No MBA Needed: A Pediatrician’s Path to VP in Health Tech with Dr. Jennie Berkovich

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Jennie Berkovich to explore how physicians are navigating non-traditional career paths, especially within telehealth and evolving care models. Jennie shares her journey from pediatric hospitalist to telehealth director, and we dive into the real tensions physicians face when stepping into new systems without clear roadmaps. We talk about trust, adaptability, and why more physicians need to take up space in operational and strategic roles. We also look ahead: what AI might mean for care delivery, and why physician involvement in system design isn’t optional, it’s essential. 

Episode Highlights:

[00:00] - Introduction to Non-Traditional Career Paths
[01:00] - Transitioning from Hospitalist to Telehealth
[04:58] - Growth and Development in Telehealth
[10:00] - Navigating Rapid Growth and Change
[14:21] - The Role of Physicians in Telehealth and Administration
[19:04] - Building Trust in Healthcare
[23:38] - The Future of Healthcare and Physician Leadership

Transcript

Alison Curfman (00:01)
Hi everyone, welcome back to Startup Physicians. This is your host, Dr. Alison Curfman and I am joined today by my colleague, Dr. Jennie Berkovich. Hi Jennie, thanks for joining me. So Jennie and I actually have a lot in common in our career paths. We're both pediatricians. We've both done a lot of work with ⁓ telehealth and health policy and ⁓ really focused a lot of our careers on

Jennie Berkovich (00:11)
Hi, thanks for having me.

Alison Curfman (00:30)
improving access to care for our kids. ⁓ And so we've worked at ⁓ different companies, ⁓ but I was really excited to have ⁓ her come on and share a little bit about her pathway because even though we've had a lot of ⁓ commonalities, she's taken a different path to get here than I have and ⁓ has a lot of really interesting learnings for people who may be still in more of a traditional setting but are

are interested in developing some new skills or some new opportunities. So Jennie, I would love for you to share a little bit about your background and kind of how you got started.

Jennie Berkovich (01:07)
Sure. as you shared, I'm a pediatrician. I was trained as a general pediatrician and my first job out of residency was a pediatric hospitalist. And I absolutely loved it. I was convinced I was going to be a hospitalist for the rest of my life. And one thing that nobody tells you when you leave a residency and you go into traditional practice, especially like something that's shift based.

is you have a lot of spare time. And I didn't really know what to do at that time. Once like board study was over, I had passed my boards. I was like spinning, you know, in residency you work so much and all of a sudden I was working less than so, so much and I was working full time. And so I decided I needed another job. And I was looking for also something that was shift based that would mesh nicely with my hospital schedule. And there's a Facebook group, I think it's called like non.

non-traditional career for physicians or non-clinical career for physicians. I just started perusing it and none of it was really sounding interesting. It was all super boring. Most of it was based or geared towards people in adult medicine. And then I saw something that ⁓ I shared before the recording. I thought it was a Ponzi scheme or ⁓ a multi-level marketing scheme. Somebody had posted in the group,

Alison Curfman (02:18)
Like an MLM.

Jennie Berkovich (02:25)
Are you a doctor that wants to work from home? Like make money working from home. And I was like, that doesn't sound right. I don't know any doctor that makes money. Yeah, it totally sounded shady. So I ignored like the first three times, but this person who ended up becoming like actually a friend and mentor in the space was really persistent. And I ended up reaching out to her on Facebook and I was like, Hey, what is this? And she was actually working for a really large practice at the time. And they were just launching their telehealth.

Alison Curfman (02:31)
You're like, my gosh, am I gonna be selling supplements or something? Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (02:55)
like department, this was pre-COVID. had never heard of telehealth. I thought it was shady. thought it was like, you know, looking at rashes. This was probably 2017, like that, right? So.

Alison Curfman (03:01)
What year do you think that was?

Yeah, yeah, there

is not a lot going on, especially in peeds at that space.

Jennie Berkovich (03:12)
Not at all. I

don't even think I had heard the term telehealth. It sounded strange and it definitely didn't sound like something I would be good at. So I ended up interviewing and I was the third doctor they hired for their department. I was working weekends, working telehealth shifts. It wasn't a startup. It was a new department, but it was a very, very established practice in the community.

Alison Curfman (03:32)
Was this a startup?

Okay.

