Whether you’re a GI doctor, neurologist, or dermatologist, there is a particular topic in which you’re quite adept. Creating a skill for physicians is a way to scratch multiple simultaneous itches.
A skill you create and sell to physicians will help your colleagues, make you richer, and add to your repertoire of abilities.
You can create a tutorial, a course, or a skill. To me, each of these is a bit different. I have created all of them and they are easy to market, fun to create, and profitable.
Medicine Needs It
More than ever, we need to share with each other our skills. The tricks of the trade. The clinical pearls which we have mastered over our careers and have made our lives easier.
Medicine is getting faster paced and there are more and more disease we need to be familiar with.
You cannot be an orthopedist and not get diabetes. If you don’t understand how your diabetic patient manages their insulin you won’t be able to manage their post-op complication well.
And you cannot be a family medicine doctor without knowing how to properly manage acne. And I’m not talking about minocycline with topical clindamycin.
We Don’t Communicate
Outside of residency it’s damn near impossible to learn anything new. All of our time is taken up with charting, protecting our ass, and dealing with bureaucracy.
Once we send a patient off to a specialist, they disappear off into the abyss. I only have enough time to read the rheumatologist’s final report, no time to review what their workup was.
Which means that I’ll continue sending my borderline ANA’s and elevated CRP’s to rheum and they’ll keep scratching their head as to why they get these weak referrals.
Traditional Teaching Sucks
I’ve been to conferences and taken online courses where a specialist has tried to teach me the basics of IBS management. I’ve listened to the management talk neurologists have given for migraines. They suck.
These are career speech givers, burn out, retired specialists who landed a gig and giving the same old tired talk to the same old uninterested physicians.
It’s not that they suck, it’s that this teaching model sucks. I need to be learning the juicy pearls of migraine management from a passionate neurologist who’s got migraines licked in her practice.
I wanna learn how an allergist managest the toughest allergic rhinitis cases. And how a urogynecologist manages his urge incontinence patients.
Don’t dumb things down for me. Don’t teach me the goddamn basics, dude. Instead, condense your knowledge into real actionable steps and workflows. I want to hear thought process and learn how you manage your patients.
Creating Skill Courses
A skill course is a course focusing on a particular skill in medicine. It might be procedural, as in a joint injection. Or it might be cerebral, such as working up a neuropathy.
If you have such a passion and are a specialist, pick up your phone and create a voice recording, less than 30 minutes in length.
Next, start a website called migrainemaster and pop that recording on there and sell it for $250.
It’s really that easy. And eventually you can write a book, if you’re so inclined. Or create a workbook for patients. Or make content geared towards patients.
Digital Nomad Physician Style
A business is a business before it’s profitable, and even before it makes it’s first sale. The minute you pick up your phone to attempt your first recording, you’ve started a business. Whether you’ll publish it, whether you’ll sell any courses, that’s up to you.
As in, you can contact various family medicine residencies and primary care clinics and offer your course for sale – wholesale, at a slight discount.
And you hopefully will come up with other topics which you can create skill courses about. Even if it’s something as simple as a good physical exam for ophthalmologic issues or the right imaging to order for knee pain.
The digital nomad physician will have multiple ways of getting income from their skill courses. They’ll have a physician audience, a PA student audience, a patient audience, and maybe even sell their courses on MOOC sites.
Opportunity for All Medical Professionals
Maybe you don’t find this idea interesting. Perhaps you’re a pharmacist and don’t think what you have to say would reach a broad enough audience.
But, dear pharmacist, did you know that most of us clinicians have no fucking clue what the hell goes on behind those sterile counters? We see the shelves full of meds and wonder why you just don’t reach up there, grab the medicine, and hand it to us.
An entertaining skill course where you talk about the ins and outs of the pharmacy would sell. Maybe not for $250, but it’ll sell.
Suddenly, every C-level exec and medical director becomes your customer. Because they all want to understand why the pharmacy becomes yet another bottleneck in healthcare.
More than Creating a Skill
It’s not that you’re just trying to create a course or a skill. That may not be enticing to you. But from such a simple action you will learn a lot.
- marketing
- creating a website
- starting your own business
- learning the legal aspects of selling digital healthcare products
- working with digital media
- making new connections
- meeting new people
The goals isn’t to make money. The goal is to add value. If you’re looking for the next idea which is lucrative, just do a google search, there are thousands!
Ideas are plentiful. It’s the idea which resonates the most with you and which you’re excited in the morning to get cracking on. That’s the right idea for you.
Income Potential
Again, don’t focus on the income, we’re medical professionals, not branded entrepreneurs.
But once you can create something valuable then the money follows. There is no other reason for someone to part with their money.
My website is tiny compared to other bigger physician brands out there. But I’m not a bad marketer and I am willing to constantly experiment.
With just a few hundred clicks a day on my site I am selling a few courses each month. Quite a lot more now because of the recent surge in telemedicine. But still plenty even before CV19.
I always made enough to pay down my student loans, if nothing else. And now I make enough to pay for a decent mortgage. And the income is passive.
Passive, as in I wake up in the morning, check my phone, and read “You’ve received a payment from ***** for $500.”
Sample Skill Course
Check out this sample dermatology skill course which I created. I am offering the link for free here. But I’ll still put it up for sale in my store.
Why? Because people still find my online digital store and will have never bothered to read my blog. They’ll see this skill advertised for $25 and they’ll buy it. And if they like it, they’ll come back and buy my $500 course.
Click here to see the product featured in my digital store.
For the next few months, and maybe even the next few years, as long as someone searches “cheap derm telemedicine course”, they’ll come across this site.
If I update the page (not the content) from time to time, or link to it from my other content, it’ll live on even longer.
Which means I’ll get a payout of $25 from time to time. Might seem like nothing but it adds up. And it’s not my only course and not my only digital nomad physician income.