How many steps does it take you to reach your referring physician colleague to give feedback regarding your recent consultation with his or her patient? Do you have to dictate a letter that must get into the hands of the physician? Must you have your staff get him or her on the phone? 

What is involved in finding an expert who can quickly answer your pressing clinical question while the patient is still in your office? How do you find that expert, and then actually reach him or her?

And, most importantly, how much productive time are these activities costing you each week or a month, as a result of this effort? 

Jeff Tangney is out to transform your experience and return hours of time to you, using the connective power of technology.

As a co-founder of Epocrates, he saw firsthand what having "power in your pocket" looks like - instantly available information that a physician can look up in a moment, to ensure the best care.

This got him wondering about the other transformative powers of mobile technology.

What if you were able to access the intelligence and years of experience of a group of physicians, with a few taps on your mobile?

How would physicians be able to use mobile technology to collaborate? And what was needed to rapidly connect with a referring physician or specialist to who you'd like to refer a patient, or get a quick curbside consultation?

To respond to this perceived need, Jeff Tangney founded Doximity, one of the fastest growing physician networks. Not only is the company thriving, but Jeff has a vision of how networks like his can help sustain the professional freedom that we physicians have come to appreciate and value as necessary to provide the best patient care possible, despite the increasing "corporatization" of medical practice.

When you have finished listening to this interview podcast, come back to The Entrepreneurial MD to add your thoughts or questions

I confess that I have long fantasized about writing a book, along with learning Italian and learning to play the piano, or reconnecting with my adolescent guitar-playing self  ... for now the fantasies have to remain just that. I guess this blog is my creative outlet for the near future!

But for those of you for whom writing a book is a pressing or deeply engaging matter, the news is good. Help is at hand.

My "Insights from the Professionals" conversation today is withLisa Tener, a book writing coach, published author, blogger and speaker who is passionate about helping aspiring authors get their message out by helping them write a book and get published.

Not only does she have her own company, but she also serves on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School continuing education course of writing and publishing books.

Lisa is a whiz at what she does - she has helped several of my clients figure out how to express themselves and their expertise or ideas through the written word, and we talk about some of her book-writing success strategies, such as:

... how to overcome those blocks to getting started
... how to know if you really have a book in you
... how to get a first draft done is as little as 8 weeks
... and much more! 

Lisa is about to launch yet another of her excellent Bring Your Book to Life programs ... designed to walk you through the process of getting your first draft written by the end of the program. It is the one that several of my clients have participated in and used to get their books written and comes highly recommended by them.

Note: She has generously offered a 40% discount for my readers for the class if using the paid in full option, using the coupon code "SAVE40". This is only available until 3/20/2012 so act quickly if you want a considerable savings.

Listen to my conversation with Lisa and then return to The Entrepreneurial MD Blog to add your comments or questions.

Kathy Stecco MD is the poster child for the physician career of the next generation.

A general surgeon who trained at Stanford in the hotbed of Silicon Valley innovation, Dr Stecco was soon lured into the world of medical device due diligence, biotechnology startups and venture capital.

Encouraged and aided by remarkable mentors, Dr Tom Fogarty of Fogarty catheter fame, and entrepreneur and venture capitalist Mir Imran, she transitioned into co-founding four medical device startup companies, with plans for more in the near future. 

Talk about the patchwork physician career of the future!

She maintains a small concierge-style medical practice to "keep her hand in", while consulting, maintaining her role as an entrepreneurial physician and business owner, and staying sane through her passion for mixed martial arts. Additionally she spends part of the year traveling while supervising global clinical trials.

Listen to my interview with this successful physician entrepreneur and then return to The Entrepreneurial MD Blog to share your thoughts and comments.

And if you would like to be in touch with Dr Stecco to learn more, her email is kathysteccomd@gmail.com.

Ask any doctor who has been taking care of patients for 25 years or more what it's like to be working in the trenches, and you're likely to encounter someone with a deep experience of the US healthcare system.

Dr. Angel Garcia is one such a physician - an internist who is not only still in practice but who is also the entrepreneurial physician creator of an electronic medical record, and an author.