Jennie Berkovich (03:42)
didn't feel like non-clinical at the time. was like still seeing patients. I was only seeing patients, but it was a brand new department. And so as we started to get busier, I saw opportunities for like program development and protocol development. So remember I told you I worked weekends. It wasn't very busy. So I would be like in front of my computer on a Sunday, three to 11, seeing like one patient per hour. And so the rest of the time I was like, okay,

Alison Curfman (04:09)
Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (04:11)
I just saw, let's say, a kid with suspected pink eye. I think it's viral, but how do I know? So that's when I really started to look if there was literature out there, any guidelines out there at the time. As you know, really wasn't a whole lot. And so it really gave me an opportunity to develop and contribute to the program in a little bit more of an administrative way. And then fast forward about a year to two years or so.

I had relocated with my family to Chicago, was still working as a hospitalist, was doing a little bit more at telehealth at that point for the same company in the same position. And the director, the one that hired me, the one that I thought was trying to get me to sell Tupperware, ⁓ was leading the company and she had offered me the position of director. And that was really my very first opportunity to work full-time remote in an administrative role. And that was really the beginning of

Alison Curfman (04:51)
Hahaha.

Jennie Berkovich (05:06)
what basically now is my career.

Alison Curfman (05:08)
Did you, ⁓ about how much do you feel like you were working kind of initially, was just like a side gig?

Jennie Berkovich (05:17)
It was a side gig that very much became the full gig. So when I moved to Chicago, I was still part-time telehealth. And I was still, I think, a full-time hospitalist. But as the department grew and as I really started to enjoy what I was doing and saw a lot of growth opportunities for myself, and ⁓ really felt like specifically the role I had at the time as a hospitalist that wasn't going to offer that.

Alison Curfman (05:21)
Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (05:42)
I kind of made the decision to leave hospital medicine for what I was pretty sure was temporarily. I was like, well, let me just like, I'm going to look for a different hospitalist job. In the meantime, thankfully I have this other full-time telehealth thing. I'm going to keep doing it. And then the directorship opportunity came in. I remember feeling like knowing really that was going to be a turning point for me. Like if I was going to be right working in administration, I think I recognized that that was going to be.

Alison Curfman (06:03)
Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (06:11)
sort of I had to commit to that as my career.

Alison Curfman (06:14)
Yeah, and

I think a couple of things stand out. First off, the fact that you found this through just connections and literally Facebook and being connected to other people that are doing different things and you were actually looking, you were looking for opportunities. And second, it kind of stands out to me that it wasn't really that huge of a shift. It's like, you know how to treat pink eye in the hospital setting or in the clinic setting.

Jennie Berkovich (06:23)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (06:42)
how can you apply that when you're just seeing patients in a new way? ⁓ But it probably involves some level of open-mindedness because I know what telehealth for pedes was like back in 2017. There was a lot of ⁓ hesitation by our field to adopt it. I know I was involved with a lot of the policy work because

There weren't necessarily good guidelines, but I think it took pediatricians like you and me to be able to be like, well, let's see if we can figure this out. Let's see if there's ways we can create an evidence base or create practice guidelines that provide good care in a new way and use it for the right use cases so that we're not using poor medicine.

but did you feel like you had to kind of think outside the box?

Jennie Berkovich (07:41)
I did, and it took me a little bit of time. think in the beginning, I was also very hesitant, especially coming as somebody who's a hospitalist. When you're a hospitalist, you're kind of like Monday morning quarterback, right? Because you're on the receiving end of people who failed outpatient therapies, right? Or, right, it failed to get discharged from the ER because they just weren't improving. And I think there's like a certain degree of like haughtiness maybe, because you're like looking at all the things that quote unquote went wrong.

and say, if only, that was my favorite line as an inpatient doctor. I ended up working an outpatient later on and it was very humbling for me. I was like, if only the pediatrician had done this other antibiotic or if only, right, they had started treatment earlier, we could have avoided this admission. And so I really had to change my thinking when it came to telehealth because ⁓ it wasn't that families were coming to telehealth instead of going to their pediatrician.

that I think that is really a big misconception, I think still in the field, that if you're doing a virtual visit, it's instead of an in-person visit. And I think the reality is that it's instead of nothing, or it's instead of going to the ER unnecessarily. So a line that I often tell people who are hesitant to have telehealth as part of their practice or to really embrace it is, if they're seeing me, it's not because they would have seen you. If they're seeing me, they would have seen no one, and this would have gotten worse.

