision. We're focused on the traditional, what we thought was traditional, although once we get into the so-called traditional, it's never really what we thought it was going to be. So, we kind of break that mindset, I think.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yes. And I see it because my husband is in corporate medicine in a large hospital system, and he's in the PSLF loan forgiveness program. So, he's kind of tied to that for a while, but there are pros and cons with the corporate jobs. There's security and income, you have a set schedule, but then the cons are that you're really not in charge of your own schedule. There's a certain way to do things. And some of the politics of the corporate medicine system may not be fun at times.

John: Well, that's absolutely correct, but I think a lot of people are fearful because of the financial aspects. Obviously, there's a risk involved, although if there's not massive overhead, the risks are minimal. But have you found in looking ahead, does it seem like from a financial standpoint and what the market will bear? Obviously, you've got to set your fees however you set them, and you have to find patients, you have to market. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and then what's the response been once the patients see that you're out there.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Right. I think going to the first point, it's very important to think about finances when you're going into building something like this or something else because you really have to map out how much is this going to cost, what are the fees associated? And even though there's a lot of upfront costs, you don't want to kind of fall too far behind or put too much money and then not get that money out. So, I think it's really important to do that. And can you repeat the second part of that question?

John: Yeah. How did you get patients and clients? Is there a marketing plan? Was it kind of grassroots? How did that work out?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yeah. So again, when you start a business, you want to run things as lean as possible from an expense standpoint. I just did it the old-fashioned way. I reached out to a bunch of therapists. I reached out to a bunch of the internal medicine docs I knew in town. I met with them for coffee, met for lunch, told them what I was doing. I ordered a bunch of postcards and sent them directly to physicians that were in private practice medicine or private OB-GYN and things that I thought my services would be helpful for. I really just tried to do it as kind of lean expense-wise as possible, and then also Google pay-per-click ads, and then having an SEO optimized website. Other than that, I didn't do anything really fancy.

John: All right. Well, I think there's a demand for that and there's getting to be more of a demand for a lot of these cash-based services because people are just tired. Well, they got huge deductibles to begin with anyway. So, sometimes you really feel as though you're uninsured. So, I think there's a growing demand. And then there's also the physicians who I think are going to be much more enthusiastic about running something that they control and not feel like they're being told how they're going to practice and when they're going to practice.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Right. I think that the most important point for the listeners to really consider is have you thought about days where you can decide when you go in and decide when your first patient starts and decide how you want to deliver care to the community, what you want to offer, what you don't want to offer? All the things that people get frustrated with when they work in a big outpatient setting or a big inpatient setting is a lot of those things are just out of your control.

John: Has there been much of a response from the medical students or residents or fellows around you that have seen what you're doing?

Dr. Brook Choulet: I try not to bring it up too much in training because it's just so different from what anyone else is doing or even has thought about. I mean, people are trying to get their medical license just to moonlight. So, I haven't talked too much about it and training, but I think maybe more people should, more people should know what the options are. I think it's definitely something that may be in my own fear of it not working out was holding me back from sharing it. But now that it's kind of up and running and things are going smoothly and we're getting a really good turnout of new patients for all of these people I've hired over the last two months then now I feel kind of more confident that this was a really good idea and I'm super glad I did it.

John: Do you feel like you're going to be involving other psychiatrists in the future?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yes. I actually hired three psychiatrists in the last few months, so I have a few other MDs and a DO working in the clinic as well.

John: Okay. How was that from a contracting standpoint? Was that a challenge or is it pretty straightforward?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Pretty straight forward. Again, if you from the start have a business plan with your attorney and you knew what you wanted things to look like as you scale, then it becomes pretty straightforward. You go in knowing what you're offering, you know what's a good deal, you know it's really fair to the other physicians and it'll allow them to break free from the environment they are in.

John: That sounds good. They've started, right? So, they kind of know what they're getting involved with, and they've already been exposed.

