Lessons Learned During a Transition Away from Clinical Practice
Learn from yesterday, live for today ~~ Albert Einstein
Jennifer Bogdanovitch is an internist who transitioned to a Medical Affairs Director position at Vertex after 12 years of clinical practice. Prior to making her transition to the pharmaceutical industry she was in a private practice working the equivalent of approximately 3 days per week.
Jennifer experienced similar issues that many physicians are currently facing; decreased amount of time with patients, issues with the use of electronic medical records systems and losing her autonomy in practicing and caring for patients in the way she deemed best. She describes “reaching a tipping point” where she felt she was compromising excellent patient care.
Given this concern, she decided to evaluate a career in the pharmaceutical industry.
Jennifer was uniquely positioned given her husband works in the pharmaceutical industry in a commercial role. Thus, she had a head start on understanding the industry and networking with people that could provide insights about physician roles in the pharmaceutical industry.
After about 1 year in, she has decided to go back to clinical medicine.
I’m really grateful to Jennifer for sharing her story because her experience can provide guidance to others that are considering whether it is time to transition away from clinical medicine.
- Be patient – Jennifer did a lot of research and turned down the first job offer she received. After really considering the responsibilities of the Drug Safety role, she decided it was not a good fit. “It is prudent to take your time and really find the best role for you”
- Medical Science Liaison (MSL) roles – Initially she interviewed for an MSL role; while interviewing she was asked to consider a Medical Affairs Director role instead. Based on her experience, MDs certainly are well trained for MSL roles and it is a “natural entry point” to the pharmaceutical industry; however, Jennifer believes PharmD’s are also very well suited – given their Pharmacy background, the ability to discuss the mechanism of action of drugs and the safety profile of drugs is ideal for a PharmD.
- Deciding to leave clinical medicine – obviously this is a serious decision that you should explore – Jennifer’s homework for a physician considering transitioning away from clinical medicine is “make two lists” – one that is a list of what you love about clinical medicine and the other is a list of things you would change about clinical practice. Use this list to evaluate any new career you are considering – will it allow you to continue to be fulfilled via pursuits that are similar to what you love about clinical medicine? Will it remove or allow you to influence the items you don’t enjoy? Applying this exercise to a transition to the pharmaceutical industry will help you to decide “Is industry right for me?”
- Autonomy– the pharmaceutical industry is a highly matrixed environment – matrix organizations are organized in “grids”. You have oversight and responsibility to your function (i.e., Medical Affairs) but also to program or project teams – in these teams, you are typically on a similar level to others from different functions – you don’t report to the people on the team but you are responsible to the team and helping the team achieve its goals and deliverables. This is quite different than clinical medicine where organizations are much more hierarchical and physicians are often quite high in the decision-making priority, even from early on. Jennifer described it this way: “by nature, physicians are decision makers, trained to be autonomous, always part of a team but still trained to be decision makers”. An entry role in pharma for a physician is typically not a senior decision maker – one can grow into such a senior role but it can take years. the road to being a senior leader in industry can be many years (for example, I was 9 years into my pharma career when I landed my first Vice President role).
- Specialists – if you can move to a company where your specialty is related to the company’s products there is clarity to your value on the team – you know the disease states and direct needs of patients.
Jennifer reflects on being grateful to have experienced the pharmaceutical industry and was able to learn from her experience. She learned that she really missed one-on-one patient care and although the pharmaceutical industry provides the opportunity to have impact on patients, for Jennifer was not direct enough.
Her learnings are great to share with physicians considering a shift away from clinical medicine. Ultimately, you need to make sure that your career move will fulfill the reasons for leaving clinical practice. Her last advice was also prudent: