From $275,000 Salaries To Work-Life Balance: Why Burned-Out Doctors Are Trading The ER For The C-Suite

Doctors are ditching the hospital grind for corporate boardrooms. And with $275,000 salaries, better hours, and less stress, it's easy to see why.

The rise of chief medical officers in tech, startups, and even companies like Google and Salesforce CRM is pulling more doctors away from clinical roles. They're trading 12-hour shifts for leadership positions that still impact healthcare—just on a bigger scale.

Why Doctors Are Making the Switch

For Dr. Lisa Shah, the shift was about scale. She loved treating patients but left exhausted every day. Losing them took a toll.

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Now, as CMO at Twin Health, a health tech startup using AI to monitor metabolism, she's helping treat populations instead of just one patient at a time.

“We’re seeing a lot of chief medical officers coming on board to grant that clinical, medical legitimacy to whatever products people are developing,” Chris Myers, a Johns Hopkins professor, told Business Insider.

The COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated the trend. Burnout soared. A Bain & Company survey found that one in four clinicians were considering leaving medicine.

And the pay? Still solid. ZipRecruiter ZIP says CMOs earn around $275,000 per year—comparable with a doctor's salary but without the brutal hours.

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A Growing Trend in Health Tech

Health tech is booming. It's expected to hit $1.5 trillion by 2032, growing at nearly 19% per year, according to researchers at Rock Health. 

That means more companies need medical expertise—and they're hiring doctors to provide it.

Dr. Guy Maytal spent nearly two decades in psychiatry before joining Forge Health, a startup focused on mental health and substance use treatment.

"I could grumble on the sidelines, or roll up my sleeves and do something about it," he told Business Insider.

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The Role of CMOs in Business

Tech giants are getting in on the action. Salesforce hired a CMO in 2019 to focus on employee health. Google added its first chief health officer the same year.

At Uber Health, Dr. Joshua Sclar now works on getting patients to medical appointments and delivering medications.

“Being a physician, I know what happens when that care is missed,” he told Business Insider.

But adjusting to corporate life isn't always easy. Dr. Nikole Benders-Hadi, CMO at TalkSpace TALK, says her biggest challenge was learning to communicate with business leaders who don't speak “doctor.”

“There can be really different end goals when you’re talking about business objectives versus healthcare objectives,” she said.

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A Lifeline for Overworked Doctors?

For doctors used to on-call shifts, patient loss, and insurance battles, moving to a CMO role reduces emotional toll.

"These jobs seem stressful, but they're not life and death," said Dr. Jonathan Jaffery of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

And while America faces a shortage of 86,000 physicians by 2036, many believe CMOs aren't the problem—they're part of the solution.

Dr. Nate Favini, CMO of Pair Team, a startup connecting Medicaid patients to care, thinks technology will help fix the system.

"There's a massive opportunity to harness tech to deliver better care at a fraction of the cost," he told Business Insider.

Doctors aren't just leaving medicine. They're changing it.

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