Dr. Brook Choulet: I think that was a little interesting for a few of them. They're like, "Can I just ask how old you are and tell me about where you are in your training?" I think it was a little different for them definitely, to see that I was trying to scale this and grow this and that I really was confident and knew what I was doing. But they trusted, they jumped on board and it worked out really well for them.

John: Are these people that had been in practice for a short time, a long time, a combination?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Yeah, I think all three of them are in their forties.

John: Okay. So that must've been a little bit of a shift that none of them had tried their own concierge practice in the past.

Dr. Brook Choulet: A few of them are in other states. So, a few of them are providing remote services here and then another one is in person here and she has tried. The administrative part of things is very challenging. So, I think allowing that flexibility where you don't have to worry about scheduling and billing is really the best fit for some people.

John: Well, this has been fascinating. Any last bits of advice for any listeners today before we let you go?

Dr. Brook Choulet: Just go for it. That is my only advice. There's a lot to figure out and a lot to navigate. But if I can do it with kind of very little experience compared to some of the people who have been in practice for a long time, then I have no doubt anyone could do it at any stage of their career.

John: Yeah. That's very inspiring. You do have to be the type of person that wants to understand how to run a business. It is a business and you need to know those business principles. And that can be challenging, but it's certainly rewarding at the end of the day if you're not, basically, serving someone to someone else, some big corporation and you get to make the decisions and provide the best care that you can. All right, let me do those links again - brookchouletmd.com and chouletwellness.com. Check those out and see what Brook is up to. I guess that's all I have for today. It was very interesting.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Thanks so much for having me on today.

John: Oh, you're welcome. It's been a pleasure and I will have to check back with you in about a year and see how things are going.

Dr. Brook Choulet: Definitely.

John: All right. Bye-bye.

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Disclaimers:

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

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

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

The post Want to Establish a Concierge Practice Before Finishing Your Fellowship? – 210 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Our guest, Dr. Jessica Lubahn found that the best new business solves a problem. In her case, it's a problem experienced by her own patients.

Jessica is a urologist, health writer, and consultant. She is also the founder of ONDRwear. It's her new apparel company that sells luxe leakproof underwear. She created this company to destigmatize urinary, menstrual, and other leakage problems. To do so, she has created products that are effective and beautiful. 

Dr. Lubahn received her medical degree at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Then, she completed her surgical internship and urology residency at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

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, unlike other programs, this program only takes a year to complete. Economist Magazine recently ranked the UT Haslam Business School #1 in the world as the Most Relevant Executive MBA.

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

A Common Problem Emerges

Jessica helps patients with incontinence in her practice. However, she discovered a large percentage of patients with mild incontinence. And they did not want to risk surgery for a minor problem, albeit a very annoying one.

In medicine I'm very risk-averse… In the entrepreneurial world there is nothing like that… You just realize the world is so big, and there is so much out there that you can do. – Dr. Jessica Lubahn

So, it became her mission to find a solution.

The Best New Business Solves a Problem But It's Not Easy

Here is a very abbreviated list of steps that Jessica had to complete in creating her new apparel company:

1. Identify a problem experienced by her patients.
2. Conceptually design the product.
3. Create a hand-made prototype of a potential solution.
4. Research the industry, network with experts, and determine if creating the product is feasible.
5. Establish her business, and engage an accountant, attorney, and other professionals.
6. For her physical products, create a pattern, and find a manufacturer.
7. Create a website, social media accounts, and develop a marketing plan.
8. Start selling and delivering the product.

If you’d like to check out Onderwear, go to ondrwear.com. The website is well-designed. The products are presented tastefully. And at the time of this podcast episode,  you can get a 15% discount on its clothing.