Alison Curfman (08:51)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jennie Berkovich (09:08)
or they maybe would have gone to a higher level of care that's not necessary for them. And I think until I came to that realization, I was also really hesitant, like ear pain, right? That's a really, really common complaint in telehealth. And my instinct is to say, I don't know why you have ear pain. You need an ear exam. And that is true 99 % of the time. But what if someone's calling you with ear pain and they're on vacation in a rural area?

or they don't have transportation and they won't have transportation for days and days and days. And you can get a little bit more of like a clear history and they have recurrent otitis, right? There's still no clear guidelines, but you have to be able to weigh ⁓ like the pros and cons, right? The risks and benefits of over treating versus leaving something that maybe has a higher likelihood of a true otitis untreated. And so I think that kind of like cowboyish sort of approach. ⁓

really ended up serving me well, but certainly it took me a lot of time to get on board with that. And even now, I think there's a lot of controversy in thinking about things like this.

Alison Curfman (10:12)
Yeah, I agree. So after that role, ⁓ you said, as a director, and you started to do a little bit more of like, I'm guessing, people management and process management, ⁓ along with your clinical care, ⁓ what came after that?

Jennie Berkovich (10:30)
So what happened was, as a director, I think the department had about seven full-time clinicians. It was a mix at the time of physicians and APPs. We were seeing, I think maybe like 5,000 to 6,000 visits per month. And I remember like one time we surpassed 6,000. I was like, wow, what a busy month we had. And then COVID happened. And for me, it felt like somebody flipped a switch. I went from 6,000.

visits per month on the platform to over 20,000 visits per month on the platform. And so I really very quickly had to figure out how to grow a department. And one thing I had never ever done in my life was figure out how to grow a department. So it was a lot of learning on the job. It was a lot of learning how to really build something from scratch, how to hire people, how to train people.

how to give feedback to people that were my colleagues. Some of them were older than me. Some of them had been practicing for much longer than me. I had no skills and really had to like learn a lot about how to be a good people leader and also program development. Like I said, we had some protocols, but definitely not enough to support a 20,000 visit per month platform.

for at that point a very large multi-state practice. And so it was a lot of really reflecting and doing research and talking to people who were doing similar things and figuring out what I could apply to our particular program.

Alison Curfman (12:00)
Yeah, that is a challenge. know that everything kind of blew up in 2020. And those are skills that maybe you didn't have in your previous work as a hospitalist, but they're very learnable, right? And part of developing programs and processes is making something that's replicable, which some people in more traditional environments actually

Jennie Berkovich (12:19)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (12:30)
do have this sort of ⁓ background of maybe developing new workflows in their clinic or hospital setting or, you know, trying to implement a new process. But the idea in a startup or even a private company is the same, right? You want to be able to create a way for a lot of people to do things the same way. And in the startup world, it's done at a pretty rapid clip. ⁓ And that's

what sets it apart, ⁓ but the skills themselves are either transferable from other clinical settings or very learnable.

Jennie Berkovich (13:10)
Absolutely. And I also think like you work so hard in training, like medicine is hard. One of the things that I used to say all the time ⁓ to other people I worked with, especially when we would get overwhelmed with like an administrative task or a process or some staffing puzzle that wasn't fitting, I would say, okay, you guys, we have done much harder things. We used to put...

needles and baby spines, right? Like that was my whole thing, right? If you can do an LP, you can absolutely figure out like staffing ratios. And so I think that mindset also helped me. There's, I think I mentioned to you when we were chatting ⁓ before that there's no room for ego. And I think in these types of roles, you have to be super humble, super willing to learn and open-minded and be able to ask for help when you don't know how to do something, which in the beginning may be a whole lot and even ⁓

Alison Curfman (13:41)
Mm-hmm.

Jennie Berkovich (14:01)
in the middle and in the end, it's still going to be a whole lot. ⁓ But certainly, you can do very, very, very hard things. If you're a clinician, you've been trained how to do very, very hard things. And a lot of that skill set, a lot of that critical thinking, a lot of that persistence of getting that tap no matter what, no matter how many more times, right, you have to put that needle in, a lot of that will transfer to persistence to get the right staffing model or to get the right programming in place or…

whatever puzzle you're working on now.

Alison Curfman (14:32)
Yeah. And sometimes it's just a matter of continuing to take steps in the right direction and get more feedback. So ⁓ what happened next for you as you grew in that director role and things kind of got busier with telehealth and what happened next?

