RX Podcast_Brian S Dooreck: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

RX Podcast_Brian S Dooreck: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur RX, where we help healthcare professionals own their future.

John Shufeldt:
Hello everybody and welcome to Entrepreneurs RX. I'm your host, John Shufeldt, and this week we're happy to welcome Dr. Brian Dooreck. He's a founder and Chief Medical Officer of Executive Health Coaching. So a company with three areas of focus, health coaching, health navigation, and practice growth. Brian, thank you so much for being on the call. I'm really excited to talk to you.

Brian Dooreck:
Yeah, thank you for inviting me.

John Shufeldt:
And so before we start, how did you, let's back up, how did you get into healthcare?

Brian Dooreck:
Healthcare. So you know, one of those things in life, sometimes you kind of just follow your path, follow what feels right. And back in my early days, medicine was just kind of on my radar. I have a degree in political science. I have my hands in many areas, but the, medicine was always kind of a natural path for me. It was never really a question, never a thought, just fell right into it. In the same way with gastroenterology, which is what I chose as my specialty.

John Shufeldt:
How old were you when you started on your path for medicine?

Brian Dooreck:
I'd say probably in middle school, high school was pretty clear. I thought about med school. I kind of went to college with that intention from the beginning. Did a degree in Political Science because back then it was easy to get into med school. There was a shortage of applicants and they encouraged humanity-based degrees. By the time I got out got pretty competitive again. But I did my basic sciences and then some, but also studied other areas, politics, et cetera. But medicine was always the clear path. Never much deviation.

John Shufeldt:
All right. So then you say you went to medical school and then you did your internal medicine. Where did you go to medical school at?

Brian Dooreck:
Yeah, the medical school in Tel Aviv, in Israel, Sackler, the New York state program and came back to New York City after that for my internal medicine and Chief Residency at St. Luke's Roosevelt in the Upper West Side. GI was my direction at that point, and I ended up at University of Miami at Jackson Memorial for that, for GI and liver training, and then in private practice ever since in South Florida over 50 years.

John Shufeldt:
OK, so you're still doing day-to-day gastroenterology, but also you've kind of branched out. What was the impetus to become an entrepreneur?

Brian Dooreck:
You know, I think I've always had the entrepreneurial spirit, you know, long before medical school going back towards projects, towards community, towards service. You know, there's a real aspect of creativity for me, it's almost like a form of art building things. And I'm not an artist with the paintbrush or drawing pad or sketch pad, but I can get very excited about building something, whether it be a business or project, a business plan, a model, an idea. Whether it's service-based, whether it's a non-profit. And that becomes my kind of, my art space, my drawing board, my sketch pad, whether it be now a computer or a canvas, or creating social media content. So I think that entrepreneurial spirit was always in me, just that manifested in different ways throughout the years.

John Shufeldt:
Very good. And now you do executive coaching as well. Is that mostly healthcare folks?

