Today we have an insightful conversation about the rapidly expanding world of telemedicine with Dr. Takashi Nakamura and Dr. Suneer Chander. two entrepreneurial emergency physicians. Takashi and Suneer share how they built successful virtual medicine careers after starting telehealth as a side gig. They explain why getting 50 state licensed maximizes opportunities and income potential across this emerging field.
We bust some common myths around telemedicine and discuss the value of learning from others with experience. Whether you’re curious or ready to take the leap into remote patient care, this episode provides an inside look at crafting a unique telemedicine career and how their community can help physicians thrive. Don’t miss the first half on my informative chat with these telehealth trailblazers!
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Transcript:
Dr. Mike: [00:00:00] Hey guys. This is Dr. Mike Woo-Ming. Welcome to another edition of Bootstrap MD podcast for physician and healthcare entrepreneurs. When I was in. Residency, which is many months ago. I was taught that there was a certain way a doctor should practice medicine, and I learned this from my own dad who was a pediatrician.
The idea is that you went to medical school, you then went to residency, maybe near the end of residency, you started a interviewing with for a few jobs. You found a group or hospital that you liked. You joined up with them and they gave you a contract and you worked for them for the next [00:01:00] 30 or 40 years of your life until you eventually retired.
It doesn’t work this way, and it’s, we’ve noticed that physicians that can work in a variety of different ways. I think a lot of it has occurred since Covid, but even prior to Covid, we have physicians working non-clinical careers, physicians who do locums work, doctors who not have one job and might have multiple part-time jobs that may require clinical care administration research you name it.
Then there’s this new way that you can practice medicine, and it’s what these two gentlemen that I’m being interviewed are referring to as virtual medicine. They’re the founders of the all in remote or also known as Air Physician Academy, who helps doctors get into this field they just launched last year with some amazing results that they’re happy to share with today.
So I’d like to introduce to the program. Dr. Takashi. Nakamura and Dr. Suneer. Chandir. [00:02:00] How you guys doing, fellas?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Great. Great. Thank you for having us, Mike.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: That’s alright. Thanks for having us, Mike.
Dr. Mike: Great. A little bit of inside baseball here is I worked with you guys for by, in the last year or so as a coach and as a business.
I may have had some contribution actually getting Air Academy started, so I’m gonna pat myself on, on, on this shoulder here. But first, let’s talk about what you guys do. What is Air Academy? What is it all about?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Okay. First of all, you had more than just some contribution. You were. You gave us the idea you heard what we did and you said, what you should teach other people.
But so obviously we’re super thankful for your guidance and your coaching. What Air does is we’re an educational program that shows physicians who want to transition into virtual medicine, how to develop multiple income streams in the field by showing ’em what opportunities exist sharing the [00:03:00] resources we have and the network we have.
Dr. Mike: Wonderful. So I wanna get into Air Academy what’s all about. Some may know you as a telemedicine platform, but it is really a lot more than that. We’re, and we’d like to get into that. So I’ll start with you, Takashi, maybe just talk about your background and then we’ll switch it over to Suneer and maybe how you guys met and then decided to launch this thing.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re both emergency physicians by specialty, right? And a few years ago we wanted to just do telemedicine as a side gig. And both of us started a few years ago, but for me, I just wanted to just to complete side gig, right? Just wanted to maybe shave off a few shifts a month, right in the er, I got licensed in a handful of states and I started doing telemedicine, just a traditional synchronous, two-way audio-video communication in that sense, and just doing urgent care. So that’s how it really started. And then so that just led to doing a little bit more, a little bit more. Next thing I’m nationally licensed in 50 states in D.C, and then just started really going at it [00:04:00] with all things virtual health.
Dr. Mike: So Suneer, tell us about your background and how you got launched into this career.
Dr. Suneer Chander: I am an emergency medicine physician. I started working during covid. It, I started dabbling in telemedicine during covid because I needed to make money. I found out that I really loved it.
I loved the access it provides to the patients. I love how innovative the care delivery models are from different companies. And. As I got more into it, I wound up expanding more licensure. I got to about 22 and started working at a company where to catch it was working and I tell people that it took action.
I met very similar to the way my wife and I met. I. We started texting each other and then we started calling each other, and then I flew out to meet him, and then we became besties and started this program together.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: We do. Go ahead. We actually had have a community of people I think.
In that sense, we do it differently from those [00:05:00] who do telemedicine who are just in a corner by themselves. I think over the past few years we just built communities of people and that’s how I met Suneer here too. Just, we just looked out to see like-minded physicians in this space.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah.
