Taking an Alternate Path with Dr. Peter Alperin

Peter Alperin, MD is a practicing internist at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and leads the growth of the HIPAA compliant physician messaging services at Doximity as the Vice President of Product. He has been the Founding Chair and a Member of Medical Advisory Board at Doximity, Inc. since 2011. He was previously the Vice President of Medicine and Products at Archimedes, a Kaiser Permanente backed start-up where he led the product team on projects includes ARCHeS, a technology platform for clinical trial outcome prediction. Throughout his medical career, he has served as director of medical informatics at Brown & Toland Medical Group and was an early employee at ePocrates where he designed a formulary tool still used by over 100,000 physicians. He completed his medical school from UT Southwestern and residency in internal medicine from UCSF. Taking an alternate path in the medical field can be daunting, prompting fears of failure. Dr. Peter Alperin discusses how he overcame that fear and navigated a successful career in healthcare technology. He identifies some of the skills doctors tend to have--and some they don’t--that lead to success in other fields. He shares the importance of building “muscles” that will lead to success, such as taking risks, talking to people, working on a team of equals, being humble, and better appreciating the time spent with a patient. Finally, he underscores the need to seek mentors who can help you pinpoint and acquire the skills you need to achieve your goals. Pearls of Wisdom: 1. Physicians acquire certain skills in their training that transfer well into alternate fields like business or technology. Learning to be comfortable with risk and learning to elicit information from patients can serve you not only in medicine, but anything you do. 2. As a physician outside the field of clinical medicine, you have to be able to identify what you don’t know. You have to learn to work on a team of equals and to be humble when exposed to ideas from those outside the world of medicine. 3. Embrace mini-mentorship experiences. You’ll find that most people are very generous with their time if you approach them to ask about what they do and how you can get there.