Does anyone have official verbiage from RadPartners about the roll-out of the TBWU (their customized time-based work units)? Can anyone share a full chart of common exams and their new values? I’ve heard they have different weightings for ER/IP/OP exam settings, and that would also make sense, but the only partial example I’ve seen circulating online is small and doesn’t distinguish, so it’s not particularly reliable.
Medical surveys are an easy way to make a few bucks at a good hourly rate (well, maybe at least for a resident), and there are multiple sites offering surveys to physicians. The caveat is that, of course, most survey sponsors are typically looking for board-certified physicians with multiple years of experience, particularly in sub-specialties. The less experience you have, the more you need to be prepared to get screened out of what seem like promising survey opportunities.
This article was originally posted way back on Feb 26, 2014 and last updated April 2026. This page contains referral/affiliate links (thank you for your support).
ENOS is a new healthcare panel with a novel premise: members are paid instantly via Venmo, Paypal, or paper check—no delays or redemption thresholds. ENOS always pays for your time: Even if you’re ineligible for a survey after completing screener questions, they still send you $5. Readers get a $25 sign-up bonus.
ZoomRx is also excellent and has a nice app and better/shorter-than-average surveys. $25 sign-up bonus for the following specialties: Hematology/Oncology, Cardiology, Neurology, Gastroenterology, Psychiatry, Nephrology, Rheumatology, Allergy/Immunology, Pulmonology, Dermatology, Urology, Endocrinology, Surgery. They even pay for attempts when you screen out.
One of the biggest survey sites is Sermo (also an online healthcare community), which is now offering my readers a $10 welcome bonus. The survey experience has been recently revamped, and once you maintain a balance of $100 in honoraria, you get preferentially invited to more surveys.
One of my very favorites is InCrowd, which has a slick mobile-friendly site and will send you survey opportunities by email or text message. These are always of the very short and painless variety (the fastest of all in my experience), so the payouts are small, but it’s good money for the time and basically effortless. You do have to respond quickly before surveys fill up, but you even get a buck when you get screened out. Being referred (like signing up through that link) will earn you a $10 bonus after you answer your first two microsurveys.
M3 now has three separate very active research companies under its umbrella: M3 Global Research, M-Panels, and All Global Circle. You can earn $25 for joining one panel, $40 for two, and $60 for joining all three (for the following specialties: Hematology-Oncology, Neurology, Gastroenterology, Nephrology, Cardiology, Urology, Surgery, Rheumatology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Pulmonology, Allergy and Immunology, Family Medicine, Psychiatry, Dermatology, Ophthalmology, Endocrinology/Diabetes, and Pediatrics).
Curizon has been in the business a long time, but they recently completely revamped their website and platform. It’s a trusted site for well-paying healthcare surveys for physicians as well as other healthcare professionals. Every new registration is entered in a monthly drawing for $100.
Spherix Physician Community pays $150 per half hour and up, and they also share insights about how other doctors feel/respond after. They’re adding physicians in gastroenterology, endocrinology, dermatology, hematology/oncology, nephrology, neurology, rheumatology, & psychiatry.
At the resident level, one of my old favorites has been Brand Institute, which almost exclusively sends out short surveys about potential drug brand names. Payouts are always on the smaller side ($15), but each one is quick (about $1 per minute or more) and screen-outs are rare. So if you get invited to a survey, then you can generally complete it and get the honoraria. No BS. The main style/format is nearly always the same, so you pick up speed as you do more of them. And that honoraria size is also significantly larger than what one can generally pull as a non-physician (e.g. SurveySavvy, the biggest most popular survey site around, usually pays a measly $2 per survey). The website, however, is clunky and terrible. You’ve been warned.
Additional legitimate additional survey sites, many of which are significantly less active, are below:
- ImpactNetwork
- Reckner Healthcare
- OpinionSite
- MDforLives is a newer company that I cannot recommend at this time.