Dr. Mike: Yeah. So let’s just talk about that because there is this kind of, maybe for lack of a better term, stigma on telemedicine, or at least it’s the way that you guys practice telemedicine. Is a lot different than I believe most doctors or at least perceive the way telemedicine is done. For example, personally, I got involved in telemedicine like 10 years ago.
Worked for a company, they helped pay or pretty much paid for states that maybe got licensed in about eight or 10 states. And then when they got started it was just like, okay, we’ll pay you by the hour. And then they quickly realized that because they were a startup company, they weren’t having a lot of.
And then they said, we’re gonna pay you by the patient there. And there could be times where you’re like sitting there for 68 hours and you’re just [00:06:00] sitting there and watching Netflix, which isn’t bad, but you’re also not getting paid a lot of money just doing this and you’re hourly rate.
It’s So is that how you guys connected because you were sharing, knowledge about this, or maybe, what exactly was the connection that, that, that led to this, relationship?
Dr. Suneer Chander: A actually, so when you dive into telemedicine, there are times when you’re gonna need to obtain new clinical knowledge.
We’re emergency medicine physicians and we were working for a women’s health company. So I was sitting in there learning their protocols on up to date learning new medicine that I, I didn’t use in my career. Takashi had been at that at that company for a couple years before I, I showed up and he just reached out a helping hand.
He said, I know you’re an emergency medicine doc. I know you’re gonna have some trouble. Let me know if you need any help. That’s when we started texting, Hey, how do I do this in this situation? How do I take care of this patient? And he just helped grow my clinical knowledge. That’s how [00:07:00] we met it, it’s more about, community having a collaboration or someone who’s open to helping other people along, it was really helpful for my career.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: And we started talking about real estate. We started talking about other contracts that we were doing and how that meshed with what we were doing like on a daily basis, right?
Hey, what other are you doing men’s health? Are you doing, chronic care? Are you doing urgent care? So we started talking about those types of things and how we’re stacking them to make them efficient for our working hours, right? So when we start talking about, we realize, hey we’re pretty like minded.
We’re trying to make the most out of telehealth. And so it’s, and it’s the way I’ve been practicing. And so Suneer was learning about that too. So we start collaborating in that sense as well.
Dr. Mike: And I think one of the biggest things is the realization that you can work for multiple companies in addition to obviously working in different states.
Usually when a telemedicine company approaches you or you’re you look into it, it is we’ll help you, we’ll help you get licensed for the states, but because of that we [00:08:00] kinda own you. So even thought about working for different companies is foreign to them. Is that what you saw and then realized that there’s a different way to, to practice this virtual type of medicine?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah. I. I think our goal in general is to try to shift over to the right side of the cashflow quadrant for those people who are, familiar with the the Robert Kiyosaki book and by doing, but what we try to do is, obtain multiple contracts in a ten-ninety-nine fashion, and not sign ever sign a non-compete.
I think that’s a mistake for any physician to sign anywhere. There’s no worth job. There’s no job worth it. To sign a non-compete. So it, that’s what we do. We try to maximize our business income.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: That’s correct. And so we’re, we wanna be nomads in the space, right? And not just work for one company.
And so we felt that we can help so many more patients out, so many more companies out with that business mindset of, now I’m a contractor, [00:09:00] right? What can I do that fits within my own office hours and not the other way around? Like, how can I work for that, employer as an employee, right?
Yeah. So there’s many ways to do telemedicine or virtual medicine as we call it, more in a broader sense because it just not, it’s not just that, like I said, not that synchronous two-way audio-video conversation. We can do asynchronous care, we can do collaborations. With advanced practitioners nationwide, remotely there’s a lot of leadership roles out there.
We do advisorships roles. We’re both medical directors at different companies. There’s the CMO roles out there, opportunity to also do be remote group practice owners. So companies can adhere to corporate practice of medicine laws. And so there’s a lot of opportunities out there in telemedicine, not, like I said, not just synchronous care.
Oh yeah.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Telemedicine has telemedicine has a bad name to it amongst a lot of physicians. People roll their eyes and think it’s about prescribing antibiotics to people who don’t need antibiotics, but it’s [00:10:00] far more vast. The opportunities are so much more abundant and diverse than that. That weird don’t know what the, that branding that it’s gotten,
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Dr. Mike: Yeah. So that’s why you’re what you guys are really doing is what you guys are defining as virtual medicine. So let’s put out a [00:11:00] definition. What is virtual medicine?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Ooh, great. So it’s anything you can do remotely. It, which would include. Digital medicine, like telemedicine that physicians tru think about when they think about virtual medicine.
