Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Harrison Smith and I am physician practicing in the coastal southeastern United States. I am married to an emergency medicine physician and we currently have two beautiful and busy toddlers.
What is your specialty?
I am a board certified pulmonary and critical care physician. I have been fortunate enough to incorporate all aspects of my clinical practice to include time in the ICU, inpatient pulmonary consults, ambulatory clinics, and procedures.
How long have you been practicing?
I completed my residency training in 2019 where I subsequently obtained my board certification in internal medicine. I began fellowship that very same year, later graduating from subspecialty training in 2022. Since that time I was fortunate enough to be hired on as faculty at the institution where I completed training. I now happily work in academic medicine.
What do you love about your job?
There are two things I still love about my career. As I alluded to above, I practice at an academic center. Having the opportunity to participate in the education of trainees (predominantly residents and fellows) keeps me sharp and provides purpose.
Secondly, I was born and raised in the same state I currently practice. I feel a sense of community where I currently work. There are familiar faces and businesses that have been around sense I was a child. Having the opportunity to care for the community that helped raise me is fulfilling.
How long have you been a member of InCrowd and what is your favorite part about participating in our research?
I have been a member of InCrowd since I completed my internal medicine residency in 2019. Through prior experiences I have found that many of the medical surveys (appropriately) seek the opinions of board-certified practitioners. As such, I waited until I had at least one board certification under my belt before I began to sign up.
Since that time, I have made survey participation a routine part of my daily life. I have found, much like in academic medicine, participating in research, addressing medical needs, and helping medical care on the cutting edge of innovation helps me stay updated of novel interventions and pharmaceuticals. As these very same interventions appear in the medical literature, I find I already have some prior exposure.
What made you decide to become a pulmonologist?
Like so many of my peers pursuing subspecialty training after medical residency, I was torn between cardiology and pulmonary/critical care.
There are many similarities between the two specialties. They both have aspects of critical care, they both have inpatient and ambulatory arms, and lastly, they both afford physicians procedural opportunities. For this reason, I believe many of my peers find it difficult to choose. However, the location where I completed my residency training had a phenomenal pulmonary and critical care division. I found myself gravitating towards those physicians and their passion for their careers. Many of those very same physicians were celebrating decades-long careers and I found that inspiring.
Critical care, like many other subspecialties, has a high rate of physician burnout. As such, I found the individuals who influenced me on my career trajectory simultaneously helped instill in me antidotes to burnout. They taught me work-life balance, how to remain passionate and empathetic and how to keep the joy in your life.
What is one thing you want other health care professionals to know about InCrowd or participating in paid research?
InCrowd has always stood out from other physician survey platforms for a multitude of reasons. For starters, they offer shorter length surveys (MicroSurveys) that are much more digestible and easily fit into small openings of free time. Secondly, I have found the surveys provided offer a wide breadth of topics, broadening a user’s research opportunities.
To any physicians currently considering participation, you should avoid the (false) notion that surveys are time consuming. True, some may require larger portions of time, but InCrowd in particular has managed to create a survey platform that is specifically curated for busy physician schedules. This is a huge benefit for physicians working full clinical burdens.
How do you fit InCrowd MicroSurveys into your busy schedule? Do you use our SMS notification feature?
My discretionary time waxes and wanes. When I am working in the intensive care unit, I rarely have enough time to complete my clinical tasks and still return home with enough energy to be the father and husband I need to be. As such, I predominantly tackle medical surveys during the weeks where my clinical obligations are less time consuming.
Thought I have used the SMS feature in the past, and found it wildly helpful, I find that the best opportunities for me to complete surveys are after I put my kids to bed. I find I have a half hour or so where I am catching up on personal emails later in the evening where I can subsequently complete a few surveys. I often carve out the time to complete a survey or two every few evenings. The benefit with this approach is that survey opportunities accumulate and I can then pick and choose what I find interesting and efficient.
How do you redeem your rewards (PayPal or Tango) and how do you spend your earned rewards?
Now to the fun stuff! I choose to receive all my rewards through PayPal. Though to many it may seem negligible, I personally direct all my survey income towards our family’s medical education debt. For those who do not know, I also own and operate a blog in the physician finance niche. Much of the content on my website revolves around our debt elimination journey. Just recently we completely paid off my spouse’s debt! Some of money used to reach this milestone was generated through physician surveys. I will use the e-gift cards generated through PayPal to purchase our budgeted needs, and this affords me the opportunity to funnel more money towards our student loans.
The Motivated MD was created outside of your practice in clinical medicine. What made you start this new opportunity?
The Motivated MD was created as a result of my personal writing. I was determined to get out of debt. As so many physicians know, medical education is expensive and is likely only going to get worse. Recent studies show that tuition costs often outpace inflation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself writing about my financial goals and experience paying off debt. Ultimately this generated a large amount of content that I subsequently put on a website. I had no expectation of the website growing into anything meaningful, however the response has left me in awe.
I now see hundreds of thousands of visitors annually and continue to publish content on a weekly basis. I have interacted with so many other physicians and healthcare workers on similar financial journeys, and the greater physician finance community is incredible. For many physicians looking for side gigs to supplement their income or further their contribution to healthcare, platforms like InCrowd can help you achieve both! If you would like more information on medical surveys, please check out The Motivated M.D. at themotivatedmd.com
Interested in receiving InCrowd research opportunities? Register here.