Summary

Dr. Jessica Lubahn is an excellent example of a physician entrepreneur. She identified a problem and created a business to solve it. Like many physicians, she had no intention of becoming a designer and owner of a nonclinical business. But she was compelled to help patients with a problem that extends beyond her medical expertise.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Ondrwear.com
• Email Jessica Luban at hello@ondrwear.com
• Dr. Jessica Lubahn on LinkedIn
• LinkedIn Ondrwear Page
• Ondrwear on Instagram
• Ondrwear on Facebook

Download This Episode:

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

The Nonclinical Career Academy Membership Program recently added a new MasterClass!

I've created 17 courses and placed them all in an exclusive, low-cost membership program. The program provides an introduction to dozens of nontraditional careers, with in-depth lessons on several of them. It even includes my full MSL Course. There is a money-back guarantee, so there is no risk to signing up. And I'll add more courses each month.

And to make it even easier, listeners to this podcast can get a one-month Trial for only $1.00, using the Coupon Code TRIAL at nonclinicalphysicians.com/joinnca. The $1.00 introduction to the Academy ends on November 28, 2020.

Thanks to our sponsor…

Thanks to the UT Physician Executive MBA program for sponsoring the show. It’s an outstanding, highly rated, MBA program designed for working physicians. It is just what you need to prepare for that fulfilling, well-paying career. You can find out more at nonclinicalphysicians.com/physicianmba.

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Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton

Disclaimers:

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

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

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

The post The Best New Business Solves a Problem – 171 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

In this post, I want to explain why it is important to validate your business idea. You may recall that in my previous blog post in this series, I described the factors needed to select a product or service to offer future customers:

• It's an area that you’re passionate about (or reflects your purpose),
• You have expertise or skills to share,
• There are customers with a problem to solve, and
• The customers are willing and able to pay for the product or service.

Try Selling a Prototype or Presell a Course

This trial run does not necessarily have to be a fully developed product. Let's look at an example.

• there are parents of these children looking for online help, and
• they’re willing to spend money to meet that need.

I’ve since found that there are products and services that physicians are willing to purchase to expedite their career transitions. This became evident when I started helping with a Facebook group (Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters) devoted to nonclinical careers two years ago, which now has over 15,000 members.

I now recognize that there's a demand for coaching, mentoring, and training. Several books have been published on the subject of nonclinical careers. There is a growing interest in this niche. And I’ve started to sell my own products.

I created a course dedicated to finding a job as a medical science liaison. That sold fairly well. So, I created more courses. Since I planned to continue developing courses, I decided to accelerate that process and open a membership site. I started with a minimal viable product (in my mind that was 12 courses).

I was able to sell an encouraging number of memberships. Now I've put more time into improving the first 12, and have added 6 new courses. I've recruited several affiliate partners to sell my course to their followers. And I'm relaunching the Nonclinical Career Academy Membership program very soon.

Several physicians I have interviewed who are coaches have followed a similar path. They started with one-on-one coaching. After building a sufficient following, they added group coaching. Some of them later created a course developed from their coaching experiences, which scaled their business, while serving more clients.

Examples include:

• First, Optimize Your Attitude – Interview with Dr. Katrina Ubell – 035,
• How to Be a Successful Physician Entrepreneur – Interview with Dr. Nneka Unachukwu – 123
• How to Be a Shrewd Business Coach and Consultant – Interview with Dr. David Norris – 111

Summary

As you plan your nonclinical online business, be sure to validate your business idea by confirming the demand for your product or service. Begin by looking for others who seem to be successful.

Then sell a prototype, or begin with a limited run of whatever you're selling. If you are a coach, sell a few discounted sessions to get going. Assess the response of your clients and the success of your coaching.

If you're creating a course – develop the first few lessons, then try to pre-sell the soon-to-be-finished course. But only finish creating it if there is interest confirmed by sales. Then use the feedback from your first few students to help direct future lessons.

Coming Next

In the next blog post, I will answer this question: What are the legal and business issues I should address before moving on?

Next Steps

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

Contact me: john.jurica.md@gmail.com

Thanks for joining me.