But it would also include oversight of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. It would also be helping digital startups comply with corporate practice and medicine laws by being their PC owner. And I, and then I think any kind of entrepreneurship or leadership options there are telemedicine, virtual medicine is a field in its infancy.
And my observation is that it is a field dominated by business without much clinical leadership. So I think there’s vast opportunities for doctors to step in and, steward. Steward this field into, a quality field that can really put patient care and patient quality forward. [00:12:00]
Dr. Mike: Yeah, and I think, obviously since the pandemic we’ve learned all these different possibilities the way physicians can practice medicine.
So I wanna get back to when you guys were dating and, but also I know that you guys started to talk more. Of your colleagues about this and taking them on your wing? Takashi, you wanna speak to that?
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah, I did, right? Because when I started doing this, I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
I was just doing the basic things, the things that the vast majority of people think telemedicine is. That’s what I was doing. But as I started getting more and more into it, and, now I’m getting calls and I’m speaking to coordinators, recruiters at healthcare attorneys all the time and I’m just inserting myself in all these in different parts of, telemedicine.
And I started making a good income so quickly that I multiplied my own ER income and. Next, I put in my six months notice to quit. And that’s when I got started getting questions from my friends and colleagues, right? The night shift docs that I used to work [00:13:00] with.
And they wanted to know how I was doing things. So that’s where I started teaching them, right? I just took ’em under my wing. I said, Hey let’s get you licensed up. Let me, I’m getting all these, these off-market job opportunities. Let me start pushing them your way.
And that’s how it really started. And I helped seven people out, most of them were from my brick and mortar but there were some that just called me. They’re friends of friends, one from North Carolina, some in, in, in the west coast, just calling me and asking me, Hey, how are you doing things?
Just ’cause I wanted to help out. I was just I was just giving them some jobs and that’s how it really started. It was very organic and all of ’em now are very successful. And then Sonia and I got to talking and Hey, we, I think we have a pretty good system in place, right?
Like we’re. We’re teaching these guys how to do it our way as a business and as nomads and it’s been working and they’re all successful. Maybe we should more formalize this and make a coaching academy out of it. And that’s how we started. And we started talking about, and that’s when we met you, Mike and you helped us a lot.
Dr. Mike: That’s awesome. Takashi, you left your er career to do this full-time. Suneer I believe also.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yep.
Dr. Mike: The same was for you? [00:14:00]
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yep. I left last October.
Dr. Mike: Wonderful. So what are you seeing with the doctors that, that you’ve been helping? Are they being fulfilled in this new virtual medicine that they’re doing?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Oh, so I, I think that, the areas of fulfillment here are, there’s a few opportunities, right? One is. If you have any kind of entrepreneurship mindset, if you wanna learn about the business of medicine telemedicine is a great space to be in. There’s a lot of opportunities to be on the business side of things and advisor, and you can learn a lot that way. I really do genuinely love the the novel and innovative ways. Some companies are taking care of me populations to catch, and I both work for a company that, helps helps patients who engage in high-risk sexual behavior obtain HIV prep.
And it’s a blind spot in the traditional healthcare system and we get to help out in that. There’s another company I work with that [00:15:00] that is taking care of patients with irritable bowel syndrome and try to avoid them getting on benzodiazepines and get them. Behavioral medication, therapy and diet dieticians to help them.
So I think there’s a lot of areas to get fulfilled in. Then on top of that, like I get to spend more time with my family. I set my own schedule. I take my laptop when I go on vacation. I and I, I. Bang out a couple of hours of work. I go to the gym whenever I want. I used to be a night shift doctor.
Like now I have, if you look at my Aura ring stats, every night between 10 and 11 P.M. I’m sleeping and every morning between five and six A.M. I’m waking up. I have a regular sleep schedule. I feel like a human again.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah, it’s crazy. I, we work on our own time, like when we wanna work and we don’t, we, when we don’t, we just keep our laptops closed, right?
I get to take my kids to school every single day. I get to go to every [00:16:00] single kid event, whether it’s at school, after school, weekend, baseball singing performances. I get to sleep with kids every single night and I work whenever my kids aren’t around or my wife doesn’t want to hang out or whatever it is.
Then that’s when I work. So it’s just been, it’s been so good. I would never have even imagined a life like this.
Dr. Mike: Yeah. I spent some time with you guys at a recent conference and we were there and I think Suneer, you had to say, Hey, I. I gotta go for a couple hours, bang up some asynchronous work here and I’m gonna be right back.
And came back, during the session was like, that, that was amazing. It kinda reminds me of, the band, the Beatles, when John Lennon said he wanted to like, get a swimming pull belt. He went in and he wrote a song, on, on his spare time.
