How to Design a Clinical Day That Works: Intentional Systems With Dr. Bertina Hooks | Episode 185
Dr. Bertina Hooks has been a hospitalist, a locums doctor, a private practice owner across three locations, a utilization management reviewer, a medical expert witness, and a physician coach. She built all of that intentionally, piece by piece, while raising a daughter and running a business with no roadmap. Then in December 2022, she was hospitalized with necrotizing fasciitis and woke up without her right leg below the knee.
In this episode, she talks about burnout recovery, career reinvention, and the non-clinical pathways most doctors do not know exist until they are desperate enough to start looking. Her message to every doctor who feels trapped is the same: you are not stuck, you are not broken, you just need clarity about what you are actually looking for.
Timestamped Highlights
[06:00]: Dr. Hooks describes how she set up her own outpatient practice from scratch, and the specific systems she built before she saw her first patient that kept charting inside clinic hours from day one.
[09:00]: She explains where she learned the delegation and workflow skills that most doctors never develop, and why hospitalist medicine was the unexpected training ground for running a sustainable practice.
[21:00]: The hybrid approach she used to start her private practice without financial risk, running hospitalist shifts alongside building her own panel, and why it allowed her to ramp up slowly and intentionally.
[22:00]: Dr. Hooks describes the health emergency that changed everything, and what it forced her to ask herself about medicine, identity, and what she actually wanted.
[25:00]: She maps out the three non-clinical career paths she coaches doctors through most often, including one that most physicians misunderstand entirely.
[33:00]: The values energy audit she uses with every coaching client, and why she believes alignment between values and career is the foundation of burnout recovery.
Three Key Takeaways
1. Sustainable practice requires intentional systems, not just goodwill.
Dr. Hooks did not stumble into an efficient clinical day. She designed it, deliberately, before she opened her doors. Pre-visit labs ordered a week in advance. Huddles with staff before morning and afternoon sessions. Templates for normal inbox results handled by the nurse, with anything flagged coming directly to her. Scribes from early on. Delegation structured around scope of practice. She knew what had made her exhausted as a resident and as a hospitalist, and she made different decisions. The lesson is not that her system is the right one. It is that she had one, and most doctors never build theirs.
2. Your medical degree is portable in more directions than you think.
Dr. Hooks has built income streams across clinical medicine, utilization management, medical expert work, and physician coaching. None of the non-clinical work required an additional degree. What it required was a willingness to see her existing skills differently, and a mindset shift around what counts as using her training. She coaches doctors who are considering a pivot and consistently finds the same thing: the barrier is almost never competence. It is imagination. The belief that there is only one way to be a doctor, and that stepping outside it means starting from scratch.
3. Burnout recovery starts with recognizing the signals before they become a crisis.
Dr. Hooks describes burnout as a spectrum, and the early signals are easy to miss or explain away. The clearest early sign she names: coming back from a break and not feeling the return of motivation that used to be automatic. She teaches a values energy audit as one of her foundational coaching tools, built on a simple question: when you look at where your energy is going, how much of it is actually aligned with what you care about? That audit, she says, is often the first time a doctor has been asked that question. And the answer is almost always the beginning of everything that needs to change.
Guest Bio
Dr. Bertina Hooks is a board-certified internal medicine physician, entrepreneur, and physician coach based in Texas. After building a multi-location private practice, navigating a serious health emergency that resulted in a below-knee amputation, and exploring careers across utilization management, medical expert work, and telemedicine, she founded Pinnacle Business Academy to help doctors navigate burnout recovery and career reinvention. Her memoir, From Fire to Freedom: A Memoir of Transformation, Renewal, and Resilience, launches September 23rd, 2026. Find her at pinnaclebusinessacademy.org and bertinamhooksmd.org.
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