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Keep breathing and have a great rest of your day,
Dike
Dike Drummond MD
www.TheHappyMD.com
[Transcript]
Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors – Weekly Tip
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Sign up for the EARLY BIRD LIST HERE
https://support.thehappymd.com/physicians-unchained
My new book Physicians Unchained: Retirement Mastery for Doctors launching in ApriL The NEW ROADMAP to Stick the Landing on this Life of Purpose
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Is Your Job an Equitable Exchange of Value?
Introduction
Hello again, Dr. Dike Drummond here with another lesson from my new book, Physicians Unchained Retirement Mastery for Doctors, which is going to launch in late April, and I'm giving weekly lessons like this in short videos across the internet.
Medicine as Calling vs. Employment
Some people, even doctors, sometimes think that medicine, practicing medicine, is a calling, is a form of art, is a practice where constantly honing your skills, and all of that is true. However, these days, over 70% of doctors in America at least are employees, and the business of medicine your employer sees physician as just another job. You're just another employee.
And they see the practice of medicine as a fancy form of an assembly line, an assembly line where, quite frankly, they wish they didn't have to deal with the complicated humans that are physicians. They would much rather have robots.
AI and the Doctor’s Liability
And now they got their wish in the form of AI. And AI is actually nibbling away at the edges of a doctor's job description and practice a little bit more every month, and you know exactly what I'm talking about.
And the challenge with AI nibbling in our practice is that even though AI may actually make some decisions or write some orders or help us with our chart, if AI makes a mistake, who's liable? Oh, that would be me, right.
The doctor always holds the responsibility for the decisions that are made, even if it isn't made by him or her, and the liability for the outcomes that are produced. That's part of the reason your employer put you under contract.
The Physician Employment Contract
Let's talk about contracts for just a second.
A doctor's employment contract is in legal terms a quid pro quo. If you do this, we'll do that, right?
So let's look at the conditions of this quid pro quo. What do each of the parties bring to the table?
What the Doctor Brings
What does the doctor bring to the table?
Seven to 16 years worth of study just to become proficient in your specialty, board certification, your heart, your soul, your skills as a helper and a healer, dealing constantly with people who are sick, hurting, scared and dying.
You bring the expertise of tens of thousands of patient encounters and a knowledge base and an experience set that no AI can replicate, and you bear full responsibility and full liability for every decision that's made, every outcome from your patient care.
What the Employer Brings
What does your employer bring to the table?
Facilities, staff, supplies, a schedule full of patients and your salary.
Is the Exchange Equitable?
My question to you is, is this an equitable exchange of value?
Are both sides putting things of equal value, things of equal value and equal preciousness on the table?
When these things are divvied up in the form of doctor gets this little pile of cash, organization gets the big pile of cash.
By the way, when I ask employee physicians, and I've been doing this for a decade, if you take all your salary and benefits, and then you look at your total collections for the year, how much you take home, usually it's right around 25–30% of the collections on behalf of the organization they've worked for.
Flip that around, we're talking about an overhead of 70 plus percent if you choose to be an employee physician.
The Tilted Playing Field
So is this an equitable exchange of value, or is this playing field somehow tilted?
Tilted playing field.
Imagine playing on a soccer team where the field is tilted 45 degrees and you're running this direction, right? You're running uphill.
Yeah, that's a tilted playing field.
Is your quid pro quo of your employment contract an equitable exchange of value and a level playing field?
You be the judge.
What Changes at Retirement
However, when you trigger the retirement transition and stop seeing patients under their conditions of employment, all of that goes away.
The obligation to the contract, the responsibility for your decisions, the liability for the patient outcomes, the scheduling of the vast majority of your waking hours, the things you can and cannot do under the terms of your contract—gone, gone.
Taking Back Control
And again, hello, locus of control.
Here's you. Step out of that contract. Be the boss of you.
That's what we have in retirement.
And the goal of the book is to show you tools and give you the support to create your ideal life after medicine, write your finest chapter in the decades after you stop seeing patients for a living.
How cool is that?
Closing
So if you're looking at me right now on social media, you're not on my early bird list.
Somewhere on this page there's a place for you to sign up. It's real simple.
And what I'm doing is sending weekly lessons like this, and you'll also be one of the first people to know when the book's available in late April.
Physicians Unchained Retirement Mastery for Doctors, a new roadmap to stick the landing on this life of purpose.
That's it for today.
Keep paying it forward. Keep being you, the helper and the healer that you are and I'll see you in the next video.