- Olson Research Group
- CurbsideMe (now defunct)
- Epocrates Honors
- DoctorDirectory
- MedSurvey
- Advanced Medical Reviews
- Physicians Round Table
- Truth on Call (text-message based surveys; not sure this is meaningfully active anymore)
- MedQuery
- Medical Advisory Board
- SurveyRx
- Physicians Advisory Council
- Health Strategies Group
- InspiredOpinions (Schlesinger Associates)
- Medefield
- Encuity Research
- e-Rewards Medical
- Physicians Interactive
True education isn’t just transmitting information. It’s the information filtered through experience that makes it real.
Experience matters because it allows us to convert all that expensive type-two thinking into long-term memory. It can, in a sense, help convert type-two into type-one thinking—or at least less expensive thinking—by taking a complicated world full of many discrete ideas and concepts and chunking them into a smaller number of discrete elements.
When radiologists read a scan, we do not evaluate each individual pixel as we gain experience; we are able to take in larger and larger swaths of structures as units for interpretation and pick up discrepancies that don’t match our mental model of what something should look like.
This is why chess grandmasters can, at a glance, recreate a chessboard after viewing it for only a few seconds, but novices can only remember a handful of pieces. It’s why “1-9-8-5” is a string of four numbers, but 1985 is my birth year.
One of the unappreciated components of a liberal arts education or general skills is that someone who is generally skilled or smart is actually somebody with a large volume of mental models and a large amount of relevant information stored in long-term memory that they are capable of bringing to bear on novel situations.
Learning to think is an organic, holistic process of taking on more and more things and doing the hard, meaningful-but-not-always-fun work to integrate them into the person you are. There is no shortcut for that. That’s why using AI to write something that’s actually important doesn’t really work for many people, and that’s one reason why a score on a standardized test is a helpful but woefully incomplete metric.
As a trainee, I disliked interpreting spine imaging. This is in part because there are a lot of discrete decision points to make at every level regarding canal and neural foraminal stenoses, the location of disc pathology, the degree of joint degeneration, and so on and so forth. That’s a lot of work if each decision requires deliberation, and it’s psychologically unfulfilling when your attending changes all your grades.
But then you read thousands of scans, and much of that type-two thinking is well chunked into a near-automatic type-one process. It doesn’t even feel like thinking—you see a canal, and you see a foramen, and you know what it is. That’s why, as an attending, reading a degenerative spine can have more in common with meditation than nearly any part of my job.
Learning curves are high, and there’s enough internal cognitive load that we can only learn so much at a time. When everything is new and challenging, everything is hard, and everything takes time and energy. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is, as yet, very wrong that “the most highly technical part of the job has gone away.” There is as yet no mastery of any topic—no inborn system-one ability or computer skill that you can simply offload parts of the scan to.
The experiences mediate the learning and move the learner down the pathway from effortful to intuitive abilities.
This is why, when a well-trained radiologist reviews a scan, only a small fraction of the findings actually require thought. The rest conform to the library of pattern matching they can bring to bear.
Preparing for standardized tests by yourself using high-quality resources is both effective and a little bit soulless. There’s a reason why much of medical education could be streamlined in both time and cost to what amounts to an old-time correspondence course—that’s because it’s long been sold as an information problem, and the core question for schools has been how to best transmit the holy information to the student.
This was probably historically at least partially true, but in the 21st century, this conception misses the point: information is no longer the core skill that needs cultivation. It is social intelligence, human skills, and the bringing of information to bear for problem-solving. It’s critical thinking, and doing it while working with people. And yes, the information is important (it really, really is!)—but the information is not where very expensive medical schools really shine. With the advent of better qBanks, Anki decks, and commercial lecture products, we are increasingly choosing a factory schooling model over one that prioritizes a social experience of working with caring teachers, motivated peers that are important to you, and patients with meaningful tasks to provide motivation and centering.
The schools and students spend lots of money on pieces of paper and question banks and other forms of curated video content, and these are all wonderful things. My point is not to suggest that using better lectures and better questions is a bad thing for education—it’s certainly not. It’s that those things do not preclude the need for the other part—not in some token problem-based learning format or anything so prescriptive—but real, meaningful, non-tedious, in-person work.
