The founder will see you now: How Dr. Uché Blackstock is changing medicine

Dr. Uché Blackstock founded her consulting firm, Advancing Health Equity, after leaving her full-time assistant professorship at the NYU School of Medicine in late 2019. She kept working part time as an urgent care physician — just as the first COVID wave hit Brooklyn.

“We were the epicenter, and I became one of the first voices in the pandemic,” Uché shared in an interview with Offcall. “I started writing about what I was seeing.”

That was just the beginning. Uché’s roles in the emergency room, urgent care, and academia helped inform her New York Times best selling book, “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine,” released in 2024.

Yet Uché’s years of experience have not stopped her from struggling with her self-perception.

“So much of my life I spent being educated and trained to become a physician,” Uché said. “But I realized that if I’m founder and CEO of a company, I really have to step into that role and really inhabit it, especially if I’m thinking about bringing business in.”

This is how Uché came to embrace her alternative career as a physician founder. This is her Side Gig Story.

Learning from family to create a Legacy

Uché’s father immigrated from Jamaica to the U.S. at 17 and worked his way through business school. Additionally, Uché’s late mother grew up in Brooklyn on public assistance and went on to be a first-generation college (and later med school) student. Her mother’s career and advocacy for black patients helped spark the same passion in Uché and her twin sister, Oni, who founded her own organization, Health Justice.

Before transitioning to life as an entrepreneur, Uché worked as a physician and assistant professor. She put in effort towards fostering health equity institutionally, yet Uché says attempting to push for this within organized medicine left her feeling constrained. Rather than staying stuck in the status quo, Uché decided to do it her own way, through a new strategic consulting firm.

Transitioning from full-time physician to entrepreneur

Uché didn’t know she could get investors to fund Advancing Health Equity. “I didn’t really consider advancing health equity as a startup, even though it was,” said Uché. While she considered launching Advancing Health Equity as a nonprofit, she got a quote that it’d cost $15,000 so decided against it.

Instead, Uché used her total savings, $20,000, to cover her start-up costs. She had just wrapped up her student loan payments, which prevented her from saving more.

But Uché would slowly go on to rebuild her cash savings, by maintaining three days a week in urgent care while spending the other two days on Advancing Health Equity. She set a savings goal: nine months’ worth of expenses. It took two years, but after that, she felt comfortable turning her side gig into her main gig.

During that transition period, Uché got invited to speak on a local radio station based on her writing during the start of the pandemic. It ended up being her big break.

“My literary agent heard me on the radio, and she's like, ‘Oh, I’ve been following you on social media and you’re doing a lot of great health literacy for our communities. Can I talk to you about writing a book?’” said Uché.

As with most book deals, Uché received an advance, which helped her cover the cost of promoting her work and hosting public events. To handle taxes and other financial implications, she enlisted help from a financial advisor, as well.

Managing small business booms – and slumps

Since that time, Advancing Health Equity has gone on to help foundations and philanthropies find funding that can fuel improvements to health equity. Uché’s company also assesses existing health equity programs to see if they are not only improving patient care, but saving money for the organizations implementing them.

“We’ve been able to place numbers and say, “Hey, by doing this really wonderful work, not only are you helping your patients’ communities, but you’ve also been able to save XYZ amount of funding and put it towards something else,” said Uché.

On top of that, Advancing Health Equity offers training sessions, in part to foster community in the health equity space and make health care settings more fulfilling for Black physicians and medical professionals.

“With the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, we started getting so much business. I actually had to turn away tons of business in 2020 and 2021,” Uché said. However, the current political climate has not been favorable to Uché or her organization’s work.

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance recently analyzed Conference Board data and found that by mid-July 2025, one third of the top 100 public U.S. companies took any mention of equity out of their annual Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) reports. For Advancing Health Equity, that has meant instituting a hiring freeze.

Ultimately, Uché views this period as part of the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur. “I’ve learned that when things are going well, make sure that you are taking advantage of those times. Saving or just putting processes in place [helps] so that during the down times you don’t get scared.”

In the big picture, Uché says that institutions that shy away from DEI practices are doing themselves a disservice too. That's because, in her view, DEI simply has a great return on investment (ROI).

“When you are keeping track of these metrics and you’re making sure that you are prioritizing quality care, it actually decreases the cost of care,” said Uché. “People are more willing to access the healthcare system and get the preventive interventions that they need.”

Business lessons for medical doctors

If you’re thinking about starting your own business, here are some of Uché’s key takeaways:

1. You don’t have to become a full-time entrepreneur overnight: Leaving a stable job (physician) for an unstable one (business founder) can feel risky. To ease the transition, you could split your time between your practice and business until you reach a certain milestone, such as saving nine months’ worth of expenses like Uché did.

2. Personal finance moves can impact your business: Padding your savings account could give you more options for getting your business venture off the ground. Meanwhile, paying down your student loans ahead of schedule can grant you greater financial independence.

3. Content creation can help your business grow: Uché went from writing online, to talking on the radio, to publishing a best-selling book. Likewise, you may be able to reach more clients and customers if you also build up your personal brand.

4. You got this: You don’t need a business degree to start your own company. As Uché said to herself before she took the plunge, “You’re intelligent, you’re a doctor — you can figure it out.”

Have an entrepreneurial side gig story of your own you'd like to share? Email us at contact@offcall.com and so we can feature you!