Hey readers 👋🏼,

This week’s newsletter takes a slightly different format from its predecessors. I was fortunate enough to be able to get in contact with, and interview a special guest - Jonathon Lee🎉.

🎙️Jonathon Lee is the co-founder of Next Degree, the next-gen healthcare job search whose mission is to help clinicians build careers they love, whether that’s in clinic or beyond. He has mentored hundreds of clinicians globally during his career spanning clinical practice, HealthTech, MedTech, BigPharma, consulting, and startups. He is a US-based Doctor of Physiotherapy, US Board Certified orthopaedic specialist, Fellow of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Manual Physical Therapists, holds an MBA from the University of Oxford, and is a startup advisor with the FemTech Lab accelerator.

📍 He can be found on LinkedIn; check out his healthcare career blog, Careers Beyond Clinic, on Medium - where his interview with me will be posted soon!

🌱 What lesson influenced you the most to become who you are today?

When I was very early on in my career, I did a student rotation at an inpatient rehabilitation facility. I had a set of patients, husband and wife, who both were admitted at the same time due to cerebrovascular accidents (strokes). They were both progressing together very well, but were both in their 80s. One night, the husband passed away. The next morning, I went to treat his wife, and she asked if I could come back in the afternoon as she was quite tired; I obliged. She died an hour later in her sleep. This taught me a lesson that I’ve never forgotten - medicine is a science, but patient care is an art.

Patient care is a beautiful dance between patient, provider, science, and empathy, and it’s hard to fully understand that unless you’ve been in a patient care setting.

You can read about this experience in books and editorials, but living that experience gives you a different perspective on life, and a deep reason and motivation for doing whatever we can as clinicians for our fellow humans in their time of need.

🦁 What gave you the courage to leave everything behind and move to England, and what did this lead to?

COVID-19 and our white coat oath as clinicians.

I was treating patients and mentoring junior clinicians at a community outpatient physiotherapy clinic during the first wave of COVID-19 in Portland, OR and a large chunk of my caseload came from a highly at-risk population - cancer, autoimmune diseases, immunocompromised patients, etc.

The early days were complete chaos for both providers and patients and I wanted to magnify my impact in line with our white coat oath - during a global pandemic, how could I expand my impact beyond the few dozen patients in our clinic?

In April 2020, the University of Oxford announced they were developing the first COVID-19 vaccine in partnership with Astra Zeneca, and I realised the future of healthcare could come from the experts at Oxford. I applied to the Said Business School at Oxford in a week, was accepted, worked at HealthTech and MedTech startups while in school, did a final internship with the Chief Medical Officer and Global Head of Digital Transformation at Bayer Pharmaceuticals, then pivoted into drug development at a consulting firm in London.

After the pandemic, my team and I co-founded Next Degree, a next-generation healthcare job search for the healthcare workforce looking to build careers they love, whether that’s in clinic or beyond. Moving to England taught me that healthcare, technology, and business can work together to create systemic change, and we are empowering clinicians to build careers they love in the rapidly evolving global healthcare landscape.

🧱From your experience with founding NextDegree, how should a person go about taking an idea and making it a reality?

From my experience, a challenge I encountered was deciding to invest just as deeply in my non-clinical skillset as my clinical skillset. Clinically, I’ve been fortunate to receive excellent training (doctorate, residency, fellowship, etc.) and it was a struggle for me to internalize the fact that scalable macro change required a different approach than specific clinical expertise, as our time as clinicians is not truely scalable - we are limited by the number of patients we can see per day, and we make substantial micro-level impact on the lives of our patients, but it’s not easy to make this scalable on a societal level when we are limited to 15 minute increments of care.

A book that really helped me learn, that I recommend to all new entrepreneurs, is “Build the D*** Thing” by Kathryn Finney, an entrepreneur and investor from the US who started her career as an epidemiologist. She lays out step-by-step processes on how to get your idea started, test it efficiently, and bring your idea to life (whether that’s in healthcare or somewhere else).

⚡️ What are the 3 most important qualities to have in order to spark change in an environment/industry?

This is a tough question, but the three things I value personally are grit, curiosity, and teamwork (coincidentally, 3 things that I believe all clinicians are inherently good at).

• Grit because change is hard (especially if you’re looking to drastically change a system, as established players will tell you why it won’t work, instead of why it could work).

• Curiosity because there are 1000 different ways to solve a problem, and we are often only aware of 1 or 2 at first.

• Teamwork because large-scale problems are often too massive for a single person to solve individually - they are complex, they are costly, and they are entrenched. Being able to “find your tribe” is a key step for “building your solution”. 

⏳And finally, it wouldn’t be JUGL without a productivity hack so what is one that you use, and why?

I always end conversations with people I’m learning from with one question:

If you were me, who would you speak to next?

This is super important because we can spend infinite amounts of time reading and figuring things out, but asking an expert how they’d go about learning the next step for solving a massive problem often cuts through a lot of steps, and leads you to where you should be looking (even if you aren’t aware of it yet).

Thank you all for reading, and I hoped you enjoyed this interview and will put some of Jonathon’s advice into practice and create stories of your own.

See you all next week!👋🏼

Umar ⚡️

That was Edition Five. Thank you for reading. Spark Change.