Whatever it once was, it is no longer mainly an information problem. As the cliche goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. We need to encourage people to be motivated (or find motivated people), and we need to help curate and support sustaining that curiosity—that people can do and internalize the need to continue doing that type-2 fun of hard work. The fact that students would rather be at home studying instead of working in the hospital shows the fruits of our system: the triviality of many students’ clinical experiences (the clerkship as performance art) combined with the pressure of Shelf exams as the defining feature of their grades.
The world is full of heavy objects, and yet most people are not ripped. We are the limiting factor, and we need systems to help us and support us to be our best selves. Burnout is a system that snuffs out our soul’s flickering flame.
There was a time in my radiology training where people were encouraged to incorporate multiple-choice questions with audience response into their lectures instead of taking hot-seat cases where people were put on the spot. That is more comfortable, to be sure, but I can tell you the fear and anxiety of wanting to perform for your colleagues and mentors was much more inspiring. Not every time you’re wrong in public is unfair pimping/humiliation.
An ability to take those hits on the chin when you flub a case is also important. Psychological safety doesn’t mean never being challenged—it means being supported enough that you can bounce back from your inevitable failures. We have forgotten how important resiliency is, and we’ve allowed undergraduate medical education to remain dominated by the factory information paradigm while neutering the chance for more students to become respected members of the care team more of the time.
I would posit that good healthcare is more analogous to a restaurant than most large corporations. From Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors:
If close local control and supervision of operations is essential to success the small firm may have an edge. In some industries, particularly services like nightclubs and eating places, an intense amount of close, personal supervision seems to be required. Absentee management works less effectively in such businesses, as a general rule, than an owner-manager who maintains close control over a relatively small operation. Smaller firms are often more efficient where personal service is the key to the business. The quality of personal service and the customer’s perception that individualized, responsive service is being provided often seem to decline with the size of the firm once a threshold is reached. This factor seems to lead to fragmentation in such industries as beauty care and consulting.
Healthcare has seen those fragmentation factors dissolve since the 1990s and especially since the ACA.
In Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-based Competition on Results, Porter then argues:
Competition has taken place at the wrong levels, and on the wrong things. It has gravitated to a zero-sum competition, in which the gains of one system participant come at the expense of others. Participants compete to shift costs to one another, accumulate bargaining power, and limit services. This kind of competition does not create value for patients, but erodes quality, fosters inefficiency, creates excess capacity, and drives up administrative costs, among other nefarious effects.
Over the years since I returned to the area, the local university medical center has progressively moved away from individualized service into a predictably depressing corporate marketshare grab. If this is “The Future of Medicine Today,” the future is bleak.
If policymakers want to improve US healthcare, the easiest lever to pull first is to enable physician ownership and make it feasible to stay small without needing to opt out of the system entirely by going direct pay.
Optimizing is challenging (Herbert Simon argued it was impossible). Some people, in some situations, can optimize for their interests and find their magical right path (their “calling”). I never had a calling; or if I did, I missed it.
I think perhaps the equally important—if less interesting—advice is to satisfy yourself across the spectrum of minimizing excess discomfort.
If there are things that you don’t mind that other people dislike, that is a comfortable niche at the broad job level, the specialty level, and even in your specific role at your company. If some people find a certain aspect of something insufferable, but you find it irrelevant or potentially meditative, then double down. That’s where you add your unique value.
My wife and I bought a house in residency that was two bedrooms/two bathrooms and on the corner lot of a somewhat busy street. You couldn’t really hear traffic noise in the house or anything, and there was plenty of parking, but we were able to get an incredible deal on the house because many people don’t want to live on a corner, and many folks think they need more rooms.
Everyone compromises, repeatedly. Continually. Incessantly and unavoidably. But you get to choose some of those compromises, and some folks’ big line in the sand might be no big deal to you. A lot of personal value is tied up in noticing and seizing those opportunities.
