We were lucky to catch up with Patricia Marsh, MD recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Patricia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?

In 2018, I was on the “other side of medicine” for the first time. Meaning, I was not the physician caring for the patient. Rather it was my father that was being cared for in the hospital. I was so afraid due to the seriousness of his condition. We thought we were going to lose him. I stayed with him for a week straight and noted after a procedure he had signs of a serious complication. I asked the nurse to call the doctor and the doctor never came, despite being called 3 times. It was then that I had to advocate for my father and call the head physician who swiftly enacted his care. It dawned on me that this likely happens to more than just my father and not everyone had a physician-daughter to help. So I decided to create my dream job from this nightmare. With my cofounder, Dr. Seerat Mission, DO, we created Ask Me Your MD, Inc. to ensure patients had direct contact with licensed physicians to advocate on behalf of them to get the care they deserve. The challenge in setting up this new telepractice was getting the word out there and introducing an entirely new cogwheel in the practice of inpatient medicine. The acceptance however was a lot faster than we expected. This need for direct physician access had been a missing key in innovation and we were happy to create the first iteration inpatient and outpatient as well. My advice when beginning a new practice is to be informed. Know the steps that need to be taken. Get legal counsel in order to have a solid foundation and work hard to get buy-in from your physician and healthcare admin colleagues.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am Dr. Patricia Kelly Marsh, MD CEO and Cofounder of Ask Me Your MD, Inc. I fell in love with medicine at a young age in 6th grade when I began to excel in math and science. I was tested for Talented And Gifted (TAG) Program and was placed in advanced classes that cultivated my passion for science. It wasn’t until the frog dissection that I was absolutely assured that I wanted to become a physician. Although my initial dreams of becoming a surgeon did not pan out, Family Medicine chose me and I’m all the better for it. My mind loves to solve a diverse subset of problems and this was the best place for me. With Ask Me Your MD, Inc. (AMYM) we solve the problems of physician burnout and physician access. It’s hard to get in touch with your physician, however, with AMYM, we give you direct access right from AskMeYourMD.com to ask your medical questions in real-time. No waiting. I’m most proud to gather a group of physicians to provide this needed service to patients. I’m most proud that after only 12 months, we became a Diverse Partner of CVS Health and will become a supplier as well for our services in their Clinical Trial Services. We will join CVS Health in diversifying clinical trials to improve the health and wellbeing of people of color that have had inequitable care for centuries. Our mission is to educate, advocate and navigate patients through this complex healthcare industry. We know that the essential pillars of the healthcare industry are patients and physicians. The other components of the healthcare industry (clinics, hospitals, insurance, politics) are confounding factors that are a part of the complexity of healthcare. But Ask Me Your MD, Inc. takes the essential 2 pillars of healthcare and opens lines of communication 24/7. Never has there been telemedicine in the hospital for patients that will be deeply ingrained in focusing on the patients’ health outcome and ensuring that both their care experience and treatment are the best for them. We take the extra time to explain things when your PCP or hospitalist cannot because they are inundated with paperwork, emails, calls and a long list of patients. We solely focus on the conversation so that at the end of an encounter on Ask Me Your MD, Inc. you are heard, understood and empowered with knowledge to direct your health.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Boys, Badminton, Bollywood and now Business. I met my cofounder, Dr. Seerat Mission, DO, at the beginning of residency at orientation in Los Angeles. At Adventist Health White Memorial, we sat by each other and were partners for the ice breaker opening. We were asked to share 3 likes or 3 interesting facts about ourselves. Little did I know that we would bond for life after this exercise. I told Dr. Mission my 3 likes were boys, badminton and Bollywood. We began to share Bollywood movies we’d seen and she was impressed with my collection of memories of Bollywood. Bollywood helped me endure the academic rigor of undergrad and medical school. She and I became close friends and a few months later were on ICU together. It was there that we both noted the similarities in the way we practiced medicine. She was brilliant and she saw the same in me. We both liked taking time to teach both the patient and the family members about what was going on. These similarities of practice grew into ideas of beginning a startup together. Seerat wanted to make a doctor chat to help answer questions and I wanted to make a platform that would advocate on behalf of patients through education and advocacy, taking the extra needed steps for positive health outcomes. We both dove in head first, bootstrapping our efforts into creating this needed solution. The alignment of both medical practice and sacrifice was deeply ingrained in the business culture we created. It was a maturation of what we’d both seen in each other throughout residency. Now, we joke about my alliterative 3 fact introduction and have turned it into 4: Boys, Badminton, Bollywood and Business.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In life you will experience failure and I did at 2 critical times in my path to becoming a physician. The first challenge was economical disadvantage. Unlike my peers in medical school, my parents were not physicians and I did not come from a well-to-do family. I grew up in College Park, GA, a predominantly black neighborhood of middle class families. My parents didn’t have the funds to put me in Swarthmore College or Temple University School of Medicine. So I was highly in debt with student loans. This weighed on me and often times, I would be in jeopardy of not being able to complete the semester due to unpaid balances. I had to learn how to navigate my life’s career ambitions with the lack of funds to smoothly travel through the journey. This created difficulty for standardized testing. As you go further in the career of becoming a physician the test costs increase as well as the application processes. Flash forward to senior year at Swarthmore and I had a balance and I was not listed to graduate. I had to take out a last minute loan, the week before graduation, to cover that balance. I didn’t have funds to take the MCAT and had to take out another loan to sit in a prep course and pay for the exam itself. So I was not beginning, by any means, at the same level of my peers. However, I was accepted into medical school and quickly found out that undergrad was just the beginning. The medical licensing exams were highly expensive and prep for these tests were far from within my reach. I had to get creative and align myself with medical school friends that would help me to study by sharing their test prep materials. Only to find out that I failed Step 2 of my medical licensing exam by 6 points. This was a blow that I didn’t know how I’d recover from. I wanted to be a surgeon and there was no way with a failure on Step 2, I would become a surgeon. It was at that point in my life that I learned the biggest lesson about resilience and how I learn best. I often note, that if I didn’t fail Step 2, I never would have found out about how I best study and how to economically prep for future exams without spending thousands on prep courses. I discovered my essential needs for passing standardized tests and never failed another exam after Step 2. No matter the challenges in life, you can overcome them all. You may have to rethink strategy or even, as for me, speciality, but believe and trust that you are right where you need to be at all times. If I’d been a surgeon, I never would have met Dr. Seerat Mission, DO and I never would have created Ask Me Your MD, Inc. My choice to continue through failure and hardship helped me navigate life at an entirely different level with a fresh and highly optimistic perspective.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.askmeyourmd.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pkels86/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/askmeyourmd/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/patriciakellymarsh
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/askmeyourmd
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@askmeyourmd
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/askmeyourmd/