Jonathon Lee PT, DPT, OCS, FAAOMPT, MBA

Bio

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Q&A with Jonathon Lee

What made you decide to become a Rehab Professional in the first place?

I received PT services after a sports injury as a teenager from my local community clinic. I had a great experience and was struck by the impact my local clinic owner was having on our community, and decided that PT was the next step for me.

What is your story behind the first sense of awareness that things weren’t quite right with your rehab career?

Early in my career, my caseload was predominantly athletes across the competitive spectrum (high school to professional). One of my coworkers asked me to pick up a patient for her while she went on holiday. I realized at that moment that I had forgotten about the first community clinic that brought me into the profession. Then, I decided to pivot from sports rehab into community care.

What was the specific moment you realized your rehab career wasn’t for you? What was your decisive moment to transition to something else?

During the first wave, I realized that my clinic could probably see 100 patients a day, but millions of people around the world were getting infected with COVID. It wasn’t that a rehab career wasn’t for me – I loved my work and the impact on my community my clinic and I could have. But in the context of a global pandemic, how could I take my white coat oath and do more? In April, I saw a ticker on CNN that announced the Oxford/AZ partnership, and I called Oxford from overseas the next morning at 430AM, applied within a week, and went overseas 30 days after leaving the clinic. I figured that, if Oxford was the best university and the best medical school in the world, and they were receiving billions in funding to discover COVID innovations, this could be a place where I found solutions to the problems I saw in clinic every day. So I quit my job, sold my house, went overseas (and then proceeded to get stuck in a foreign country, without my family and friends, during not one but two COVID lockdowns).

What are some personal struggles you went through while finding and then transitioning to an alternative career (or your business)? How did you overcome them?

Imposter syndrome was definitely a big one, especially at a university like Oxford which sources students from all over the world, and in an environment like business school where I had never opened Excel or Powerpoint before. But, after speaking with tons of my classmates, I was surprised to find out they were fascinated by the world of physical therapy and the global impact of COVID on clinicians. So, I started a pro bono clinic in Oxford where I exchanged free 30 minute PT sessions for a six pack of beer and a lesson on Excel, Powerpoint, or some other business tool or topic. It grew massively – by the end of the year, I had a several week waiting list and some of the university sports teams were reaching out about independent consulting arrangements (I was also a two-sport varsity athlete while at Oxford, which was doubly challenging because they wrapped all of the sports seasons into the spring due to the previous winter lockdown, meaning I was working, going to 2 practices, and finishing up my MBA all at once).

What was the first sign(s) of traction (and the emotion behind it) with your new career? When did you know this could actually work?

One summer in London, a computer science friend mentioned how a close family member (who happened to by a Physical Therapist) felt “stuck”. Long story short, we decided to start a summer pub night series in London where I brought my startup and investor friends to meet clinicians interested in how they could scale their impact through tech startups. We started with a single Reddit post and ended up running a summer-long pub series where each party could chat to each other. Quite a few clinicians ended up getting their first shot beyond clinic from these pub chats, and that’s when I knew it could work.

What do you love most about your new reality?

I love following the clinicians I’ve spoken to on their career journeys. Here’s a secret – I make calendar reminders to check in on people to see how they’ve progressed – and I can’t really describe the feeling I get when I find out someone made it to clinic director, or product manager, or senior medical advisor, or any other role. The role itself doesn’t matter – what matters is getting “unstuck”. I personally don’t get people “unstuck” – I try and lay out some resources and paths, because I believe clinicians are some of the smartest people around. Give an example of a few destinations, illuminate a few potential paths, and clinicians can figure it out.

What did you learn in your rehab career that you apply to your new career?

The Pomodoro Technique. TLDR: productivity happens in discrete blocks of time, which is why I think clinicians are super productive. We’re literally trained to think in 15, 30, 45 minute time blocks then transition to an entire new problem and solution. Being able to think of projects in terms of “patient care blocks” has served me well in tons of environments – consulting, big pharma, and now startups.

What is obvious to you now that you struggled to see in the moment of working in the rehab profession?

Clinicians aren’t being used to the best of their cognitive ability – most often, clinicians are papering over existing patient care gaps with ingenuity and creativity. Imagine what we could do if we unleashed this creativity to create change, rather than use it to paper over existing problems? Healthcare could change for the better – for patients, for providers, for payers, and for society. We’re sitting on a huge resource – the next generation of clinicians – and if we can grow and nurture them to reach for all the things they want to achieve, imagine the possibilities.

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