So that, that’s incredible. So you guys got together, you started to realize that a lot of doctors were benefiting from the knowledge that you’re sharing, and then it was decided to like, Hey, let’s create a formal company, and that’s how air all in Remote Physician Academy was born. You worked with your [00:17:00] first group I believe started what, six months?
So tell us about what is the All-in-A-Remote Physician Academy. And why should a physician be interested in this program?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Do you want Takashi want me to take it?
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: No. Yeah, sure. Our program is pretty unique, right? We provide lifelong resources and opportunities for our physician members. It’s, so the educational part, six months, but it’s not just a six-month.
Six month coaching academy, right? It’s an immersive program. We combine nonstop education both formally and informally. We provide networking and also job assistance. So we what we do is we provide support with licensure, right? So people getting a license, multi-license, we recommend national licensure so you can leverage everything.
We can also, we also provide the unique off-market job opportunities out there. Personalized coaching, catered to members specific needs. And we do that until their objective goals are met. So it’s very catered to that specific physician member [00:18:00] I. Additionally. Our program fosters a long-term community of like-minded physicians, similar to what we had when we started.
And we still take collaboration and networking pretty much for the rest of their career. So it’s this lifelong community that to get you get to be a part of
Dr. Mike: Suneer. You wanna add on to that?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah, I think the other thing that we do is, we’re all nationally licensed. Everyone who joins our program is committed to getting their license in 50 states and dc and with that, there is increased risk, and I don’t say that to scare you.
I, I say that to, to show, to, to make sure that everyone knows what they’re what they’re getting into, and make sure that they’re educated about it. It. If you think about it, fifty-one different licenses, that’s fifty-one different jurisdictions. You’re you’re dealing with in terms of your CME compliance, the telemedicine compliance.
And it’s, it becomes complex and hard to deal with. Our group leverages our. The fact that we are a group to obtain guidance from from legal systems from [00:19:00] license licensing specialists in order to mitigate those risks for us. And we also educate the doctors how to what potholes there are, where are the pitfalls are and what they should avoid.
Walking around with 51 licenses, Takashi once told me is like walking around with a with a loaded gun and not. Not knowing how to use it, not having an ability to use it. We can fast-track that for you. We can show you how to how to manage that.
Dr. Mike: And I think In addition, and you did mention, you, you have resources that you use to help you with the licensure and it’s oftentimes with a discount that they would be able to get on their own.
Is that correct?
Dr. Suneer Chander: That is correct.
Dr. Mike: That correct? So let’s talk about the, yeah, let’s talk about the fifty-one licenses. There’s some probably people, doctors here, maybe they have one license fifty-one sounds a daunting. Can you do this with just a few licenses? What would
you recommend?
Dr. Suneer Chander: So you can definitely create a solid income with a few licenses, but if you want [00:20:00] maximum leverage, maximum flexibility and maximum income.
Fifty-one gets you there fifty-one gets you to making sure you’re scheduling. When you wanna work, how you wanna work fifty-one gives you more business opportunities, more advisory opportunities. Certainly you could do pretty well in the range of, Takashi and I debate this, I think minimum 10, he thinks minimum 20, you could figure it out, but it, you can definitely get a solid income if that’s what you’re looking for. Yeah.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: And. I feel like you, you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And there are people with 10 licenses that are making the equivalent of their brick and mortar and the way Suneer and I look at it like that’s pretty cute, right?
Hey, that’s cute. What are you doing? You’re doing synchronous stuff or doing maybe a little bit of asynchronous. But you don’t know what you don’t know. The more licenses you have, not only do you cap at a, you can cap at a higher income range, but you can also like. You have time on [00:21:00] your side now, right?
Imagine just opening up your laptop and you can just open up five tabs and you just look at the cues in five different companies and you’re just gonna have a full cue with everything and you can just, you can play with it and do as many consults as you want whenever you want to do it, right?
You’re not waiting for patients to get into the cue. So there’s a lot more you can do, even if it’s just clinical, synchronous and asynchronous care that with many more licenses. So I, like the senior said, I always recommend the more the better. If you can do it through what they call the IMLC, the Interstate medical Licensure, Compact.
If you’re, if you reside in a state that that is, that does that, then you can get a lot more licenses quicker and cheaper.
Dr. Suneer Chander: It’s not just about volume. Mike though more licenses get you more volume of patients. That’s definitely true. It’s also about certain job opportunities.
There, there are people that won’t hire non-fifty-one-ers. And then it’s also about, helping companies with corporate practice and medicine [00:22:00] laws. They want you to be a fifty-one-er, if that’s the case. And then. We both do a little bit of n nurse practitioner collaborations.
