I didn't choose this path. It chose me, in a conference room I almost didn't walk into.
“I didn't choose this path. It chose me.
After I left clinical practice, I took a job as a clinical reviewer at a company that had just launched a new specialty program for musculoskeletal care. It wasn't going well. Providers were furious, and the company had started sending Provider Relations Managers out market by market — one-on-one meetings with PT clinic owners, hospital systems, anyone willing to sit at the table and air their frustration.
The Provider Relations Managers were getting torn apart. They didn't speak clinician, and the providers knew it in about ten seconds.
So someone had the idea to send an actual clinician along instead. I raised my hand.
On that first trip, I calmed rooms the team hadn't been able to calm in months. Not because I had a better pitch — because I could actually speak the language on both sides of the table, and the providers could tell the difference immediately.
I was pulled up to Senior Provider Relations Manager within weeks, overseeing the very program that had almost sunk. Within a year I was the person both sides called when things got hard — health plan leadership on one end, providers ranging from single-clinic owners to national hospital systems on the other. At one point I sat at a table with American Physical Therapy Association leadership and a major national health plan, defending a program that had drawn national attention for all the wrong reasons.
That trial by fire is the actual reason I ended up building a career in this world. Nobody planned it. I just turned out to be useful in a room nobody else could calm down.
Here's the part I didn't understand until much later: I wasn't managing a crisis. I was doing the same thing I'd done as a clinician — sitting with someone in pain, figuring out what was actually wrong, and building a plan around that instead of the symptom. I just didn't have a name for it yet. I thought it was just the job.
It took losing that job, years later, to go back and actually see the pattern in what I'd built.
Has anyone else discovered a skill by accident — something you didn't realize was a skill until much later?