Brian Dooreck:
Well, I mean, the reality is I chose to commit some time to social media platforms and I'll tell you why. You know, I've been in school before, I went into practice for about 17 years between starting college to when I finished my fellowship. That's 17 years of formal training when you add it up. It's a lot of years. And on top of that, 15 years of clinical practice, and I realized that my reach beyond my local social media sharing and my local community had really a profound impact on people's lives. I was able to suddenly connect with people all over the world and share about things that are, things that are in my lane, things I know, things I'm good at, things I'm an expert in, and it could be things as simple as heartburn or gas or bloating or hemorrhoids. Things people wait a month to see me in my office, wait in my waiting room, pay fifty dollars at the window for a co-pay, I'm able to suddenly share on a global platform and really help people improve their quality of life. So by doing that, people start asking me for guidance and coaching. And how do you eat that way? How do you post your lunches? What are you eating? How do I do that? I started selectively dabbling in the space of providing private and direct actionable accountability to individuals at a certain level. Not something I was looking to scale, not something I was looking to be on Facebook about, mostly on LinkedIn through those connections there. And that's one area I kind of got into it. Not really an area I committed full-heartedly so it wasn't my direction or path. I started working with doctors in practice growth. So I'm not good at everything I do. I don't have a three-point shot well in basketball, and I don't make gnocchi and I don't write haiku, but I'm really good at the things I do. And one of those things is marketing and growing my own local practice and building that, and I became very good at that, and proficient at it and have a lot of ways I do that. So much so that I've written articles in a series and some of the journals on it, and some doctors have started asking me, how are you doing it? How do you get two hundred and sixty Google reviews? How do you keep that presence? How do you do it? So I created an arm of executive health coaching, regarding practice growth coaching and selectively worked with a few doctors helping them build their practices. The truth of the matter is if we're not helping each other doctor to doctor now, I don't know when we will. And the third area I got into, which is really the main, one of my main focuses professionally outside my medical practice is private healthcare navigation or patient advocacy. Because, you know, and I know most people can't get hold of an office manager in a week, but you and I can get a hold of any doctor about thirty-six hours if we know how to navigate and leverage the system. And you and I both know how broken healthcare is from the inside. And so I got into that space of helping people navigate healthcare in a very dark, scary time in their lives. It's become one of the most rewarding things that I've done professionally in that space.

John Shufeldt:
That's excellent. Yeah, I completely agree. If you're not in the healthcare system, trying to navigate it is nearly impossible. And you know, I've had some recent experiences where I had to navigate it for myself and got through it fine. But I remember thinking, boy, if you're an outsider, it is, I can see why people wait weeks and months to get appointments even after knowing they have cancer. Ok, so speaking of cancer, you had a recent endeavor called Colorectal Cancer Provider Outreach Program, CR CPOP, what's that about? Why did you decide to start that?

Brian Dooreck:
So it's like, you know, it goes into that space of creativity of using technology as an art form, you know, so the reality is in my world, the gastroenterologists, you know, it happens one hundred and fifty thousand times a year in this country between myself and fourteen thousand colleagues called gastroenterologists, maybe three thousand colorectal surgeons nationally. You know, we diagnose colorectal cancer. And what happens is people, you and myself come in for a colonoscopy feeling fine, feeling good, have a little rectal bleeding, oh yeah, I have hemorrhoids, oh yeah, I just ran a marathon, I feel great. Oh, my dad had colon cancer at fifty-two. I'm forty-eight off. I don't, nothing's wrong, I feel great. They go to sleep 15 minutes later. They wake up. I'm like, listen, I found something and it's, you know, it's more than hemorrhoids and we've got to deal with it. You need to get labs, need to get a CAT scan, need to see a surgeon, and they don't hear a word after you mention the word cancer and the conversations like, listen, you know, I'll get the biopsy back in a few days. But this is what it looks like, it looks like colon cancer to me, and they don't hear anything. Their world is upside down. Their blueprint for life gets ripped up in front of their faces, their winter is here, and their post-propofol kind of groggy. Colon cancer is a different animal than breast cancer, when you feel a lump, get an ultrasound mammogram, get a biopsy, you're kind of awake and aware of what's going on for two weeks. Prostate cancer, your PSA is up. You got a lump on the exam, you get a biopsy, you're kind of talking to your urologist throughout the whole thing. Colon cancer is like, catch people off guard all the time. And what I realized is there's a gaping hole in what we're doing and people go home, and maybe just maybe they're googling on the weekend, am I going to die from colon cancer? And maybe they'll trip across a social media post from, say, Fights Colorectal Cancer or the Colorectal Cancer Alliance or something like that, and what I created is a simple program for doctors such as myself to have that conversation post-procedure with a patient, say, listen, you know, this is what's going on. We're going to do this together. You're going to need labs, you need a CAT scan, you need to see a surgeon, see an oncologist, I'll see you in a week. I want you take out your phone right now and I want you to text the word colon to 484848 and hit sent. It pops up on their phone as a PDF, a one page summary with five phone numbers for the American Cancer Society and the four national colorectal cancer organizations. Five website links. And I want, we could tell our patients right then and there in the bedside post procedure. Listen, take out your phone. You see this. I want you to lean into these groups now. I want you to call them tonight. I want you to get on their websites. We're providing a step of actionable accountability towards a diagnosis of disease that just caught someone off guard and providing that reassurance, that direction, that guidance at the bedside post procedure is something we don't do and we haven't done, and something we now can do through this program.

