On/Offcall: Our Key Takeaways for Physicians from HLTH in Las Vegas

Welcome back to On/Offcall!

We’re still buzzing from an action-packed few days at the HLTH conference in Las Vegas. The highlight for Offcall, of course, was our epic event with Scrub Capital centered around the power of clinician storytelling – where our co-founder Dr. Graham Walker interviewed Christina Farr about her new book “The Storyteller’s Advantage” (see his review and go buy the book here!).

The core lesson was about why communication is not just a soft skill, but instead an overlooked superpower of every great clinician, and especially in the AI era. But the even bigger lesson we took from HLTH was there’s a huge (and growing!) group of physician and clinician founders and investors who are tired of the status quo and are doing their part to take back control of healthcare. We were so excited to meet so many clinicians who are building companies and creating spaces to advocate for fellow clinicians. The energy was electric. A huge thank you to everyone who we got to meet in person, and we’ll continue to do our part to create these kinds of clinicians spaces for others moving forward.

We’re including a few recap posts in the Highlights section below. But we also want to hear from you: If you were at the conference, what were your own takeaways? What was the big idea you walked away with that will shape how you think about healthcare?

Share in the comments, email us, and be sure to tag Offcall in your own recap posts so we can round up yours in next week’s newsletter as well!

Why Women Physicians Still Earn Less and What We Can Do About it

This week’s How I Doctor guest is a legendary figure in the field of gender inequality in medicine: Dr. Vineet Arora. Vineet is the Herbert T. Abelson Professor of Medicine and Dean for Medical Education at The University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, and she’s spent her career confronting gender inequity for women physicians head-on.

After Offcall’s original data release showing what the gender pay gap looks like in emergency medicine, Graham wanted to speak with Vineet about how we actually change the structural inequities that are driving women out of medicine.

In the podcast, they cover:
💬 The invisible labor that women physicians are expected to carry
💬 What’s driving women out of medicine and what we can do to change it
💬 How medical education must evolve to support all physicians and especially women
💬 How to fix the mentorship pipeline and build true support for diverse physician leaders

Huge thanks to Vineet, and all the other physicians who are doing pioneering work in this space.

🎧 Listen to the episode here (and if you’re inspired, please feel free to repost the episode on social media!)

Know someone who would benefit from joining us? Help us grow our tent by forwarding this newsletter to your physician colleagues and subscribing here.

Help Us Build the Ultimate Physician AI Whitepaper

ICYMI, we’re releasing a definitive physician AI whitepaper that will cover how physicians really feel about AI tools and their impact:

-> How AI could actually improve our job satisfaction
-> Which AI saves us time vs. just adds more admin noise
-> How employers could actually get us excited to adopt new AI tools
And much more!

To do this, we recently launched a confidential survey, and it’s been so heartening to see how many physicians from this newsletter community have taken and shared the survey on social media (thank you Adam Carewe, Jessica DeJarnette, and so many others!). We want every single physician who reads this newsletter to be included, so if you haven’t yet, please answer the short questions below (takes 2 mins!), and we’ll release the anonymized findings in a few weeks. Thank you in advance and please be sure to repost to spread the word!

Here’s the survey link

Physician Builder Spotlight: Gina Siddiqui

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet Gina Siddiqui, Founder and CEO of Carte Medical (more on the company’s mission below!). You can connect further with Gina on LinkedIn.

1. Gina, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? I think I pursue entrepreneurship to express my taste – how I think the world would be more awesome. Probably like many of you, my time practicing as a doctor has given me a long list of things I could see working better for patients and doctors. I love that as an entrepreneur, you get to design your taste/vision and see whether customers like it!

2. Tell us about what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. Carte is trying to bridge the gap between the personalized, contextual, thoroughly considered, expert-driven medical decision making we all want for ourselves and our loved ones, and the time-constrained, generic "slop" that insurance-driven medical care is inexorably sliding us towards. Patients come to us for guidance on all their health affairs (annual memberships where we diligence all their specialists, testing they get done, and daily/weekly/quarterly health priorities) or for guidance on a single critical decision (shorter engagements where we do in-depth research and often line up meetings for them with world experts on their unique situation). 

3. What's your advice to anyone in medicine who's thinking about entrepreneurship? Don't turn the work you have to do to be entrepreneurial bigger than it actually is. You don't need an MBA or to quit your job. You just need to be willing to carve out some time where you will start out quite dumb and inexperienced because you'll be doing something new. Then, to be a successful entrepreneur, all you need to do is to stick with the problems you explore until you become very competitive/good at them :-) Shameless plug - I also advise anyone passionate about going deep with patients and thoroughly researching cutting edge medicine to get in touch with us. We're always hiring amazing docs (see our careers page here). I'm also always happy to point you in the direction of other companies that may align with your interests too.

4. What's one lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious to you before? Before starting Carte, I had been on the founding teams of other startups and saw the ways single people and customers transform early company trajectories. I think it wasn't obvious until I became CEO the raw breadth of stuff that falls on the CEO to do well – especially in the early "zero to one" phase and in particular, when it comes to choosing what to focus on.

Read the full article here. Know someone else who should be featured? Reply or tag them and their company in the comments!

Highlights From Our Community: The HLTH Special Edition

Each week, we celebrate career milestones, launches, & other goings-on in the physician community. Have something to promote? Reply and we’ll feature you.

✅ Thanks for speaking up, Amna Shabbir
Dr. Amna Shabbir delivered a TEDx talk about the hidden epidemic of perfectionism and why it’s time to share creative solutions. Watch it here!

👉 Important conversation, Lukasz Kowalczyk
Dr. Lukasz Kowalczyk sparked an important conversation on social media about why RVU metrics are flawed and what would happen if we build healthcare around what patients and peers recognize as quality. Read it here.

👌 Thanks for sharing, Shannon Constant
California Medical Association president Dr. Shannon Udovic Constant opened up about why when women hold leadership positions in medicine, the culture of how the work gets done changes - for everyone. Thank you! Read it here.

🙏 A snapshot of some of our favorite HLTH recap posts (be sure to tag us in yours/others so we can include more next week!)
Dr. Aditi Joshi here, Dr. Owais Durrani here, Dr. Rebecca Mitchell (and Scrub Capital founder!) here, Dr. Yair Saperstein here, Dr. Sandeep Pulim here, Dr. Natalie Davis here, Dr. Glenn Loomis here, Dr. Joshua Guttman here, and Drs. Arvind Rajan and Pranav Sanghvi here.

🚨 Must watch video, Tricia Pendergrast
And finally, Dr. Tricia Pendergrast shared a must-watch video about the importance of salary transparency in medicine (and why everyone should sign up for Offcall!). Watch it and share the post here!

Be Sure to Sign Up for Offcall!

At Offcall, we believe physicians deserve to be heard, valued, and treated fairly. Everything we do is driven by our commitment to empowering doctors with accurate, reliable, and trustworthy data — to advocate confidently for themselves and ensure their compensation truly reflects their worth.

Learn more and sign up here

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