Your expanse and your ability to get more across multiple states is much easier when you have more licenses. So it’s not just about telemedicine volume. It’s about your entire. We advocate for fifty-one because it’s about your it’s maximizing all of your opportunities through multiple streams.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: And even with one company, right? So you can talk about multiple streams and multiple companies, but even one within one company, you can be their turnkey solution. You can be their director, their advisor, their NP collaborator and their sweeper role. Say, there’s no physicians to be able to take care of so many doctors.
At the end of the night, you can go back, you can go down in there and be the clinician for them as well. So multiple streams of income, even within that same company.
Dr. Mike: Now
We talked about how AIR is a six-month program. You guys are, sharing your knowledge if not every week or pretty much close to it.
But I also wanna also want [00:23:00] to discuss, you’ve had numerous guests, from the industry come in. I wanna share some, maybe some examples of who you’ve brought in and how that’s impacted the group.
Dr. Suneer Chander: I, I think our guests serve as a lot of inspiration and giving insights onto inspirations for our doctors, as well as gives them their personal insights on what is going on in the field. We’ve had a few guests, we’ve had Brendan Levy who is a physician that started, Hey Doctor, which is the EMR that was acquired by GoodRx and now by wheel.
We had Rafid Fadul who is a, a serial entrepreneur and telemedicine expert was one of the original founders. I think he was the original CMO for Wheel. And then we had Jen Pena, former White House doctor in both the Obama and the Trump administration. And she’s.
She has [00:24:00] multiple medical directorship roles in several telemedicine companies. The experience, their wealth of knowledge has been I think pretty valuable for our docs.
Dr. Mike: So we talked about not only do you guys provide the knowledge with yourself and with your guests, let’s talk about the different opportunities, that AIR provides.
You wanna speak to that.
Dr. Suneer Chander: I’ll let you take that Takashi.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Ah think we’re really just, it’s, I don’t know if. I don’t know how to say it, but we’re, I think we just, we give every opportunity possible. We’re gonna really, we just, we give the members all the tools they need to succeed really in virtual medicine.
And we don’t just give the tools. We like, we guide them through everything. And there are a few of our members right now that have, pC opportunities to be to be owners of remote physician groups. And we’re like, we’re walking side by side with them and going through everything with the whole legal system where we’re helping them get their attorneys and ask, making sure that they ask the right [00:25:00] questions to put ’em in the positions to succeed.
Yeah, we’re not just, we’re not just handing out tools and saying, Hey, take this course and you’re done with it. We’re really we’re really guiding them step by step and into whatever field of telemedicine or virtual medicine they want to get into.
Dr. Mike: And also, since your academy has been born, a number of different companies have actually reached out to you, asking about potential.
Look, looking for 50 physicians for 51 licenses. Do you wanna speak to that?
Dr. Suneer Chander: We’ve had about five or six companies that have reached out to us after they’ve heard about us looking for staff. Some even looking for specialists. In our group we have two cardiologists, two dermatologists.
We have some GI doctors, a PM&R doctor so those are fifty-oners, and those specialties are hard to find. And they know that they can come to us and ask us for a referral.
Dr. Mike: So with the Air Academy, it is a comprehensive program. It is a, it is an investment and I think it’s an investment [00:26:00] into the physician’s future and career opportunities.
Let’s say, docs listening to this and it’s Hey, why can’t I just do this on my own? And I’m sure you’ve talked to some doctors who, who listen to you and for whatever reason they just decided to do this. What does their academy offer that perhaps they’re not able to get on their own?
Dr. Suneer Chander: I think there’s a few things. One is. Our experience the whole telemedicine landscape is like the wild west, and a lot of people don’t understand the complexity of the rules involved in engaging with patient care through all the different modalities that are available. And Takashi and I will be completely upfront and honest with you, we’ve stepped in potholes before without even realizing it.
We’ve been lucky. We’ve been lucky so far. There’s a lot of areas where, most people who get into trouble, they don’t know what they didn’t know. And when we stepped into those pitfalls before, we just didn’t know that we’re good people. We just didn’t understand that. [00:27:00] So one, with our experience, you’re gonna avoid all those pitfalls or we’ll show you where to watch out.
Two, like I think. Most people think of telemedicine as a solitary career. People are in their cave, in their basement doing this. And we provide a community that’s very collaborative. People help each other out. One person starts on a new platform and another person’s already been on there. They get together.
We get to be friends. We, and we get to be colleagues. So we provide a community. The second, the third thing is that we provide our network which is. Which is great, I think because we’re also expanding our network. We, all of a sudden people are calling us to get referrals for jobs.