John Shufeldt:
That's action to do a CT or MRI and investigate this further. And you know in your heart, it's a glioblastoma. You know, in your heart that's not going to be well. And you literally, you know, you said you ripped up the blueprint of their life. I've never heard that phraseology, but I couldn't be more true. And you're right, you leave these people and they're like, what the hell do you have, after you send out that initial ...?

Brian Dooreck:
Yeah, that conversation, that blueprint for life is, you know, I pull up from Tony Robbins and some of the stuff he talks about and some of the way he describes these things. So, you know, this program is something we started about a year ago. It was an idea, got one of my interns who was working with me. We kind of mapped it out. We modeled it and we just kind of just threw the hat over the fence and got it going pretty quickly. It's pretty exciting where it's headed now.

John Shufeldt:
And that's excellent. And how did you, I mean, you know, you and I are not spring chickens. How did you get into social media?

Brian Dooreck:
I dabbled in social media from the beginning in the goals of building my own local medical practice. Facebook. Little stuff here and there. About a year or two years ago, I got involved into a diet plan with my one of my Cross Fit coaches because it worked for me. I lost about 10-15 pounds, lost about five percent body fat just by changing some diet. And it's like, listen, you got a great thing. Let's go with this packages, you know, I'm a gastroenterologist, this is a good fit and doing that kind of, you know, saw the power of social media. I kind of focused on LinkedIn, but as I said to you before, the power of social media from someone as myself is, there's so much noise and so much fluff out there. But when I share and I post and I go on LinkedIn and I put stuff up today about like Crohn's disease, or I put up something about diet hacks and probiotics, you know, I talk about what I know, what I'm good at, I stay in my lane. I focus on what I'm an expert in. And if that provides value to someone, great. If they pull from it, they push it forward. If they share it, wonderful. If they skip it, that's fine, too. You know, I'm not in it for the likes or looks or the smileys or whatever you want to do. It's not about some vanity metric for me. For me, it's about providing value. If you don't, if you're I talk to someone today and I wrote into a business plan I'm drafting for something I'm doing, and I said, mindset for this is three mindsets. And the first one is this is about giving more than getting. And if you stick to that mindset that what you're doing is more about giving than about getting, it's going to keep you much, much more aligned to what I'm looking for in my life. And again, I pull some of this stuff from people along the way. You know, I pull from people like Tony Robbins and Simon Sinek and Brené Brown, people I listen to, here and there and spots or in CLAF. In terms of business mindset, you know, I pull a lot from him, I learn a lot from him and his his approach to sales and marketing. Neil Patel, and I just pull from different people, take little bits here and there, apply to what works for me in my life.

John Shufeldt:
So what what have you learned as an entrepreneur through all this? I mean, what have been, if you had to give like three takeaway messages for budding entrepreneurs who want to be you? What would you tell them?

Brian Dooreck:
Let's say one is, you know, don't let perfection get in the way of excellence. And myself being a high level perfectionist type person personality and allows great achievements in life also allows traits, a lot of frustration, and they always get held up on and slowed down on. and that's a problem. And so I'd say is sometimes you do got to just throw your hat over the fence. It doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be the perfect, you know, every aspect of it optically, visually, aesthetically, to go forward, you're going to get to slow down. Things are moving too fast. The second thing is exactly what I said before. It's about giving and sharing. And if you are doing something that is not based on giving or sharing or serving, you're never going to succeed. You'll succeed maybe in some benchmarks of things that you think that are important, but they're not the things that are important to me, and they don't wanna drive me. So for me, that's my driving force. And I think that third thing in terms of that and kind of follows that it just kind of flows is it's a conversation. You know, in entrepreneurship, you're building something, usually you're selling something, you're building something to sell, you're selling a product, you're selling an idea, you're pitching something, you're making whatever it is, everything is a conversation. If you're not having a conversation, you're just selling, then you're missing the whole, the whole basis of communication. If the communication is a conversation, if it's about providing value, providing something greater than anything you're asking, if it's not about an ask but more about a give a share, that's how you're going to close forward on your entrepreneurial aspirations.

