Transitioning from a Clinical Career into Non-patient Work

How to make smart sacrifices from your paycheck and invest in yourself

Has clinical work lost its luster?

We should distinguish between not loving your job and not loving your career. I’ve written about the Big Three criteria for assessing if you’d be better off finding a new gig (see: Should You Quit Your Healthcare Job?). Sometimes the cons of a job start outweighing the pros and we can feel burned out.

But other times the burn runs deeper and we’re actually falling out of love with our profession. No amount of job hopping will cure it; no raise will make the fruit taste as sweet as it used to. This can be a devastating epiphany, and it often comes with the heavy weight of emotions like depression, guilt, and anxiety. We’ve spent our lives taking care of patients and now we have to figure out something else to do for a living.

The good news is that there’s a whole world of non-clinical careers waiting for you. In How I Stopped Being a Dentist, I talk about the several paths that lie ahead.

So how do we take those first steps? How do we find out if we want to go into academia or work in pharma sales or join a healthcare technology company? Read on…

Recognizing it was time to transition

My first few years in practice were the “rise and grind” life of an associate dentist. I was working six days a week, early mornings and late nights, enjoying getting paid to do the thing I had essentially spent my whole life training to do. I loved it. I was learning every day. I was far from my 10,000 hours (as Malcom Gladwell would say), so dentistry still had many mysteries for me and I was uncovering them one filling at a time.

After three years of being an employee, I opened my own practice from scratch in 2010. It was a whole new world of exciting challenges. I was still honing my craft as a provider, but I now was learning to be an entrepreneur and a manager of people.

Dentistry had my full attention. Until it didn’t.

After another year, I came to the realization that I wouldn’t be totally fulfilled as a dentist and practice owner. I wouldn’t say that I was approaching mastery of my craft, but I was becoming more comfortable, and that was getting dull. My growth and enjoyment were starting to plateau, and I could see a not-too-distant future where the daily challenges of healthcare were more frustrating than exciting for me.

Fortunately, by that time I had already been dabbling in other pursuits that held my interest. Could I turn any of these extracurricular activities in to steady work that could start replacing patient care? Let’s see:

(1) I was heavily involved in organized dentistry. I held a few different leadership positions including one at the national level of the American Dental Association. While this was a fun distraction from clinical work, these were volunteer positions… meaning my payment was in leadership experience and networking. No real career prospects here.

(2)I had a couple dozen lectures under my belt. This was starting to pay, but the gigs were few and far between. I definitely wanted to do more of this.

(3) I had started a blog, The Curious Dentist, as a creative outlet and as a means to build my brand online. I loved writing, but this generated no revenue.

(4) I had done a couple one-off consulting gigs, but nothing that had paid very much. I wasn’t well-known in the industry, so these opportunities had been more coincidental than intentional.

(5) I was a co-editor of a bi-weekly e-newsletter for a dental media company, which paid me a few hundred bucks a month. This was promising, but I was a long way from replacing a day’s pay in patient care.

So I would need for one or more of those pursuits to start paying decent, steady money if I was going to start reducing my clinical work, right?

Pulling the trigger

Let me set the stage. I had been working in my own practice Mondays, Wednesdays, and alternating Saturdays. Those days didn’t pay very much at all because it was a start up. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, and alternating Saturdays I was an associate dentist in another practice, which is what actually generated my income. So I was working six days a week, was starting to feel less enthusiastic about clinical work, and was feeling drawn towards my inconsistent low- or non-paying hobbies.

In 2012, I gifted myself the most valuable resource on the planet: time.

I gave up Tuesdays at my associate job. I made the rather bold decision to not wait for my non-clinical work to start paying better. I devoted one day per week to develop my non-clinical work so that it would eventually start paying better. I was able to strategize, build my brand, devote more time to writing, research topics and create slide decks. It was freaking glorious.

To be clear, it truly wasn’t easy to give up what was essentially a third of my paycheck. And remember that my income was already a bit lighter since I wasn’t earning much from my clinical days at my start-up practice. These were the lean years, financially speaking. But this was me making an investment in myself. The lost dollars from an extra shift of clinical work were a stack of casino chips and I was betting it all on me.

That bet paid off within two years. I spent many of those Tuesdays researching how businesses work, which was quickly becoming my new favorite subject. I was keenly interested since I was two years into owning my own practice and had realized I had a lot to learn, but I also found that it was a niche topic as a lecturer in my profession. And my lecturing was becoming more consistent because I knew I could create whatever material I needed upon request (for more info, see How to Launch Your Career as a Professional Speaker).

The biggest payoff, however, was that e-newsletter. It had been my foot in the door with the dental media company, who began sending me additional work. I joined their continuing education peer review board, which meant I reviewed submissions for quality and helped strategize on future initiatives. I wrote additional content when asked, including for their flagship publication, Dental Economics. I had become a reliable utility player— plug me in and I’ll get the job done. Want a quick technical review of a CE submission? No problem. Need to ghost write an article for a reluctant author? I’m your Huckleberry.

In 2014, the Chief Editor of Dental Economics retired and I was on the short list for taking his place. When I got the job, everything changed for me. This was a prominent position in the dental industry, acting as an accelerant for my lecturing and consulting work. Most importantly, I had steady, paying, non-clinical work and I was able to quit my associate job. I was now only seeing patients 2 or 3 days per week (in my own practice) and the rest of the week I was getting paid to do something other than patient care.

Smart sacrifices

The classic entrepreneur story involves making sacrifices to will a bold idea into existence. They take out loans, max out credit cards, and get friends and family to fork over cash to start a business in their garage.

If you’re in healthcare and you want to begin transitioning into a non-clinical career, think about all the things you could accomplish if you had just one day to devote to pursuing your new passion. One day per week, two weeks, even just one day a month. You will miss the paycheck, but your future self will be eternally grateful for the smart sacrifice you made to properly pursue your next endeavor.