A Physician’s Path to Becoming Virtual Preventionist
Interview with Dr. Mo from USA.
What is most important to me is that I feel continually challenged in medicine and also have an impact on patient lives.
Quick facts about Dr. Mo:
🌎 Country: USA
🎓 Degree: MD
💼 Current Job Role: Virtual Preventionist
💰 Gross income: $100K a year
🎨 Hobbies: Rock climbing, cooking, reading and writing.
📗 Favourite Book: The New Earth.
Hello! Could you introduce yourself and describe your current professional role?
I go by Dr. Mo but my full name is Mohammad Ashori MD and I did my education in Los Angeles, both for medical school and my family medicine residency. After graduating I worked for a large HMO in the US but before that I did a lot of moonlighting in residency which was exciting. Now, I do healthcare consulting, run my own virtual medical practice, work with physicians who have had medical board investigations, work in primary care clinics and urgent cares.
What inspired you to shift away from traditional clinical practice to your current role?
Traditional medicine stopped being interesting and challenging. I felt that most people who came to see me didn’t need to see me and the ones who really needed to be seen were too complicated to manage in the time allotted. I was looking to feel challenged and make a bigger impact and I didn’t want to lose my ability to earn a high income.
Which skills did you need to acquire to succeed in your current role?
It requires understanding medicine not from just a doctor’s perspective but from a patient, policymaker, and entrepreneur. Being able to explain why we do what we do in medicine is important. I first started doing work in data analytics and ontology and then now work with healthcare companies who want to improve their product and services that are patient facing. Communication and patience is important.
Which resources did you find most helpful for developing these skills and during your transition?
I like the Joshua Sheats podcast because it helps me think more creatively. I like podcasts by Tara Brach and Byron Katie to get out of my own head and Plenary Session to understand medical science. Health IT Today is great for understanding health information technology and the 101 of healthcare comes from AHealthcareZ which is a YT channel. And I read several books a week these days related to healthcare, often written by physicians or those intimately involved in healthcare.
Can you describe a typical day in your current role?
Every few months I’m in a new country. I wake up and make coffee and go for a walk. I make breakfast and check email.
I create my daily schedule which might be some patient care with my own virtual patients, some telemedicine work for another company, and some consulting work.
I usually have some meetings on the phone because I like to walk and talk. Then I take my laptop to a cafe or library and work there on a project. I try to keep as much asynchronous as possible.
What were some of the challenges you faced during your transition, and how did you address them?
I had no idea how to talk to entrepreneurs and thought they knew more about the patient journey than me. I realized most really love the input from a physician but there are no doctors who have any free time and the skill to communicate with an engineer or CEO.
I would watch and read a lot more books written about healthcare before embarking on this alternate career path.
And I’m still not good at leveraging other people’s skills to expand my brand so I end up doing it all myself.
Do you apply any of your clinical skills in your current position? If not, do you keep your clinical knowledge up-to-date?
Yes. As physicians we know how to do retail work, problem solving, people management, HR, forecasting, data analytics, critical thinking, goal setting, time management - basically, we are a lot more than someone who can take a pulse and prescribe a medicine.
For someone interested in pursuing a path similar to yours, what steps would you recommend they take?
The most important thing is to figure out what it is that you are interested doing every single day when you wake up.
You always have medicine to fall back on so there is no reason to force yourself to the situation where you are going to be unhappy once again. Next, what skills do you need to make you better at what you do, maybe there are YouTube videos you can watch or books or courses you can take.
What are your long-term career plans?
What is most important to me is that I feel continually challenged in medicine and also have an impact on patient lives. My long-term career plans are to continue to build my eventual medical practice so that I can practice anywhere in the world and continue to do some health coaching so that I do not have to necessarily have a medical license. And I will also continue to do some consulting in either health information technology or some aspect of medical business.
What advice would you give to someone considering leaving traditional clinical practice to pursue an alternative career path?
My advice would be to first figure out what it is that you do not like about medicine. It is quite likely that you will go to some other field or to a parent field of medicine and find the same problems once again.
Once you can identify what it is that is causing you suffering then you can try to reimagine and be creative and think outside the box to come up with solutions.
Sometimes just cutting back on work or moving to a less stressful environment can make a world of a difference. Other times you may just be a lot more passionate being in the forestry service than being in direct care with patients.
Where can people find you?
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohammad-ashori-md/