Until next time.

The post How to Validate Your Business Idea appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

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On this week's episode of the PNC podcast, John interviews Dr. Jawad Arshad, an emergency physician looking to bring much-needed transparency to the healthcare marketplace. He and his partners also intend to disrupt the health insurance industry by removing insurers from the physician-patient interaction.

Background

Dr. Arshad is an emergency medicine physician. He completed his medical training at SUNY Upstate Medical Center and his emergency medicine residency at Henry Ford Hospital.

He worked as an EM physician, and became involved in the administrative side of medicine early in his career. First, he served as the director of the Emergency Department at Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital.

Next, he left corporate employment and worked as an independent contractor at the Beaumont Dearborn Emergency Department, and started an urgent care clinic. As a business owner, he interacted directly with payers, and experienced the frustration associated with billing and collections.

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, with over 650 graduates. Unlike other programs, which typically run 1 – 1/2 to 2 years, this program only takes a year to complete. And Economist Magazine recently ranked the business school #1 in the world for the Most Relevant Executive MBA.

University of Tennessee PEMBA students bring exceptional value to their organizations. While in the program, you'll participate in a company project, thereby contributing to your organization.

Graduates have taken leadership positions at major healthcare organizations. And they've become entrepreneurs and business owners.

By joining the University of Tennessee physician executive MBA, you will develop the business and management skills you need to advance your career. To find out more, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office by calling (865) 974-6526 or go to vitalpe.net/physicianmba.

Entrepreneur Version 1.0

Jawad's exposure to the world of business came through a combination of administrative work and an investment in property with a friend. The investment brought him face to face with the world of contracts and business operations and spurred him to set up his own urgent care clinic.

“If you are looking for compensation at first, you will miss out on opportunities.”

Dr. Jawad Arshad

Jawad noted the importance of seizing opportunities when they present themselves, even if they do not offer significant compensation at first. “If you are looking for compensation at first, you will miss out on opportunities.”

Jawad learned about healthcare tech startups by investing in a telemedicine company. While the experience was hugely valuable to Jawad, ultimately it did not work out. But the experience taught Jawad some valuable lessons in entrepreneurship:

• Know your limitations – don't try to do everything yourself.
• Make sure everyone has skin in the game. People without their own money on the line are less motivated to see something succeed.

Those experiences inspired him to start WoW Health Solutions about three years ago. With his team, he developed and deployed all of the necessary back office systems for the company. Together, they are now rolling out their services to patients, physicians and employers as they begin to enter the healthcare marketplace.

During our interview, Jawad explains how WoW Health Solutions is bringing transparency to health care costs, while eliminating third party insurance companies from most of the physician-patient encounters.

The post How to Introduce Transparency to the Healthcare Marketplace – 113 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Dr. Jon Larson and his partner started a healthcare technology company because they wanted to improve medical care. They realized that there was an opportunity to use technology to improve the lives of both physicians and patients, so Medspoke was born.

MedSpoke is a physician-centric company, focused on solving healthcare credentialing challenges. It eliminates credentialing headaches, by keeping credentialing data automated, organized, current, and available.

Giving Physicians Mobility and Flexibility

Any physician or healthcare organization that has licensing, credentialing, or enrollment needs can use MedSpoke as an end-to-end solution.

It's a need born out of Jon’s own experience and pain. He wanted to be mobile and flexible to work in multiple places. But each new employer would ask for the same information in a different form.

There's a major physician shortage with lots of open positions. Delays are aggravated by excessive credentialing paperwork. There had to be a better way of quickly placing medical professionals into available opportunities. MedSpoke solves three problems that every physician deals with when wanting to work:

• Obtaining a state license.
• Being credentialed with an employer.
• Being credentialed with health plans.

The University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program

I'm very thankful to have the support of the University of Tennessee Physician Executive MBA Program offered by the Haslam College of Business. You’ll remember that I interviewed Dr. Kate Atchley, the Executive Director of the program, in Episode #25 of this podcast.