So we’re making a lot of friends in the industry on top of the friends we already actually have. So I think those three things are the major things that we provide. Takashi what do you think? Anything I missed? No.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Just to add to that, you’re right. Like we got so lucky, right? Like we, there we stepped in a lot of potholes and we [00:28:00] didn’t get reprimanded for that.
But there were a lot and you don’t know what you don’t know, right? And. It’s oftentimes the mistake of the company, these MSOs, these management organizations who are run by like these tech tech nerds, and they’re not run by physicians, right? It’s not that, that the establishment like, like a brick and mortar hospital where everything, they have in-house compliance officer and things like that.
And so you do things without knowing that they’re wrong, right? They’re you’re breaking rules. And we know colleagues that have suffered as a result of that, right? And who had licenses reprimanded. So we’ve been lucky. And as we got more and more into it, we realized, oh my gosh, we’re making all these mistakes.
We got this has to stop. And this is it. It also creates an opportunity for physicians to just pull in. And with this community, for example we we paid for, with the community with this membership, we were able to pay for a 50 state survey, a compliance survey to see what states. Can can do asynchronous care versus what cannot and why, right?
All the nuances there. Now, if a company were to do that, it costs between 50 to [00:29:00] $70,000 and some really big companies, yeah, they can do it every quarter, but US physicians, we cannot do anything like that. That’s crazy. Who, nobody will spend that kind of money, right? What we’re able to do as a community with the membership funds is to pay for that once every six months.
We’re trying, if we can do it once every quarter, we will, we’re, right now we’re planning to do it once every six months, so we have, so everyone’s on the same page. The physicians know what they’re getting themselves into and they know where they can practice certain types of medicine and where they can’t.
Dr. Mike: So a physician is probably listening to this. They’re probably working at their other job. This sounds very attractive, but can physicians do this while. Working their other job.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah, I started I started doing this. I was a fifty-state licensed physician. While I was still working in the er I worked maybe 20, 20 to twenty-five hours a week with telemedicine.
It was all on my own time, right? So in between shifts when my kids were at school. When they were doing their homework or they didn’t want to just, they just wanted to kick [00:30:00] me outta their room and not spend time with me. That’s when I worked. This extra time, it really, two hours here, three hours there, it adds up.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yep. Yep. And going back to getting more licenses so you can do that on your own time. So when you’re not working, when you’re waking up early in the morning, you’re, your family’s still asleep, you can just open up your laptop and get a little bit of work done. And for me, next thing you know I’m.
Giving away shifts, right? Because I don’t wanna work. And then it, and it gets to a point where now you get to choose to work your brick-and-mortar as opposed to having to work there, right? So you can definitely transition out as slow or as quickly as you want. If you get into our membership there’s no rush into doing that.
I think I, it’ll definitely take longer if you do it on your own, but you can absolutely do it on your own and you can continue to work your main brick-and-mortar job. It’s just, we’re just gonna turbocharge that if you join the membership.
Dr. Mike: There’s a lot. Yeah. Go ahead, Suneer.
Dr. Suneer Chander: I I would just to add onto that Takashi like, it, it’s not necessarily about leaving your job either. It’s about attaining your goals. So we [00:31:00] actually have a member Justin he, he loves teaching residents and works in an academic emergency department. And he doesn’t wanna stop doing that, the, these academics.
They take pay cuts. They’re not making as much as as us in, private practice. So he does this on the side in order to supplement his salary to allow him to do that. And he’s crafted like a career that he loves because of that. So he gets to work on the business and entrepreneurship side with telemedicine.
He gets to teach residents. It’s not about leaving it’s about attaining your goal.
Dr. Mike: Now there’s some, maybe some myths in telemedicine and I guess, we’ll send it to virtual medicine. Is that, this is only good for the first liners, primary care ER docs. But you mentioned you had some specialists on here.
So what type of physician can have a career in virtual
medicine?
Dr. Suneer Chander: We had a guest speaker the other day who said that COVID was the golden age of telemedicine and it laid the framework and the groundwork for [00:32:00] telemedicine to grow, and now he thinks it’s a golden age for specialists.
And it’s about to blossom. And when he was talking about we talked specifically about procedure lists and hi, his response was, if you’re a procedure list, think about everything you’re ignoring in your office while you’re doing your procedures. That is something that you can do in virtual me virtual care.
So I think it’s good for anybody. Mostly, I think it’s good for people who are self-starters who are organized and who if they’re not, they understand that they need to get help. And who are not afraid of learning new things, new clinical things I should say.
