How 3 Clinicians Use Their Expertise Away from the Bedside

TABLE OF CONTENTS

For the vast majority of clinicians who leave the bedside, it’s not because they stopped caring.

They leave because the system makes it harder and harder to do the work they were trained to do.

At the same time, health tech companies are realizing something important: Clinical insight doesn’t lose its value when a clinician steps away from direct patient care. In fact, it often becomes even more powerful in operator roles, support roles, and other roles that shape how care is delivered, as well as on technology teams building tools meant to work in the real world.

For nurses, doctors, and other providers facing burnout, these circumstances can lead them to a quiet, internal crossroads: Stay in a role that can sometimes feel like it’s taking more than it gives, or explore a different path that still lets you advocate for patients and clinicians at a systems level.

Now, reader, it may not surprise you to learn that, as a health IT company that’s been around for nearly 30 years, we’ve seen again and again that purpose in healthcare isn’t limited to certain job types or titles. Of course there is purpose found in roles directly related to patient care, but it can also be present wherever clinical judgment, empathy, and lived experience are allowed to influence the systems involved in patient care.

The question most clinicians ask at this point isn’t whether they want to leave the bedside. It’s what they might lose if they do, and what they might finally gain.

So what does a meaningful transition actually look like, day to day? How do you make sure you’re staying connected to purpose and maintaining awareness of your impact?

To understand both the motivations and the process of seeking out these non-clinical opportunities, we spoke to 3 clinicians who made the transition in different ways:

Vlaanderen Reotan, an Implementation Consultant at PerfectServe
Amy Staly, Director of Healthcare Product Strategy at Clearsense
Dr. Mike Bronson, Founder and CEO at AnesthesiaGo

Here’s what they had to say about their own search for purpose beyond the bedside and the advice they’d offer to clinicians considering a similar move.

Why move away from bedside care?

Each of the 3 clinicians we spoke to described similar motivations for gravitating to healthcare: A desire to help others and an eagerness to take on challenging work.

For Vlaanderen, becoming a registered nurse also meant carrying on the family line of work. “Everyone in my family’s a nurse,” she says. “My cousins, my mom, my aunts—everyone.”

Amy, meanwhile, considers going to nursing school “the best decision of my life” despite experiencing high day-to-day stress as an ED staff nurse and nurse manager for an inner-city hospital.

“There were times when we had to deal with a lot of gang violence and a lot of drug overdoses,” Amy recalls. “So I was constantly dealing with patients suffering emergent situations because they were either addicted to drugs or part of a gang. And it was taxing!”

Dr. Bronson ultimately chose anesthesiology because of its active role in bedside care and the satisfaction of seeing the impact of that care in real time. “If I give medication to a patient, I see its action within 10 seconds,” Dr. Bronson says. “The immediate impact of caring for patients in a very critical nature is something that appealed to me before medicine. It’s what keeps me going now, as I still enjoy staying at the bedside and taking care of patients personally.”

Despite the satisfaction each clinician found in providing direct patient care, all 3 found themselves drawn to new, non-clinical healthcare opportunities and challenges. Vlaanderen and Amy each took an interest in clinical informatics and how technology could improve patient care through better documentation, workflows, and communication.

Dr. Bronson’s interest in healthcare scheduling technology was sparked by the inefficiencies he witnessed in his group’s day-to-day schedule-making process.

“I’m a naturally curious person,” Dr. Bronson says. “So I looked to see if there was a solution out there that could solve our scheduling problem. I found out that solution didn’t exist.”

As those new interests and ambitions began to take root, though, all 3 clinicians found themselves struggling to walk away from (or decenter, in Dr. Bronson’s case) bedside care and the strong sense of purpose it provides.

“A lot of people feel like they’re stepping away from their purpose and what they studied for [when they leave the bedside],” Vlaanderen says. “But after my own second-guessing, I realized working in the health tech side still gives you plenty of opportunities to help patients.”

Don’t rush your clinical experience

Dr. Bronson encourages younger clinicians not to rush through their direct patient care in search of exciting opportunities in tech, especially when they’re still learning what parts of healthcare they’re most passionate about.

“You don’t need to jump on every opportunity,” he says. “More often than not, taking an opportunity that might not fit what you want to do is going to lead you down the wrong path.”

A strong foundation of clinical experience also helped Vlaanderen and Amy discover healthcare passions beyond bedside care. Each of them began their healthcare journeys with 7 years of direct nursing experience before gradually transitioning into informatics and other non-clinical roles.

Vlaan points out that while she didn’t have an educational background in technology, her curiosity about hospital systems and operations, which was informed by her experiences as a nurse, provided the initial spark that eventually drew her toward health tech opportunities.

“It’s important to consider how you can utilize your experience to have a broader impact,” Dr. Bronson says. “It doesn’t mean that you have less desire to take care of patients. It means that you see other opportunities to apply your expertise.”

Start raising your hand for the right opportunities

Internal networking, asking about leadership opportunities, and volunteering for internal committees and decision groups are some of the best ways for bedside clinicians to begin building toward a move into non-clinical work.

Amy’s first steps into non-clinical work came when her hospital system attempted to implement an EHR that presented a number of potential patient care risks. After pushing back during the training process, she joined a small group of clinicians who confronted high-level leadership about the shortcomings of the new EHR system.

“We actually did turnaround time studies. We had data backing us up,” Amy says. “I was one of the people saying, ‘We’ve got to show a before and after of how this is impacting our delivery, our care delivery.’” It was like a crash course in the importance of involving clinicians in technology governance.