Jennie Berkovich (14:50)
Yeah, so the department grew, the company grew, and the role evolved. And so I went from telehealth director ⁓ to, I think at that point, the role became vice president of telehealth and patient access or something like that where I basically had an operational dyad, right, somebody who.

who had business training, and they were helping me operate the department. And then I was really in charge of care delivery, of the clinical programming, and to making sure that our patient access strategy for the company aligned with ⁓ what the rest of the organization wanted. And so I working, again, a whole brand new skill set, working with a mergers and acquisitions team, working with integrations, working with new practices to help them develop a telehealth.

and patient access strategy. And so I was doing that for a few years until I got an opportunity ⁓ to have actually a very similar role, but in a different company that was more in like an earlier phase, more of a startup, ⁓ which is where I am now. So I'm currently the vice president of physical health at Hazel Health, which is a school-based ⁓ virtual platform that delivers physical health, which is like medical visits, as well as mental health, behavioral health visits to schools.

Alison Curfman (16:01)
That's great. Well, backtracking a little bit, when you said the word mergers and acquisitions, that's something that most physicians would probably be like, ugh, I don't know anything about that. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a finance person. ⁓ But I know what this rapid growth curve looks like. And the organization that you were with was ⁓ one that was acquiring practices and kind of

helping get them on new technology and ⁓ bringing them into their fold ⁓ as a medical group. so it sounds like you may have had some externally facing ⁓ skills that you had to develop as well.

Jennie Berkovich (16:49)
Yeah, that's really where I think I started to learn. It's a whole new language. Sometimes you have to literally learn new words. I don't think I knew what mergers and acquisitions were. I was constantly looking stuff up in the middle of a meeting. People would say M &A, and I was like, did they mean M &M? Like more bit and more... What is that? Again, you can't have any ego. You look, you ask, you look up. There's no stupid questions. I'm very, very lucky that I had an excellent mentor.

Alison Curfman (17:05)
⁓ &M's, yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (17:17)
at this organization at the time he was brought on as like my operational partner. I reported to him for some time and then he really advocated for me to move up in the company and really taught me a whole lot about how to think about things from a business perspective. ⁓ So one, I think it's really important to have somebody in your corner like that. ⁓ But I would ask all sorts of things like, what does this word mean? What does this acronym mean? And I had to really at that point, I think decide like,

Do I philosophically believe in telehealth? Do I really think this is like a way to deliver care, a way to improve access? Because it became part of the job when you work with new practices, when you work with newly acquired practices, is to kind of sell, for lack of a better term, the fact that this is a good process for them. This is gonna help them improve patient care. It's gonna help them improve the quality of their own life, improve the quality of their patient lives.

And so I had to learn a whole other skill set, almost like a sales skill set of ⁓ getting people on board with telehealth. And I'm not a salesperson at all. And so I realized for me to really be able to do this well, I had to believe in it.

⁓ And so that was also, I think, a period of transformation and reflection for me because before it was a job and I was committed to the job, but I was never like, I really believe telehealth is the future. I was never that person. And I realized to be successful, to continue to move forward, I was gonna have to decide if that was true for me.

Alison Curfman (18:48)
Yeah, I think the strategy that you had to oversee was that you were frankly heading up and growing a division that could be centralized to support a lot of in-person practices. And ⁓ one of the challenges that comes with that is that every practice is a little different coming in and has their own culture. sometimes

being a physician that can relate to other physicians is in and of itself an incredible value to the organization who's trying to incorporate new practices and offer new resources and ⁓ expand the growth of those individual practices. so like being a, ⁓ I don't know, I find that as physicians sometimes we're a little bit wary of

anything administrative or ⁓ more operational or even finance based, we get kind of ⁓ defensive. For good reason, like there are a lot of reasons that we as physicians are suspicious or skeptical. ⁓ But I found that like in my role as a physician leader in various companies that are trying to do something new, like

Jennie Berkovich (19:58)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (20:16)
It's also just like establishing that trust with your colleagues.

Jennie Berkovich (20:21)
for sure, is a lot of trust building. I still think it's probably a lot of trust building and it's a lot of, I think, showing off authentically, which is why it was really important for me to believe in the truth of what I was saying. And so it was very common for me to be in a situation where we had acquired a small practice, somebody who had invested blood, sweat, tears, their entire career, years of their livelihood into building a practice.

for their community, they had now sold it to private equity and then they had a bunch of suits coming in and like changing up the EHR, changing up their back office process, changing up the way vaccines were ordered and delivered. And I wanted to make sure that they saw me as an ally, as not somebody who was there to tell them that all of their processes were terrible and here I come like from the big corporate office to tell them better ways to do care, but really taking time to learn about.

their patient population. That was always the first question I asked, like, tell me about your patients. I think that was unexpected ⁓ to sellers or right to owner sellers where they thought I would just start pitching telehealth or start telling them about the platform and start telling them about my processes. But I always approached it from a place of curiosity. Tell me about your patient population. Tell me what are the demographics? What languages do they primarily speak?