Dr. Mike: So let’s talk about your program.
We recently did just we soon be completing the first cohort. And at the time listening. I know we’re either just launching or about to close your second cohort. Let’s [00:33:00] talk about some of the stories or, success stories from your first group. Like we said, it is an investment. It’s investment in your future. Let’s talk about ROI, the return on investment. You wanna be able to share some success stories from your first group?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah I, my favorite story is Haley’s story, right? Haley I actually got presented a PC opportunity for a company that does continuous glucose monitoring.
And I’m an emergency medicine doctor, and they wanted a family medicine or internal medicine doctor. So we we introduced Haley, Dr. Sibitz to, to this company and she was actually gonna turn down the company because she did not feel like she had the experience to do it and to cash in. I got on the phone with her.
Told her that she absolutely had the experience to do it, gave her confidence. Now she’s their medical director, their PC owner. She works 20 hours clinically a week on her own time. And she’s got equity in the company. And we helped her kind of negotiate that equity as well. And, I, [00:34:00] I feel pretty proud of about that because she was not gonna take it and now she’s very happy.
Now she’s crafting her career around that one solid job.
Dr. Mike: So it sounds like they’re not only replacing their income, they’re actually exceeding the current income
Dr. Suneer Chander: For sure. Potential
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: is there in the fifth month? I have some stories, right? Like I, there’s a handful of good stories. In the fifth month, there’s one of the members who is on paternity leave, and he texted one of our coaches that he’s making more, he’s making just as much or more while being on paternity leave in his fifth month than the brick and mortar.
So he’s good to go. He, at any point he could leave. I dunno if he will, but that’s somebody just being in the fifth month in, in our program and he’s not even fully licensed yet. We have another person who’s now flying first class, Justin, right? Because he has enough asynchronous gigs.
So he’s now I’m gonna fly first class. And we’re just talking about getting a privacy screen so he can start jamming out some asynchronous thing so he can pay for his first class while he’s in first class. But there, but I think. The [00:35:00] most common one that I think we’ve heard is just people saying that there’s so many opportunities that they just never knew existed.
And to be able to get into that confidently is something that, it is something that they weren’t expecting, but they’re really happy that they have. Yeah.
Dr. Mike: We talked about, the benefits as well as the risks, in, in this type of medicine. I think it would be, be foolish to learn about the possible risks, and we talk about risk, talk about malpractice.
Insurance how is malpractice covered in these type of endeavors?
Dr. Suneer Chander: Malpractice, you tell medicine. I don’t think it’s as it is a common question. It, I don’t think it’s as big of a deal as most people think it is. First of all to answer your question generally the contracts you get.
They will provide the malpractice for you similar to the way your hospital provides it for you. There are some opportunities out there where it requires you to bring your own malpractice. I took on a couple of those opportunities and I went out and bought [00:36:00] my own malpractice insurance for national licensure, $5,000 for the year that, that was how much I pay.
I think that tells you. That the insurance companies don’t think that telemedicine is a huge risk. The risk is actually elsewhere. The risk is in making sure that you’re maintaining regular regulatory compliance with a, while you’re practicing in multiple jurisdictions. And that can be a big problem.
If you mess up one state. If you don’t get your pain CME in and they reprimand you, the entire country will know that happened and they will also investigate you. And it can be for lack of a better way of saying a big cluster. This is, what we try to do is provide organizational tools and systems in place so that we, you mitigate that risk.
Dr. Mike: So as a member of Air I know you guys have like tracking systems because it can be very complex. It’s hard [00:37:00] enough a physician dealing with one state, let alone 50 50 plus and utilizing your expertise and knowledge to help the individual physician. So where do you see virtual medicine going?
Is it’s saturated or do you see a lot of opportunity moving forward?
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Definitely not saturated. I think it’s just gonna grow and grow. Anyone who tells you it’s saturated are people who have the three to five licenses and they’re looking at just some national companies out there. But we see startups growing every day almost.
It’s crazy. And there’s bigger companies that are just like starting these smaller branches of companies. Just going with specific care. Specific diabetes care, retinopathy care or something like that, right? There’s these big companies that are just forming these, so many small companies and you can work within those small companies too, right?
But I just see it just growing and growing. There’s just no way it’s gonna stop.
Dr. Suneer Chander: The other o opportunity is start your own. If you’re an [00:38:00] entrepreneur, start your own telemedicine practice. We have a friend who’s a lipidologist. All he does he has a virtual practice.
All he does is, collect care for people with high cholesterol. That’s his niche practice. We suggested to one of our members just she knows how to speak Nepalese to create a virtual practice for Nepalese speaking patients. There is a lot of opportunity for growth from the business sector, but there’s also not a lot of opportunity for you to pursue your own passion.
