This is not just another list of possible non clinical jobs for physicians. If you are like most physicians and have come to this point in your career, you have likely heard about the classic examples. “Have you thought about pharma? What about teaching? You could be an expert witness!” All of these could be viable solutions, but the question still remains – how can you get there? You’ve studied, tested, trained, and maybe even practiced medicine for years and likely have not had a job outside of the world of medicine, so where do you start?

Traditional Medical Careers

In the labyrinth of healthcare, the traditional medical career path has long been regarded as the quintessential journey for aspiring doctors. This well-trodden route typically traverses through roles entrenched in clinical practice, hospitals, and academia. A symphony of white coats, stethoscopes, and bustling hospital corridors characterizes this conventional trajectory.

Embarking on this journey entails a formidable commitment, marked by the enduring trials of extensive education, grueling residencies, and a perpetual pursuit of continuous professional development. The path, though laden with challenges, is rich with the rewards of healing, diagnosis, and the profound impact a doctor can have on individual lives. However, it is important to remember, at the end of the day, this is a job. Like any career choice, it may not be right for you.

Leaving Medicine

Depending on the amount of residency training, years in practice or specialty, physicians may be inclined to pursue different career paths. The physician looking to find a non clinical position immediately out of medical school will likely have a much different resume than an early stage attending attempting to move away from clinical practice. We’ll explore several different stories from each one of these stages, in the hopes that concrete examples can illuminate some of the options available to physicians.

Moving to Pharma

Dr. Andrea Best knew early on in medical school that she did not want to pursue clinical medicine long term. She liked to be challenged, and found that doctors often saw the same thing over and over again. While in medical school, she began exploring alternative career options in Pharma, the Automotive Industry, Testing, Occupational Medicine, Safety & Collisions, Cereal & Food, and Nutrition. 

However, after finishing medical school, Dr. Best ended up practicing family medicine for nearly 4 years. She was a faculty member at Loyola University, taught family medicine residents, and practiced at Cook County Hospital. Ultimately, her career would lie outside of clinical medicine.

While she was an attending physician, she was introduced to a Pharma physician development program aimed at identifying and shaping future leaders for their pharmaceutical R&D team. It involved 6-month rotations in clinical pharmacology, medical affairs, pharmaceutical development, and pharmacovigilance and patient safety, among other fields and training opportunities. Dr. Best decided to take the leap, and was accepted into the program.

She notes that it was necessary to negotiate some elements of the offer, having just left a successful medical practice, and that there were certain drawbacks, such as less vacation time. Not to mention the other challenges associated with starting a brand new career. The program she entered into was designed to show the potential roles available to physicians and expose her to R&D, human testing, safety and side effects and working with epidemiologists. She ultimately ended up settling into a role where she designed programs to assess the safety of her company’s pharmaceuticals. 

Dr. Best is now a Vice President in R&D and has had the opportunity to work with global regulatory authorities in strengthening the regulatory system in developing countries. Dr. Best told us that the requirements for entering into a similar program are generally similar and require a medical degree and the ability to think critically. Most companies have a physician training program and are often taking applications.

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Rethinking Residency also spoke with another former attending who has made a similar career change. This doctor was a rheumatologist in a major west coast city, covering call for all of the city’s hospitals with one other physician. Feeling the effects of burnout only several years into her clinical career, she started to explore alternative career paths. She explored pharma, insurance jobs, expert witness opportunities, all the classics. As a rheumatologist however, she realized there would be many opportunities within pharma given her experience.

She found podcasts about alternative career paths, joined Facebook groups, and tried searching LinkedIn. She was able to craft her resume for these sorts of new positions with the help of others, and ultimately came across a major Clinical Research Organization (CRO). She was able to land a CRO position as Medical Director, and started working a typical, 40 hour work week. She quickly found that she was being paid more as a CRO than even in her clinical practice, and was able to maintain a much healthier lifestyle. In this role, she supported several clinical trials for phase 1, 2, and 3 for various rheumatology indications and did medical monitoring. 

