Hey this is dr incorporated. I’m really excited to take the step of faith out and begin a vlog and social media site for our fellow employee physicians. I’ve been an employed primary care doctor in the midwest now for almost 25 years. I’m married, I work in a rural community, have five children, and thoroughly enjoy my job as a primary care physician. But what I recognize is that many of us as employed physicians need support from one another as we go through this journey in the difficult and challenging world of modern medicine.

The fact of the matter is that many of us are unaware of many of the truths that are associated with practicing medicine today that go beyond the nuts and bolts of the biology of caring for patients but really get into the world of practice management and personal and professional finances. Now, most of us had very limited exposure to this, either growing up or in our medical training in medical school or in our residencies, and have really sort of learned through trial and error.

I’m hoping to create a community for us as employed physicians that allow us to mutually support one another and share discoveries about how we can thrive as physicians who are employed. The truth of the matter is that the majority of physicians coming out of training now are choosing to be employed as many as 91 percent of residents who are graduating are choosing to sign up as employed physicians and moving out of the private practice, a model of care.

I think there are a number of reasons for this that really makes sense, and allow us to sort of simplify our lives by choosing to be employed and allow our employers to really handle all of the nuances and challenges associated with third-party pairs and the difficulties of modern medicine. But one of the things that many of us discover through time as we continue to work as employed physicians is that there’s a big sacrifice that we make in giving up some of that control, and the biggest thing that really I have found is that we lose autonomy and control of our own personal and professional lives. Although, yes, we get rid of the hassles of maybe managing an office or managing third parties or managing issues that are associated with running a practice in a day-to-day manner, we also put ourselves in a position to become micromanaged, and frankly over time many of us who have done this for a while just begin to resign ourselves that this is the exchange we make for getting rid of some of the hassles associated with practice management.

We really become worn down as being micromanaged by our employers and the third parties that surround us. I’m really convinced this is one of the underlying reasons that there’s a lot of professional dissatisfaction today, that there’s a large amount of physician burnout and even a large amount of physician suicide. I just read an article recently that pointed out that there is as many as one physicians every day of the year who is choosing suicide. It’s a startling fact to me but has to do really with the enormous pressures that we have as physicians in medicine and the really unique challenges that we undergo every day as we engage in this practice and profession of medicine.

I gotta admit I humbly don’t know all the answers but I’m really excited to help create a community of mutual support and shared knowledge that I hope is able to restore some of the simple joy and benefits that really most of us should find is serving as physicians. That’s why I think there are a lot of truths that each one of us can share uniquely from the perspective of employed physicians that will allow us to enjoy and thrive in medicine again. One of the greatest truths that I’ve discovered is the existence of a little-known space that’s called employment-lite, and in this space, it’s sort of a hybrid between pure employment and private practice.

My guess is that most of you as physicians don’t even know that such a space exists and I want to especially explain the massive benefits associated with this relatively unknown space to you, my fellow employee physicians because I think it really has the potential and power to really change how you feel about medicine and how much you and your family can enjoy medicine.

My threefold purpose in regards to this vlog and the social media sites associated with Doctor Incorporated is to really bring about an awareness campaign about employment-lite and many of the other nuances associated with employed physicians. There’s really a three-fold goal that I’ll have and that is to expose, second is to educate, and the third is to empower. In regards to exposure, I really want to help employee physicians see that there is a space for them to own and operate their own professional corporation all while being employed. This is simply known as an employee-lite contract or a PSA. It’s very similar to what professional athletes and actors and actresses use in their line of work. They have a business structure that maximizes their professional services and the payments that they receive from that. They also have a business structure that really maximizes their ability to retain as much of their earned income as possible. This two-fold purpose is one of the secrets that allow professionals to thrive in their desired professions, such as actors and professional athletes.

Let me use for example one of the professional athletes who are known to have earned the most money in baseball of any professional baseball player ever. His name is Alex Rodriguez, and Alex has earned over 450 million dollars during his baseball career which is just an enormous amount of money and almost too hard to imagine. But when he signed his 250 million dollar contract with the New York Yankees a few years ago, it was a very wise move on his part of the course because of the large amount of money that he made. But one of the little-known secrets about this was that Alex Rodriguez chose to form his own professional corporation as part of that process so the paychecks that he received from the New York Yankees really were not sent to Alex Rodriguez himself but actually paid to Alex Rodriguez PCBY. Making that simple a change in terms of where his money was being sent and whom it was negotiating his contract through, Alex was able to both receive a greater income but also to retain more of that income. That’s the case for many and most professional athletes as well as actors, actresses, many lawyers, engineers, and architects also operate under the same principle.