Vlaan’s path away from bedside care involved a little more searching. Through her frontline clinical experience, she witnessed firsthand the different kinds of inefficiencies and operational issues that overwhelm clinicians and impact the quality of patient care. She also had some thoughts about how those issues might be addressed, but she didn’t know how to put them into practice.

Her nursing manager encouraged her to join the hospital’s IT Clinical Informatics Committee. Once Vlaan volunteered as a super user, she began to see a clear path forward. “As I was getting more exposed to those projects, I started envisioning myself in a strategic role where I could impact hospital operations at scale,” she says.

Dr. Bronson, on the other hand, almost found himself involved in health tech by accident. He was handed the case scheduling responsibilities for his anesthesia group unexpectedly, which usually entailed getting a stack of papers at 5 PM and building the next day’s schedule by hand.

In his search for a more efficient way to tackle this process, he found himself creating a brand new piece of tech that could deliver exactly the solution he needed. Thanks to the work he’d done as a bedside clinician—asking questions, searching for better solutions, and building relationships with key stakeholders—he was in a perfect position to seize the opportunity when it struck.

“As you start to ask the right questions, you can start to see a potential path forward,” Dr. Bronson says. “And if you can get your key stakeholders on board with your idea, they’re more than likely going to let you pursue it a little bit and see how it goes.”

Be prepared to go wider than you anticipated

The path from bedside care to a role in health tech isn’t likely to be linear or obvious. If you’re unsure where to go, curiosity can be an invaluable guide.

Even after successfully transitioning into non-clinical work, Vlaan thinks the healthcare industry isn’t good at telling nurses and other providers how their clinical experience might be useful in other non-clinical roles. For example, she thinks nursing backgrounds are often a great fit for application analyst roles, but the job descriptions are so technical that many nurses assume those roles aren’t meant for them.

“That’s why, even if nurses don’t have all of those technical capabilities or skills yet, I highly recommend that they pursue those opportunities,” she says.

In the meantime, clinicians should keep an open mind regarding opportunities in health tech and other non-clinical work, and trust that their clinical expertise will be an important asset no matter where their healthcare journey takes them.

“If you have a company whose sole makeup is non-clinical folks trying to solve a clinical problem, I think you’re going to have a hard time achieving success with that,” Dr. Bronson says. “These companies need boots-on-the-ground players who know where the problems lie and what solutions will be impactful for the people using them.”

Find the right balance for your own career

Moving away from the bedside doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavor. Some clinicians may choose to test the waters in a non-clinical role while continuing with direct patient care; others may seek opportunities that allow for a mix of clinical and non-clinical work.

That balance was critical for Dr. Bronson. As his work with the case scheduling product (later called AnesthesiaGo) began to grow, he had an opportunity to go all-in as the company’s CEO. But doing so would have meant moving out of clinical work entirely.

“That was not the route I intended to go,” he says. “My hope in my career was to always remain at the bedside in some capacity.” Today, Dr. Bronson continues to strive for a 60-40 balance between his clinical and non-clinical work. “It’s what keeps me going,” he says.

Amy, meanwhile, initially explored tech-related opportunities while staying in a direct patient care role—until she had an opportunity to switch over to non-clinical work and escape the grind of working night shifts as a nurse.

Once she made the transition, Amy realized non-clinical work was a perfect fit for her skills and interests. “I didn’t realize how analytical I was,” she says. “And I didn’t realize how technically inclined I was at understanding systems and applications.”

Although Vlaan was eager to move from bedside care to health tech, she continues to work directly with clinicians while using her own clinical experience to support providers and patients. One of her achievements at PerfectServe has been the implementation of a team alert workflow that quickly messages groups of providers when urgent or life-threatening situations develop.

But creating a solution is only half the battle. What makes Vlaan unique is her ability to use her own real-life clinical experience to connect with clinicians and help them embrace new technology on the hospital floor. Having knowledge from both worlds is what bridges the gap.

A note for healthcare leaders

Healthcare organizations shouldn’t count on clinicians to explore new paths and opportunities on their own. As the need for clinical experience in non-clinical roles continues to grow, healthcare leaders can help prepare clinicians for those opportunities by prioritizing:

Clear job descriptions and training for non-clinical roles. Vlaan encourages healthcare companies to emphasize job descriptions and training that will encourage nurses and other clinicians to apply.
Committees and panels where clinicians can gain new experiences and skillsets. Amy points to internal task forces and other volunteer initiatives as great opportunities to gather valuable clinician input while helping them gain non-clinical experience.
Cross-pollination of functional leads. By increasing communication and skill-sharing between departments, healthcare organizations can make technical knowledge and clinical insights more accessible and integrated across all internal functions.

Above all, Dr. Bronson encourages healthcare leaders to listen to clinicians and take time to gather relevant information before making decisions, especially when those decisions directly impact clinical care.

As a clinician-turned-health-IT leader, Amy says it’s good for both clinicians and leaders to be mindful of the stresses that come with each role. “I’ve seen both sides—they’re both hard, and in their own ways,” she says. “You never truly understand what the other person’s job is until you’ve actually done it.”

Bedside care isn’t the only way to make a difference

Most clinicians go into healthcare with a goal of helping others—and bedside care is not the only way to make an impact. More than anything, the clinicians we talked to advised simply staying open to other ways to get involved, even as you invest in your clinical role. “Once you gain comfort and experience in a clinical role, other opportunities will find their way to you,” Dr. Bronson says. “And it gives you more opportunity to make an impact in other aspects.”

Clinicians should focus on doing the best work they can, asking questions, networking with others, and paying attention to where their curiosity and passions are leading them. When the right opportunity comes along, it could offer a chance to make a positive difference for patients on a scale you never thought possible.

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