Here is the updated first entry in a series of posts about radiology tools, ergonomics, and efficiency. This includes the go-to stuff I use every day to practice diagnostic radiology, (briefly) how I use them, and a few alternatives. This series is the result of a lot of research, trial and error, and input from others in the radiology community.
Unnecessary caveat: There is no real best anything. Here’s what I have idiosyncratically landed on as a stable happy set-up that balances efficiency and comfort (and an editorial selection of those favored by others).
We get into more workflow details and justifications in the other posts, but we can summarize my personal approach as a hands-free microphone solution, a vertical mouse with some—but not a comical number of programmable buttons—and a left-hand device that adds additional hotkey efficiency as well as—critically!—a way to scroll with my nondominant hand in order to spread the love across multiple joints.
The original version of this post was published in May 2023.
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About the experience of grief and the inevitability of death, from Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us by Martin Shaw:
Be extravagant and protracted and real in your grief. Don’t worry about doing it wrong. Labor over the preparation, exhaust yourself, show up. Make something by hand. Read stories to the beloved, allow yourself to go numb to it all. Fall asleep, get up, rinse and repeat. But don’t let a chance like this go by. This is a time outside of time, and extraordinary things can happen. The Other Place is much closer than you think. Dress better, as your old ones may be watching. Get a few gray hairs and don’t think about plucking them out. Derailment is mandatory, but not to be forced. Make sure people see the body if they possibly can. Don’t expect anything to be the same, even when folks stop dropping off pasta dishes at the door. You have entered a new, deepened world now. It has something to say to you.
I’ve always wanted a lot chucked in the ground with me when it’s time. Wagons, gold, great fanfare. We are ceremony people, we are story people, we are poetic people. Like a little bird we slip through the doors and get dragged into love affairs and peculiar ambitions and moments of charity, and suddenly we die, and we are back out into some kind of next adventure, as souls scattered into luminous fragments apart from our body, but without those dreadful knees and high blood pressure. I remember these things, turn them like my prayer rope, in the sour hours of my doubt.
That is writing.
CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, fighting hard on a podcast (clip here) to set a new record on how quickly you can be wrong about how radiology works and how it’s been affected by AI so far:
There’s this story of, like—I think it was Geoff Hinton—predicting that AI will replace radiologists. And indeed, AI has gotten better than radiologists at, you know, doing scans, right?
But what happens today is there aren’t less radiologists. What the radiologist does is they walk the patient through the scan, and they kind of talk to the patient. So, the most highly technical part of the job has gone away, but somehow there’s still some demand for like the kind of underlying human skill.
The “Indeed” is completely baseless and without a reality correlate. It was indeed Geoffrey Hinton who said the world should stop training radiologists in 2016. In feeling compelled to address this current wrongness, I am reminded of this perfect comic by XKCD.
What I find genuinely surprising here is not the marketing hype or the finessing of reality but the bold, straight-faced use of the past tense for something that simply has not happened. The future is uncertain, but the desire to continue raising money doesn’t change the past.
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang made similarly wrong comments last November and also received no pushback. I appreciate the motivations for this kind of more-than-hyperbolic talk given the massive investment in AI, but is there an example anywhere on any of these podcast tours or speeches where someone has actually pushed back on a laughable, supposedly factual claim and had a real discussion?
The real world of AI is interesting enough as it is without needing to pretend that radiology has proven Jevons Paradox. Like, stuff is happening. It’s cool! I get it. Every day, someone reports something interesting, like a mathematician sharing last week how Claude solved a complicated math problem he was working on. Even if Dario is directionally right about the future, he’s wrong about where we are and where we’ve been.
(I buried the links in those paragraphs, but I wrote not one but two posts responding to Huang’s comments that I think are worth reading.)