How well do they relate to you and to technology? Do you think this is going to be adoptable? What types of visits have you already done virtually that resonated well with your patients? And then I sort of like ⁓ ballooned it from there. And I think when you're working with acquisitions or integrations in general, I really think that's the only way to do it because integrations is so hard. And even that word, I think, can be really triggering for people who have been integrated because

the foundation of it is like you come, you look at what you're doing, you kind of ignore all of it, and then you wipe it out with like a centralized process. And I think that typically doesn't go well.

Alison Curfman (22:19)
No, not at all. And I think that when you are growing a company, I've definitely been involved in having a multi-market expansion, keeping the culture of the individual markets or practices themselves and keeping a lane of what is an autonomous thing for that practice and then what is like a

maybe you have standardized back office billing and stuff, but how ⁓ you expand the patient population or just the culture within the office, how do you maintain that as much as possible? And ⁓ when you talk about trust building, mean, for me, I feel like that's something that is just an inherent skill for pretty much any physician. We just literally can't do our jobs if we can't establish trust in our

Jennie Berkovich (23:15)
of

Alison Curfman (23:16)
communication, period,

Jennie Berkovich (23:17)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (23:17)
end of story, whether you're trying to ⁓ coach a patient on chronic disease management, if they don't believe you or they don't trust you, they're not gonna do it. Or if you're trying to establish trust with your colleagues or your consultants or to collaborate and provide care. I do think that, you know,

it can be really hard to change within healthcare. And I think that we're coming up on a decade of an unimaginable amount of change that will put so many of us out of our comfort zone. Like you and I have even talked about some things that like will probably seem like small potatoes in the next couple of years, like whether or not you can treat ear infections over telehealth. that was something that could have caused like an hour long heated argument.

Jennie Berkovich (24:12)
Yeah.

Alison Curfman (24:15)
in the past couple years. I'm not saying it's not important, it definitely is, but I think that medicine is gonna change in ways that are just like massively uncomfortable for all of us. And we have to have physician leaders who are willing to filter some of these ideas and identify like what's safe, what could be safe, what could actually have a greater benefit than risk, especially with AI and you know.

We all have hubris that we think we're, you know, super smart because we trained for so long, but I tell you what, like a lot of times the AI is a lot smarter than I am. Like I think that there's going to be things that we have to be able to question. Like how could we incorporate this safely into practice, even if it's different. so I think that a lot of the change management that you've done and being a leader that's able to take something that was kind of new and

not fully understood or integrated, which now it just seems so freaking basic. Everyone's like, well, yeah, of course everyone does telehealth. Like it's just, it's changed. The field has changed, but it wasn't like that before. And I think that both the change management and the trust building that has to happen to come along with that and this underlying, sticking to your guns of like, do you stand for? Where do you draw the line in like,

change that you're willing to support. All of that is stuff that I feel like you and I have both kind of faced.

Jennie Berkovich (25:49)
And I think it's really important for doctors to be part of that process. ⁓ I think there were so many times in my roles where I would ask myself, like, do I really need to be a doctor to be able to do this? Like, I did nothing clinical today. I made spreadsheets. I looked at dashboards. I worked with data, right? I helped build a profit and loss statement and helped defend why my costs were a certain amount. I didn't use any part of my doctor brain. But that's wrong. I do think it's very, very important.

Alison Curfman (26:18)
You put everything

Jennie Berkovich (26:19)
important.

Alison Curfman (26:20)
through that lens.

Jennie Berkovich (26:21)
Exactly. To actually have doctors at the table as all of these new revolutionary processes are happening, right? So AI, think, is a perfect example. One of my mentors, who was like a national AI expert, told me once that if we don't have doctors like at part of the build, AI is going to happen to us, much like EMR has happened to us, right? If anybody remembers like the

Alison Curfman (26:44)
Yeah, and look how that turned out.

Jennie Berkovich (26:47)
Exactly,

right. If anybody remembers like all the go-lives with EMRs when we moved from paper charts to the system, was like, remember catastrophe, right? Like was like complete pandemonium. And I think we as doctors really did not lean in enough at the time. I don't think there was maybe opportunity or interest, but it happened to us and now we're paying the price. So I think when you're looking at telehealth or program development or administration or AI, you have to have doctors at the table.

to use that clinical lens, that clinical voice to make sure that this is developing into something that's going to be an asset to us. It's going to be like another stethoscope for us instead of something that just happens to us and we end up being the victim of it.