The UT PEMBA is the longest running, and most highly respected physician-only MBA in the country, with over 650 graduates. Unlike most other ranked programs, which typically have a duration of 18 to 24 months, this program only takes a year to complete. And, it’s offered by the business school that was recently ranked #1 in the world for the Most Relevant Executive MBA program, by Economist magazine.

University of Tennessee PEMBA students bring exceptional value to their organizations by contributing at the highest level while earning their degree. The curriculum includes a number of major assignments and a company project, both of which are structured to immediately apply to each student’s organization.

Graduates have taken leadership positions at major healthcare organizations and have become entrepreneurs and business owners. If you want to acquire the business and management skills needed to advance your nonclinical career, contact Dr. Kate Atchley’s office by calling (865) 974-6526 or going to vitalpe.net/physicianmba.

Where There's a Problem, There's an Opportunity

After completing residency, Jon practiced clinical medicine as an ER physician. He just wanted to find a good group and ride off into the sunset.

But only a few years of practicing emergency medicine, Jon wanted to see what else was out there. So, he took a job as a Medical Director at Aetna.

Later, he wondered if healthcare administration might be the thing for him. He noticed that most physicians who made the transition to healthcare administrator usually had an additional degree. So, he went back to school to get an MBA.

As his career progressed, he noticed that there were process and system inefficiencies everywhere. And he realized that wherever there's a problem, there's an opportunity. He developed a strong entrepreneurial urge to solve those problems.

Jon knew he always wanted to do something with his MBA. Making the switch to be a full-time entrepreneur gave him that opportunity. But he learned that the MBA did not fully prepare him for his new role.

“Let's get these physicians where they need to be, so they can deliver and provide that access to care.”

Dr. Jon Larson

Thoughts on Running a Startup

The only way you learn to lead, is to get in front of people, make decisions, fall on your face, learn from mistakes, and keep going.

Nine out of 10 startups fail. Companies that stick with their original idea, that no one's paying for, go down in flames. To be successful, they need to pivot, reconfigure and focus on execution.

Jon notes that “your best marketing tool is word of mouth, which is predicated on customer success.” Give your customers the outcomes they want. Otherwise, your business won’t survive.

Click here to download your TRANSCRIPT

And entrepreneurship is all about action. It's 10% idea, but 90% execution. The execution part is where most ultimately fail.

Day-to-Day Life of an Entrepreneur 

Every day, Jon has a “To Do” list. There are many things going on that he must handle, and he’s pulled in different directions. Every day is about prioritizing and setting goals. Yet, no two days are the same.

He’s also a catalyst who pushes initiatives forward and looks for opportunities to continue to grow his business.

Starting a healthcare technology company might be an option for physicians wanting to do something beyond clinical medicine. However, starting a business has been the toughest thing Jon has ever done. He says he usually feels one of two emotions running a startup business: Euphoria or Terror.

Jon reminds us that running a new business is not glamorous. There are many day-to-day mundane things that have to be done. If you're going to do it, you must be willing to get your hands dirty. Nothing is above or below you. You’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes to move the company forward.

Links for today's episode:

Learn more about Jon Larson and Medspoke here:

• Dr. Jon Larson on LinkedIn
• MedSpoke
• PNC Podcast Episode 29 with Sylvia Romm
• American Association for Physician Leadership

Thanks to our sponsor…

Thanks to the UT Physician Executive MBA program for sponsoring the show. It’s an outstanding, highly rated, MBA program designed for working physicians. It might be just what you need to prepare for that joyful, well-paying career. You can find out more at vitalpe.net/physicianmba.

Thanks again for listening. I hope to see you next time on Physician NonClinical Careers.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

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

Podcast Editing & Production Services are provided by Oscar Hamilton.

Disclaimers:

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

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

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

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