Welcome back to On/Offcall!

‼️ Nerd fest alert! Will you be joining us Tuesday for the event everyone is talking about??

AI is coming at us fast, faster, and fastest. As clinicians, each one of us will have to understand not just the basics but also know how to incorporate AI into our daily practice. So we’re hosting our first live webinar to teach everything you need to know to get started with AI today, featuring Offcall co-founder Graham Walker, MD and Validara Health founder Sarah Gebauer, MD.

Here’s what you can expect:
✅ Live + interactive Q&A! — but yes, it’ll be recorded
✅ Real examples and challenges from actual clinical practice
✅ Curated resources to try at the end
✅ No prior AI knowledge required (literally zero)

The event will take place Tuesday June 3rd at 5pm PT / 8pm ET. Join over 300 colleagues and RSVP at the link below! 

Event RSVP here ->

Know someone who would benefit from joining us? Help us grow our tent by forwarding this newsletter to your physician colleagues and subscribing here.

Offcall’s First Data Drop Is Live!

📊 This week, we released our first data insights from Offcall’s physician users – starting with the timely topic of supervising NPs and PAs.

While there's tons of contention online about NPPs/APPs and physicians, we wanted to look at actual data about the impact on job satisfaction and salary. And after analyzing thousands of anonymous data points, we found that it's... complicated and unexpected. In some specialties like Emergency Medicine and Anesthesia, we found lower levels of satisfaction with minimal bump in pay. But in other fields like Cardiology and Neurology, we see the opposite.

So what does this mean and what’s our hypothesis for why? Watch Graham’s video summarizing our findings and read some great commentary from Dr. John Dayton here. Be sure to dive into the full report linked below.

How doctors really feel about managing NPs and PAs ->

This 2x Founder Did Something Radical Before Building Anything in Healthcare: He Actually Listened to Doctors!

This week on How I Doctor, we featured a non-doctor entrepreneur who sold his first company for $850 million but then decided to do something that should not be radical but unfortunately is: He listened to actual doctors!

After experiencing the healthcare system up close and personal when his father had a heart attack, Aniq Rahman started shadowing clinicians in the emergency room and observed a level of dysfunction that made him angry and determined to help fix the system. So he started Fabric, which has since evolved into a thriving startup aimed at improving the consumer experience for health systems, providers, employers, and patients alike.

Throughout this episode, Graham and Aniq discussed:
- How fragmentation has led to a broken system that confuses patients
- Fabric’s mission to transform virtual and in-person healthcare through a consumer lens
- What the future should look like and where AI supports behavioral change and long-term health
- A bold vision for how healthcare might evolve 10 years from now

Listen to the full episode here!

Most Talked About On Offcall

3 Things to Read This Week

Medicare’s ambitious tech agenda guided by Palantir and Main Street Health executives (STAT)
From reporter Mario Aguilar: Veteran technology entrepreneurs have been tapped to help promote better care for people on Medicare and beyond.

Why America Needs more physicians in Congress (The Doctor Is In)
From Dr. Terry Adirim: “At a time when Americans rank healthcare among their top concerns, it’s striking that so few of the people writing our nation’s health laws have ever cared for a patient.”

Average wait times for physician appointments still on the rise (AMN Healthcare)
A new report shows wait times are up 19 percent since 2022 — Ob-gyns and Boston have the highest while Atlanta has the shortest.

Physician Builder Spotlight: Morgan Jeffries

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we’ll feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Morgan Jeffries, Neurologist & Medical Director for AI at Geisinger. He is a member of the ML for MDs Slack Group which you can learn more about and apply to join here (physicians only). Connect with Morgan on LinkedIn here.

1. Morgan, what inspired you to become involved in AI leadership? I wasn’t very technical when I was younger. My undergraduate majors were in biology and philosophy. When I entered med school, I thought I was going to go into psychiatry. I wound up enjoying the structure of neurology more though, so that’s what I chose. I didn’t get interested in computer science until I was in my mid-twenties and doing research on eye movements and visual attention. The system that ran the experiments was written in C, and I had to do some hacking to get it to work on my task. Between that and the MATLAB code I wrote to analyze the data, I probably spent close to a thousand hours over two years writing and thinking about code.

After I got married in 2017, my wife and I decided it was time to make a pivot. We moved to Pennsylvania where I took a job as a neurohospitalist with some informatics work on the side. One thing led to another, and I gradually got to the point where I was spending the majority of my time in informatics. I was looking to challenge myself, so I started taking courses in AI. That was probably in early 2022, which ended up being good timing. ChatGPT launched in late November, and I tried it within a few days. A few days later, I emailed our entire informatics group to tell them what was happening and that it was something that deserved our attention. That led to a series of conversations, and eventually I became our Associate Medical Director for AI. TL;DR: It was less inspiration and more a series of small steps guided by a mix of curiosity and practicality.

2. Tell us about your focus and the problem or gap you're solving or filling. The team as a whole is working very hard not just to maintain existing programs and launch new ones, but also to make changes under the hood that will accelerate our work going forward. There are so many parts to that, but two of the biggest areas involve streamlining our formal change management process and scaling governance. I’ve personally been most heavily involved in launching our generative AI efforts and developing a strategy and materials for workforce education and communication.