The fact is as soon as you receive a paycheck from your employer in your own personal name you’ve already put yourself in a position to lose more money than you should, and most people who form their own PC recognize that forming their own corporation allows them to retain a lot more of their hard-earned income. Well, I figured if there’s a whole bunch of 20-something-year-olds in professional athletics who really learn and know this optimal business structure, why shouldn’t we as physicians make the same choice and make the same decision?

As you continue to tune into this vlog and social media site I hope to unpack with you many of those opportunities that you’re going to become exposed to that are just really smart moves on your part that have nothing to do with working harder but have a lot to do with working smarter. I also want to educate you as a physician about the benefits of controlling your own income through this personal corporate structure that really helps maintain a whole bunch of benefits for you as a physician. There are many many benefits to aligning your work with corporate employers, and stakeholders really help take a lot of the risks associated with practicing medicine out of your hands today, and really a lot of those risks are wise to avoid. I’m really all for employment and really believe that physician employment is both the present and the future of us in medicine, however, I think it’s also beneficial for you to consider forming a professional corporation that then contracts with your employer and allows you to have the greatest benefit of both maximizing your salary or earnings as well as maximizing your retained income as an employed primary care physician.

In the midwest, I make nearly seven figures from my professional services due to the unique PSA structure that I have. This is nearly four times what most employed primary care doctors in my same specialty make and is really twice as much as I made when I was working simply as an employed physician 10 years ago. It’s legal and it’s available to each one of you and I would encourage you to tune in and learn more about how you can really experience the same benefits that I have and really continue to work in really the same manner that you have in the past. Really, I believe that physicians need to be empowered because they’re the backbone and workhorses of the medical world.

Many employment models have really devalued physicians in my opinion. We become line items on spreadsheets. We are now considered “providers” and really are not considered about how we are valuable to patients but are considered about how we’re valuable to our employers at the end of the day. They’re interested more in the downstream revenue that we provide for them than they are in how we’re taking care of our patients. Many of the third parties have furth eroded our esteem by really controlling and micromanaging the oversight over our medical decisions. Our lives are now filled with pas and peer-to-peer conversations that are really connected to cost-saving measures for those third parties and really have nothing to do with what we’ve been trained to do in providing medical care to patients is really one of the frustrations that many of us feel every day in medicine, not to mention the fact that we are becoming EMR clerks and expected to fill in all the slots and points and clicks in the EMR, really not for the benefit of doing better medicine but really for the benefit of proving that we’re providing quality care. Of course, the stupidity of that is that we know that we’re providing quality care but we have to somehow prove it by clicking the right boxes in the EMR to show that we’re aware of that and that we can prove to them that’s the case. It’s just one of the many stupid elements of medicine today that are really frustrating and challenging for each one of us as employed physicians, but the fact of the matter is that’s not going to go away.

As we continue to dialogue and talk and work through things together on this vlog and website I think there are a lot of secrets to how we can navigate through those challenges and really maximize them to our benefit. I really want to help physicians to be empowered to love medicine again. To restore some of their autonomy and control. I want to help prevent burnout and improve their work-life balance and satisfaction. I know I love being a primary care doctor. I love practicing medicine in my own community, and I love really taking care of patients. I’m thankful for the good life that it provides for me, for the financial income and quality of life that it provides, and I really believe that should be the case for each one of us as physicians.

So you might be asking yourself why should you join the Doctor Incorporated media outlets. I’m going to encourage you to do it to learn about the secrets of really being employed physicians and how we can maximize that in our lives and really enjoy it. In my particular case, I want to unpack a little bit for you about how you can actually have your own business and have your own personal corporation and professional corporation that supports yourself as an employee physician. I want you to hear unfiltered stories about employment-lite physicians and how they are navigating in this employment world and how they’re really thriving and doing well.

I want to help create a mutually supportive physician community space that allows us as employed physicians to thrive and grow and to really enjoy what we’ve been created to do, and that is to take care of patients and to be satisfied with providing quality, safe, good health care right in the community that you live. I want you to join me in helping to create this physician community space that really is mutually supportive. I think it’s going to be a great ride for us. I think there’s a lot of nuance to this and I hope that you choose to join me in making the future of medicine a better place for each one of us.