After less than two years at the CRO, she was recruited by a major Pharma company to work as a clinical lead, under the same title, Medical Director. She admits the work is more demanding in her pharma position (closer to 60 hours per week) and there is much more pressure to deliver. Her base salary is the same at the pharma company as at the CRO, but she is given equity and bonus opportunities. The standard is 25% of a base salary in equity per year, as well as the opportunity to make an additional 25% target bonus per year. She was also given a sign-on bonus upon starting her new position. 

Comparing the two positions, while the CRO job may have been less demanding, there is not much career advancement available in CRO. Her work also was not recognized as much while in the CRO role, compared to her position in pharma where she is responsible for delivering the clinical trial and will have her name on the final delivery. 

There are 3 main buckets that physicians can work in as a Medical Director at a pharma company. 

1. Clinical Development – developing the asset and deciding what you’re going to study, how it will be studied, designing the study, protocol, and execution, through database lock and launch of product.
2. Medical Affairs (more external facing) – interacting more with the outside world. This could be posting marketing studies or interacting with key opinion leaders in the field, and it may have more travel (30-40% travel).
3. Pharmacovigilance (the safety people) – working to detect, assess, understand, and prevent adverse effects of drug-related products.

Additionally, she recommended this article that helped her along her journey.

Pharma positions can be difficult to gain entry to, and it may require starting from closer to the bottom. While this can be a tough pill to swallow, each person we have spoken with is very happy with their decision and feels that they ultimately made the right move. 

Working In Consulting

The full interview of Brian Bangs can be found here, but we will discuss his story briefly as well. Brian has taken the opposite path as most that will be reading this, but his insights are helpful nonetheless. Brian first went into consulting at Deloitte after receiving his undergraduate degree, and has since started medical school. 

“Consulting is not exactly what I expected it to be. It was great for what it was, but not what I wanted it to be for me. Yes the work can be interesting, the travel can be exciting at first, but mostly you are thrown into overflow work rooms for 12 hours a day and spend most of your time in Excel or PowerPoint.

When I first started, I was in limbo for a bit. I completed all of my onboarding, but it quickly becomes your responsibility to find a project to work on. Unless you are brought on at a higher level, you are not immediately assigned a team or a project. There was some help from the internal staffing department, but I mostly had to reach out, cold call and try to network with managers and teams across the country to find a project that would take me on. After about a month, I was assigned to a project based in Dallas for a major airline. They were in the midst of an acquisition and brought Deloitte on to help implement a Human Capital management system. As an analyst, my main duties were Project Management, gathering materials, requirements and managing status reports for a technical, software driven implementation. The majority of my time was spent updating PowerPoint presentations to maintain the status of the implementation project.”

‘Consulting’ is a broad term, and can refer to a number of different jobs. When discussed as an alternative career path for physicians, it typically refers to working at a major company like Deloitte or Bain & Co. Even within these companies, the types of roles are wide ranging. Most however, have an arm focused on healthcare and are often looking to recruit physicians. Similar to pharma programs, many have a Physician Leadership Program that will expose a physician to various roles and opportunities within the company and put them on a track to develop a leadership role. 

While Brian’s experience may not have been for him, there are certainly many who enjoy the types of challenges and opportunities that come from a consulting job. It is important to note however, that like breaking into pharma, you may be required to ‘start from the bottom’ and work your way up. But compared to continuing a clinical career that you are no longer happy with, this temporary sacrifice may be well worth it in the long run. 

Physician Coaching

Rethinking Residency also interviewed Chelsea Turgeon, MD, which can be found here, about her journey from quitting residency to becoming a career coach and world traveler. It is an important story to not only show that yes, you can quit residency, and your only options are not to simply start another corporate career. Chelsea pursued a passion and has found success by being open and honest about her experience, while utilizing many of the skills she learned along the way to becoming a doctor in the first place.

“What I really wanted was freedom and the ability to travel. The ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle was very attractive to me, but I also knew that I needed to find a way to make money in the interim. I applied, and was accepted into a program to teach English in South Korea. But I still wanted to pursue psychology in some manner, so I signed up for a life coaching certification program as well. This was all taking shape at the end of 2018, and then in February of 2019, I boarded a plane to South Korea to start my adventure.