His book, Do No Harm: Saving Our Healthcare System, was written with the idea in mind of improving the doctor-patient relationship. He embraces the idea of an educated "patient consumer" and offers some basic ways in which patients can care for themselves at home with minor symptoms before rushing into the doctor's office, urgent care, or worse still, emergency department. 

He is also careful to paint a portrait of life as a doctor working under the constraints of the contemporary US healthcare system, in the hopes that patient expectations can be better managed.

Listen to my 20-minute interview with Angel Garcia MD in which we explore his entrepreneurial side. And then come back to The Entrepreneurial MD Blog to add your thoughts.

"Accidental entrepreneurial physician" Melanie Bone MD was way too busy to have to contend with the illness that struck her as a young mother and practicing gynecologic surgeon. 

Barely 40, with a husband and four kids under the age of 6, Dr Bone was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer. As challenging as her journey was through the surgeries of bilateral mastectomies, chemotherapy and radiation, she never failed to exercise her powers of observation. 

Once she realized she wasn't going to die as she expected, she began exploring ways to put her new-found discoveries about the experience of being a "cancer patient" to good use. Her non-profit foundation, CancerSensibility.org (updated website coming) was her launching pad, followed some years later by her for-profit on-line store, CancershopUSA.com, geared to the support of patients with cancer, and their families and friends who loved them.

Listen to Dr Bone's powerful story as an entrepreneurial physician, still-practicing gynecologist, mother of now four teenagers, and cancer survivor with a distinctive take on what it means to have faced hell and lived with gusto to tell the tale.

When you are done, I invite you to come back to The Entrepreneurial MD Blog and share your thoughts!

If you have multiple interests or passions and you are an entrepreneurial physician, how do you find a way to marry all of this into a single entity AND turn it into your professional occupation?

Just ask Herb Rogove DO.

As an "early adopter" of the intensivist, the hospitalist and the telemedicine models, and as someone who saw the potential to leverage his knowledge of these different areas, Dr Rogove has been able to create a mashup of his passions in his entrepreneurial physician start-up business, c3o Medical Group.

Having moved on to his third entrepreneurial venture, Dr. Rogove appears to have found a winner, not the least reason being that he has bootstrapped the business through careful analysis and business planning.

This innovative physician service group is redefining how highly specialized services can be delivered consistently and in a high quality manner to less well-served areas of the country.  

He is busy creating a model for medical delivery of the future!

Listen to my interview to find out how Dr. Rogove came up with his business idea and executed it, and then please come back to The Entrepreneurial MD Blog to add your comments.

And should you be interested in career opportunties with his forward-thinking company, he can be reached at hrogove@c3otelemedicine.com!

Daniel Palestrant MD is a man with a clear mission.

As the founder of Sermo, a 130,000+ physician-strong networking platform, this deeply thoughtful entrepreneurial physician businessman and leader intends to create the go-to on-line "conversation pit" to facilitate nationwide physician dialog and collaboration. 

Since the days of the doctors' lounge or dining room are largely products of a bygone era, he envisions a cyber community, exclusive to physicians, where curbside consults occur, knowledge is shared, and opinions rendered - across time and geography.

Since he is a businessman at heart, he has formulated an income-generating business model that, despite some controversy, appears to be very successful.

Like almost all entrepreneurial physicians, Dr. Palestrant began his journey into business from a background in medical training. As a surgical resident, he questioned the in-the-box reductive thinking demanded of him by his professors and peers. Sidelined by a back problem, he found an opportunity to reflect on the match (or non-match as it turned out) between his entrepreneurial inclinations and the role that was being carved out for him in his highly traditional surgical residency training.

He was able to draw upon his prior experience as an entrepreneur, having created and sold a healthcare informatics company and conceived of and created a commercial Web-based healthcare resources for physicians and allied health professionals 

As a result, Sermo was born in 2006. And judging by its growth over the last 5 years, it is a true entrepreneurial physician success story ... with plenty more up its sleeve, including its new Sermo Mobile app, "giving physicians real-time access to the knowledge base that resides with the network’s member base of doctors".

Oh, and by the way, a little known fact - Daniel Palestrant is part South African -- yeah!!

Our conversation was so wide-ranging that I decided to create a Part 1 and a Part 2 podcast.