John Shufeldt:
How much has resilience have to play into this, you know, in your experience and then what you've learned along your path?

Brian Dooreck:
You know, I'm constantly tweaking, constantly revisiting. I'm constantly finding direction in how I ask questions to myself, constantly shifting, reframing the vision, reframing the conversation, internally reframing how I view things, reframing how I present things to myself. That's where resilience is. Because life is not a straight line. Business is not a straight line. Everything's not a straight line, you know, and I know it, right? And if you're not able to adapt, adjust, tweak, modify and keep your eye forward, it's going to never, never going to put you where you want to be. If you're not measuring, I tell my intern something along the lines, if we're not measuring, we're not progressing. If we're not progressing, we're not living. So I'm constantly measuring what I'm doing, constantly measuring, constantly benchmark. Constantly, no longer has caught up on the list, the to-do list as much as the big broad strokes. Where are the big broad strokes? What's going to get me to the outcomes and results I want? Again, Tony Robbins type of mentality, quicker, faster, better, easier. You know, how am I going to get to where I want to be in five years and thirty six months, quicker and faster? Is it doing 18 things on a to-do list or doing one thing or three things or doing something completely different? And that's the way I look at all the things in my life right now. Big Picture. Broadstroke.

John Shufeldt:
Very essentialistic. So where do you see yourself? So kind of last question, where do you see yourself in your business post-pandemic, if that ever, if we ever are post-pandemic, where do you find yourself?

Brian Dooreck:
I find myself in a space that I have found in certain markets that have gaping holes that I've identified at this point that I've not, you know, so much discussing here, but they involve healthcare, they involve patient advocacy, they involve helping people navigate through healthcare because I don't care how much money you have in the world, I don't care what 100 million dollar yacht you're sitting on in the Bahamas or whatever you're doing. And if you've got a chronic medical condition or acute medical crisis, or your spouse or your loved one is not doing well and has a shitty quality life, your life is not good. I don't care how much money you have? So I've identified some gaping holes in how people navigate through healthcare, even at the highest levels, because what most people do is either the standard or doesn't work. And I know clearly now that there are real problems that everyone knows, and no one has really addressed the solutions to them. And this is where I'm headed. You know, it's like in life, you know, you can go where everyone's going like telemedicine, maybe, or whatever. I'm going to go the other way, I got other ideas. I don't want to go where the pack is going.

John Shufeldt:
Excellent. Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people find out more about you?

Brian Dooreck:
Yeah, I think the best thing for me is just go find me on LinkedIn. It's kind of where a good place to connect with me, follow my content there if it interests you, I stay in my lane on health, nutrition, colon cancer, screening, patient advocacy. You know, I post on things including exercise, nutrition, balanced lifestyle. That's what I post on. So if you're looking for kittens and ducks and gratitude, you know, I'll talk about gratitude if involves health and nutrition, but not anything else. So I stay in my lane and enjoy. If it's interesting to you, follow me, connect with me. I'll always make time to speak to any of my LinkedIn connections. Always find a minute here and there. You can pick up the phone and speak to anyone around the world. It's one of the ways I see the platform of value. So for me, it's about raising the bar and offering access, most importantly, stay safe, stay healthy to you and all your listeners.

John Shufeldt:
Thank you very much. Well, folks, this is another edition of Entrepreneur Rx. Dr. Brian Dooreck, thanks, Brian, for joining, look forward to seeing you all soon.

Brian Dooreck:
You will stay safe and healthy, John. Thank you.

John Shufeldt:
Thank you.

John Shufeldt:
Thanks for listening to another great edition of Entrepreneur Rx. To find out how to start a business and help secure your future, go to JohnShufeldtMD.com. Thanks for listening.

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