“By the end of the first year, I realized that I did not want to be a full time blogger, so I started to pursue coaching more seriously. For a while, I mostly talked with clients about their career, typically helping fellow high-achievers ‘find their purpose.’ My contract ended in February 2020, right as the COVID-19 outbreak started. Initially I was planning to backpack around SE Asia, but COVID had other plans for me, and I ended up staying in Vietnam during the first 8 months of the pandemic. I was making about $600/month coaching a few clients, and teaching English online to supplement the rest of my income. I strategically chose to live somewhere like Vietnam because the USD goes much further there. I was able to live very comfortably on about $1000-$1500/month. 

During the pandemic, I started to hear more and more from healthcare professionals, and in 2021 shifted fully to focusing on working with this client base. At the same time, I was publishing a blog post about once a week, but only a few about medicine. I gained some traction with a piece about why I left medicine and it took off from there. I am currently testing out a ‘homebase’ in Albania, but still very much adhering to the ‘digital nomad’ lifestyle.”

Chelsea’s lifestyle may not be the right fit for everyone, but it is crucial for physicians to hear that they have more options than the traditional post-medicine routes of pharma, insurance, medical writing, etc. You may not want to practice clinical medicine anymore, but know that what you have learned along the way can be valuable to others and can open up opportunities in a variety of fields.

Health Tech Jobs

Finally, we spoke with Vincent Pisano, Data Scientist at Abacus Insights. Vincent initially started in medical school after receiving his undergraduate degree in Biology, but quickly pivoted to various roles in healthcare technology. He has since earned a Masters of Computer Science and has held various positions outside of clinical medicine for nearly a decade. He has worked with a number of physicians along the way, and was able to offer valuable insights into the types of roles and skills that healthcare technology companies are looking for.

Initially, after leaving medical school, Vincent did what many others have done, and many of you may have even done before medical school. He started as a clinical research coordinator, overseeing CRO data management for oncology trials, while teaching himself to code. This later led to roles as a clinical data analyst, and now as a data scientist. 

He echoed our previous interviewee, that CRO roles are an excellent place to start. Many biotech firms outsource their research and studies to CROs in order to run trials, and it is very possible to build relationships with these companies while working for a CRO. If you have expertise in a particular speciality, such a surgical subspecialty, there are thousands of biotech companies creating devices and products specifically for those individual markets. They often need physicians to lead their clinical research teams as well as front-facing physicians to be the ‘face’ of their products and research.

One of his previous roles was at a startup called Vori Health. Vori has created a novel, virtual environment for back, neck and orthopedic care by assembling teams of specialists, therapists, coaches and nutritionists to work directly with patients. They employ a number of physicians, some of whom actually conduct the virtual visits, while others are employed to help design the systems and products. While Vori may be specific to orthopedic care, there are a number of similar companies innovating in other healthcare related spaces who need individuals with specialized knowledge of the subject matter to help create better products.

Vincent suggested that if there is a specific field of interest, a physician should try to attach themselves to at least some level of research within the field in order to make themselves more attractive to potential employers. Even seeking out vendors at national conferences to introduce yourself and inquire about potential positions can be helpful when gathering information. Many of these positions that these companies are looking to fill can be difficult to find the right applicant for, and they can often be found more easily through relationship building. 

Physician Burnout and Work-Life Balance Challenges:

Phrases like “physician burnout” resonate with the very real struggles doctors face in maintaining a harmonious work-life balance. The demanding nature of their profession, coupled with emotional strains and a high-stakes environment, contributes to burnout—a phenomenon that has gained increasing recognition. The relentless pursuit of excellence, coupled with the pressures of medical practice, underscores the urgent need to address work-life balance challenges within the medical community.

However, if you’ve made it this far, you may seriously be considering leaving clinical medicine altogether. It is becoming an increasingly popular choice given the long hours, enormous responsibility, diminishing reimbursements, as well as a host of other factors. Hopefully some of these stories help illuminate several paths forward outside of clinical medicine. There are of course a massive number of opportunities, job titles, and companies that are well suited to MD’s and DO’s, so try to not think that pharma, health tech, insurance or consulting are the only options. Physicians are exceedingly smart individuals with problem solving skills, incredible time management and organizational abilities, and would be an excellent asset to many organizations. Know that while the perfect job may not be available to you immediately after leaving clinical medicine, simply taking a step in the right direction for your health and well-being will likely open new doors and opportunities.