Alison Curfman (27:31)
Yeah, and you don't do it in a vacuum, right? Like you and I both ⁓ have been on the executive committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. We both have written policy. We both have, you know, gone deep into like, who are the experts in this area? Who actually, how do we actually get like hundreds of people together who are, have like really strong expertise who can weigh in together on how we should be doing this? Nobody is doing this in a vacuum.

but it is very easy to sit back and be a late adopter to things and really just be the one to say, these are all the reasons why we can't do this. And I see a lot of doctors who just frankly think that private equity is evil, administration is evil, policymakers are evil, payers are evil, all the other...

perspectives in the healthcare ecosystem are money-grubbing, selfish, out-to-get-you, non-mission-driven cohorts of people. And you just can't have that perspective. Like, there's just no way to change healthcare and to continue. You have to almost enter the space as a physician, caring about your Hippocratic oath, knowing that you will do anything to keep patients safe and

provide better access and better care. ⁓ And you just have to learn how to understand the perspectives of other people in the healthcare ecosystem and work with them to find solutions.

Jennie Berkovich (29:06)
Yeah.

It's for sure not a binary thing where like, right, all health care delivery is good and everybody on the other side is bad. But I would say if somebody feels that way or that's your instinct, go, I would say go and look. There was this whole outcry recently, and I think it's still ongoing, of people feeling, AAP members specifically feeling, I think, really disappointed or disillusioned with the AAP's lack of response to recent federal policies regarding vaccinations and things like that.

So I think when I hear that, my first question is, you involved in the AP? Do you know how much advocacy AP is doing? And I'm not trying to like 100 % defend AP in any way. There's so much that they do that I don't agree with. But I actually think this is one thing where the advocacy team and the AP has been very strong and very vocal and has done a tremendous amount of work in order to try and combat misinformation and things that are coming out of federal policies recently.

Alison Curfman (29:46)
Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (30:05)
⁓ And so I would say for anyone who feels that way about payers or about private equity, it could be true, but I think you get yourself a seat at the table. You deserve a seat at the table. Doctors need to have a seat at the table and then decide. And if you still feel like it's not a good fit, I promise you there's probably space for you to change that narrative, like push back against it. I worked in private equity and I deeply believe in evidence-based, good care.

and that all, certainly all kids deserve good care. And that's somebody who worked in integrations in private equity. And there's a lot more people like me. And so it's not all good and not all bad. And if you think it is, get yourself a seat at the table and push back against that.

Alison Curfman (30:49)
Yeah, I mean, I think that the two of us are a pretty rare breed. There's not a lot of pediatricians that worked in private equity, ⁓ but I think that, you know, look at how much our respective organizations have expanded access to care for kids. I mean, I think that, you know, you can be very mission driven and very clinically oriented and very

purpose-driven and work in any space. ⁓ But I loved hearing your background and your story and how you kind of pursued something that was literally a message on Facebook and led to an entirely new career path. So any closing thoughts that you'd like to share?

Jennie Berkovich (31:35)
I think a really good lesson that I still try to remind myself often and that helps me I feel like unlock a lot of doors is you can't have ego in this. You may be an amazing renowned surgeon. You may be like, right, a hospitalist extraordinaire. But if you don't have a strong LinkedIn, if you don't really know how to use Excel quickly, if you don't know what the word dashboard means or you've never used one,

⁓ start at the beginning and you will learn quickly. You can do hard things. If you can operate, you can do hard things, right? If you can provide anticipatory guidance about safe sleep and helmets, right? That is hard. That is probably harder than a lot of the things that we do in administration. So the skills apply. Don't be intimidated, but you have to be very, very humble. Ask for help and watch the videos, read the books, read books on, you

Alison Curfman (32:09)
Yes! Yeah.

Jennie Berkovich (32:32)
leadership and how to talk to people and how to sell yourself and learn the lingo. And if you're willing to do that, I really think that as a physician, you are set up for success.

Alison Curfman (32:42)
Well, thank you so much for your time. And ⁓ if anybody is interested in reaching out, Jennie Berkovich, she's on LinkedIn and we will put her LinkedIn in the show notes. Thanks so much for joining me today. All right.

Jennie Berkovich (32:56)
Thanks, Alison.