Dr. Mike: Yeah. And what I love about too, obviously that cares to my entrepreneurial heart, is that you are letting more physicians get into this ’cause it is imperative. I think that the way we’re gonna be moving forward, that a physician should be a key component in, in this telemedicine slash virtual medicine wave that’s already here and it’s coming whether you like it or not.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Honestly, Mike, that’s the reason why Takashi and I wanted to do this because most physicians enter this space and they’re on their own, and there’s no way [00:39:00] that we can, leverage our group as of physicians against businesses, medical boards without go coming in as a group.
There is no. College of Telemedicine physicians advocating for us. There is, you go to these conferences like the American Telemedicine Association or HLTH, there’s no clinicians there. There. There’re huge telemedicine conventions. It’s like me and Takashi walking around on the floor, and that’s it.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: In fact, they asked us to raise their hands how many physicians are in the room? And it was just like, just a handful of us that raised their hand were like, oh my gosh, this is the, this is a telehealth convention. And there’s three physicians here. It’s crazy.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah. So mission is increase our numbers in a community.
Go out and advocate for ourselves.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah. But even as clinicians, right? Like it just the different mindset of having just knowing that you are not [00:40:00] just stuck with one employer, right? We are, we can, we don’t have, we really don’t have a boss, even though we’re working as clinicians and all these other and in positions within telehealth, we don’t really have a boss, we’re working independent contracts for the most part. So just to have that mindset as physicians, I think is huge.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yeah, if you guys are
like, it’s so much more fun working with people than four people. It is like a, it is a different animal.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah.
Dr. Mike: So 100% true. Guys this has been amazing.
Thank you for sharing all of this knowledge. If you’re interested in joining the All In Remote group we’ll leave a link here on the show notes to where you can go and get it from information. You guys set up a, a free call with each of the potential. Clients why is it important for you to make sure that you’re speaking to, potential clients for this?
Because like I said, it’s not for everybody, right? It’s not for everybody. So what, what gets involved with we can expect when we talk with either one of you, I believe you guys are answering, you’re talking to them individually. Yep. For the only [00:41:00] remote,
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: yep.
Yep. I think the first thing we wanna know is what your own, what your goals are. What do you wanna do? Are you stuck in your, in, in your brick and mortar? Are you are, like, are you stuck with your golden handcuffs? Or what are you trying to do? Are you trying to get more time for your family?
Or do you want more geographic freedom? Do you wanna make money? I think we wanna know where you are, who you are as a person, right? And what you want to get out of this, right? What your goals are and if you feel like we can get you there. Then we’ll love to have you, there, there’s some things that we wouldn’t be able to do.
We’re not magicians, we can’t do everything. But if you feel like you’re a match, then you know, we’ll let you know and we’ll be very honest with you.
Dr. Suneer Chander: Yep. And then, honestly, like I, Takashi and I lose sleep over our members because we wanna make sure that, we feel the weight and the responsibility to take care of them and make sure they get to their goals.
So I, it is something that when I first started doing this with Takashi, like I, I finally came out to him and told him like, I haven’t slept in a week. And it was, it’s something we care about deeply [00:42:00] for
sure.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Sure. If our members go all in with us, I, we tell ’em we’re going all in with you as well.
Dr. Mike: Yeah. And I can certainly attest to that. Into the business. It has been truly amazing and yeah continued more success to the Air Academy and to you guys what you guys are have put in. ’cause I know a lot of work and blissful interiors got gone into this. So again, this has been tremendous.
Thank you for your time. Any last minute thoughts before we end the interview today?
Dr. Suneer Chander: No, just thank you Mike. You’ve been, you’ve inspired this whole thing we definitely appreciate you.
Dr. Takashi Nakamura: Yeah. You definitely you helped us so much from the beginning to now.
Thanks so much for making making it more fulfilling for us. This is such a, this is super fulfilling for us to be able to do this for other our, of our colleagues.
Dr. Mike: It’s been my, my pleasure again continuing success with the Air Academy. If you guys are interested in potentially joining and it, if it’s lucky enough to be open, we’ll leave a link where you can go and register for a free call to see if it’s right for you.
[00:43:00] And guys, we talked about there’s lots of different ways that you can practice medicine line of different ways. You can make money, whether it’s being your own business, whether it be working for lots of different companies. We have opportunities, we have different choices, but it’s not just about researching it and reading it.
It’s allowing you the opportunity to accept these potential opportunities. Do everything each day that keeps you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.