3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about pursuing a career in health system AI leadership? If you’re early-career (or mid- or late-career), and you haven’t already realized this, you ultimately want to wind up in a place where you’re spending as much time as possible doing things that you enjoy, that you’re good at, and that you also find meaningful. However, it can take a lot of trial and error to figure out what those things are, so be patient, and be willing to try a lot of things. There will be points along the way where you have to pick up skills you don’t already have. I know two approaches to this: one is to learn whatever it is in your spare time, and the other is to leverage the skills you do have to get a job where you can learn that thing.

If you know you want to work on AI within a health system, you can come to it from a lot of places. If you work in quality and safety, education, informatics, department leadership, or solely as a front-line clinician, try to learn a little about AI and think of where it could be applied in your current job. Talk to people about it. Go from there. Find ways to contribute that require as little permission as possible. Conversely, if you're starting from a technical role, try to spend time with stakeholders on a project so you can understand the challenges they're facing. If you need learning resources, Stanford has a great series of courses on AI in healthcare that you can get through in a few months. The AMA also offers a much shorter series that's free.

Lastly, I’d encourage people to indulge their curiosity and learn things that may or may not be immediately useful just because they’re interesting. That was the approach I took with programming, and it worked out well. I’ve also spent my limited spare time over the last few months on circuit analysis. Maybe I’ll end up applying that to robotics, but maybe I won’t. It’s been fun though, so it’s no loss either way.

4. What's one lesson you've learned since beginning leadership that wasn't obvious to you before? Almost none of the challenges are technical. There are some, but the team is generally very good at identifying those early and either deciding the project is a non-starter or working through them. The overwhelming majority of the headwinds we face involve change management in one form or another.

This excerpt has been shortened, be sure to read the full article here. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply or tag them and their company in the comments!

Cool Summer Event Alert! (H)Arts in Medicine Retreat

Now for something different: This August, Dr. Sophie Peterson, Leah N’Diaye, and the (H)Arts in Medicine organization are hosting an Arts and Wellness Conference for clinicians in Santa Fe aimed at art immersion, self-care, and self-reflection. The conference features a unique combination of wellness and relaxation, art experiences, and journeys in awareness utilizing Narrative Medicine and peer-coaching techniques and will also include: entrance to art museums, a flamenco tablao dinner performance, a Japanese spa retreat and Izanami dinner/sake pairing, and an evening at the world famous Santa Fe Opera!

They’re offering a special promotion for Offcall: If you use Promo Code: "OFFCALL100" with registration, you’ll get a $100 discount, which can also be used in addition to another $100 rebate for referring a friend (Note: this does not include travel/hotel).

Learn more about this event and register here.

Highlights From Our Community

Each week, we celebrate career milestones, launches, & other goings-on in the physician community. Have something to promote? Reply and we’ll feature you.

🏃‍♀️ Run, Annie Andrews, Run
Physician running for office alert! Pediatrician Dr. Annie Andrews announced her run for U.S. Senate in South Carolina. Watch her launch video and learn more here.

🎙️ Hot new podcast, featuring Sachin Jain & Peggy O’Kane 
Dr. Sachin Jain and Margaret O'Kane had a spirited discussion on the future of the quality movement for the new NCQA Quality Talks podcast. Check it out here.

✅ Strong work, Minal Shah!
Dr. Minal Shah was featured with many other healthcare leaders in Becker’s Healthcare’s 57 predictions on the future of the healthcare workforce. Read more here.

📝 Recommended read, Resa Lewiss
After last week’s How I Doctor episode about mid-career physicians, we’re highlighting important work from Dr. Resa Lewiss about mid-career women physicians in academic medicine and how mid-career and senior-career women are held back due to gendered ageism in healthcare.

👏 Well stated, Taif Mukhdomi
Dr. Taif Mukhdomi reflected on the ROI of practicing medicine today and why the deck is stacked against physicians. Well said! Read it here.

🎥 New course from Antonio Webb
Dr. Antonio Webb released a new course called Social Media for Doctors to help physicians build, grow, and monetize their online presence. It’s the “blueprint he used to grow to 1M+ followers while still practicing full-time as an orthopedic spine surgeon.” Check it out here.

📖 Go buy the book, Terry Adirim 
Dr. Terry Adirim’s book “Digital Health, AI and Generative AI in Healthcare” is a well-timed, concise and practical AI guide of both the technology’s promise as well as the downsides. Learn more and buy it here.

🍾 Congrats, Shiv Gaglani
Osmosis.org founder and physician entrepreneur Dr. Shiv Gaglani graduated from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine this week! Congratulate him here.

Have You Nominated a Physician for Our How I Doctor Award Yet?!

We’re giving out the inaugural How I Doctor Physician of the Year Award to a physician who is charting a new career path and using their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit to inspire other physicians. We’ll be announcing the winner in this newsletter and on the How I Doctor podcast, and we’ll also award this person $1,000 to recognize their contributions.

Who is a physician role model you would like to nominate? You have until June 13th to make your nomination. Learn more about the award here and nominate someone at the link below.

Nominate an all-star physician here!

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