Listen here to our podcast conversation Part 1, which is focused on how he became an entrepreneur. In Part 2, yet to come, we will talk about his insights into the roles that physicians can and should play as healthcare undergoes reform in the coming years. 

When you have finished listening to this interview podcast, come back to The Entrepreneurial MD to add your thoughts or questions

It was only a mere five plus years ago that, with the help of his physician wife, Dr. Scott Burger opened his first urgent care center, Doctors Express, in Baltimore Maryland.

As a trained and practicing emergency room physician, Dr Burger knew all too well the waste of time, money and other tight resources that went into providing urgent primary care to patients in the emergency room. And it really bothered him!

In a leap of faith, he opened urgent care center number 1 in 2006. But his vision was much bigger than that!

He pictured a chain of Doctors Express urgent care centers across the land, providing high quality physician-driven care in a predictable uniform way -- kind of like what we have come to expect from Starbucks. 

To accomplish his dream, he recognized he had to use the business model of franchising.

However, he knew his limitations. As a clinician, his confidence in his ability to set the ground rules for providing care knew no bounds. But when it came to the complexities of this business model, he needed help.

Fortunately, he had contacts in the right places and a partnership was born - with two businessmen who had the experience of starting, running, growing and franchising a business. There was one BIG problem however - his first partner was a very good college friend ... and we all know that business and friendship don't mix ... or was that really true?

Listen to this 26-minute podcast interview to hear how Dr Scott Burger took the seed of a dream and has grown it into a rapidly-expanding entrepreneurial physician success story.

When you have finished listening to this interview podcast, come back to The Entrepreneurial MD to add your thoughts or questions.

How long does one have to be a practicing physician before it becomes obvious that a clinical career isn't the right line of work to be in?

I guess it depends.

In Mike McLaughlin MD's case, it didn't take long. This highly-trained plastic and hand surgeon suspected during even his residency that clinical practice wasn't his ideal job. Nevertheless, he persisted by going into practice long enough to confirm that his future professional happiness depended on quitting clinical practice.

Guided by a relative who served as a business mentor, he began the 2-year long quest to find an alternative non-clinical career that preferably encompassed at least some of his hard-earned medical knowledge.

He explored his passion for writing by investigating the field of medical communications ... and a new non-clinical career was born.

Several physician executive jobs later, his own successful medical communications business Peloton Advantage was born, co-founded with a colleague. In addition he donates his time to his generous sideline passion, the physician career networking site, Physician Renaissance Network (PRN). He has also found time to use his writing skills by penning a part personal memoir-part self help book, "Do You Feel Like You Wasted All That Training? Questions from Doctors Considering a Career Change".

When you have finished listening to this interview podcast, come back to The Entrepreneurial MD to add your thoughts or questions

Many older physicians are contemplating quitting medical practice and retiring, fed up with the hassles of huge overheads, employee squabbles and grumbling patients.

Not so Dr. Robert Novich.

An internist and nephrologist who has been practicing for over 35 years, Dr. Novich of Westchester County, N.Y. still approaches his work with the enthusiasm and pleasure that stems from tackling interesting challenges while serving his patient population in very satisfying ways.

Last week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert and his son, Jeffrey Novich, to learn more about his innovative micro-practice, and how the two of them teamed up to create one of the most "tech savvy solo primary care practice in America." Robert was recently featured in Forbes for his eye-opening commitment to utilizing technology to slash overhead to 15% and greatly enhance care and patient relationships.

Robert spotted the potential computers offered to streamline his practice operations many years ago. Building his first practice management system with simple tools, over the years he layered on more and more functionality. As his information technology became more sophisticated, his need for extra employees dropped. This expense reduction in turn more than offset his declining reimbursements!

Listen here to my interview with Dr. Robert Novich and Jeffrey Novich to hear how father and son not only built a platform for which to run Robert's medical office, but also created a platform that can serve a wider audience – the needs of other medical practices, especially if they are micro-practices.

Wanted: beta testers for Patient Communicator (their web-based service that facilitates doctor-patient communications)!!

When you have finished listening to this interview podcast, come back to The Entrepreneurial MD to add your thoughts or questions

[image courtesy of Forbes Inc]