It’s always dangerous to assume malevolence over incompetence/ignorance. That said, Dario Amodei is worth $7 billion on paper, with Anthropic raising money on a valuation of something like $380 billion. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I’m starting to think he, Jensen Huang, and others know it’s not true but feel it’s the storytelling they need. This radiology “example” has become such a common talking point that I’m beginning to doubt that all the AI guys don’t know better. I’m not even entirely sure which explanation (untruth vs ignorance) I prefer.
A common response that waves away these sorts of issues is to say that the prediction is/was right, but the timing is/was wrong. This is the excuse Geoffrey Hinton has been giving ever since that infamous 2016 claim.
But when it comes to anything important, there’s a word that summarizes what it means when you are kinda “right” about something broadly but incorrect in all of the details and timing. That word is wrong.
If I predict a stock market crash within the next year and it doesn’t happen, I’m wrong. If it happens four years later, I was still wrong when I said it. And that wrongness can be very unhelpful.
I wouldn’t necessarily argue that Amodei’s predictions about what will happen to work when we achieve a country full of “geniuses in a data center” are wrong. But nothing about those predictions makes a false statement true. It doesn’t change the past, and it does call into question the seriousness of the thought process and the commitment to honest discourse. It also forces you to cynically place those predictions into a market and fundraising context. Because only that helps explain why smart, talented folks who should know better somehow seemingly don’t.
To address Amodei’s vision of what he already thinks radiology is today:
Could we see a world where radiologists do more patient counseling? Sure—though honestly, I doubt that would happen at scale.
Could we see a world where some radiologists really focus more on patient-care aspects? (I’ll generously assume “walking them through the scan” was figurative and not misattributing what a technologist does.) Perhaps a vision of breast imaging after screening profitability is curtailed? Also sure.
Could we see a move, at least for an intermediate-term, to a world where procedural work becomes a greater part of the job for a greater fraction of people? Sure—although people wouldn’t be happy, and maybe, as Dario Amodei and others have also suggested, we’ll just have robots doing everything for everybody all the time.
I won’t pretend that those visions of the future are impossible, or that those possibilityscapes are wrong. But I can point out that the credibility of the visioner goes down when they are piggybacked on statements that are not reality-based.
People with vested interests in AI company valuations going to the moon telling you that AI is going to the moon are not an unbiased source of information. The nature of being the CEO of an extremely valuable company is that everything you say is the spear tip of a one-man marketing machine.
What’s less said amidst all the excitement, of course, is the quiet frustration of daily failure—like how my beloved magical automatic impression generator still sometimes hallucinates conclusions from a source text that is only a few hundred words. The future tense, the present tense, and the past tense are distinct for a reason.
Yes, of course, the jagged frontier is way more powerful than what is commercially available, and the best of what’s technically achievable has almost no market penetration. I agree that cool things are cool. What’s commercially available, however, is where the real world basically lives.
So, if anyone reading this plans to interview Mr. Amodei, Mr. Huang, or anyone else pontificating about AI:
In 2026, for most radiologists, the “most highly technical part of the job” hasn’t meaningfully changed.
Morgan Housel’s The Art of Spending Money offers an excellent reframing of saving: think of it not as delayed gratification, but as the purchase of future independence and resilience against uncertainty. Because those things have value even before the money is eventually spent later. Knowing you have that armor is protective against the generalized uncertainty of a modern first-world existence.
Human psychology lets me assume/pretend, broadly, that the world tomorrow will be mostly like the world today. But there are enough regular things to be anxious about that cannot be avoided, including a whole bunch about the health of my family and the future for my children, that are inherent, unavoidable, and challenging—if not impossible—to mitigate.
But at least that big emergency fund and those long-term investments that I basically ignore on a daily basis provide that warming blanket. If winter is coming, then it makes sense to prepare.
I don’t think I have an above-average tolerance for physical or psychological pain, but outlier performance in many domains comes down to the ability to tolerate discomfort. It makes sense to live in a way that minimizes unnecessary discomfort, stress, and uncertainty in as many domains as you can, in order to save that tolerance for where it drives the outcomes you want.
If this new age of AI should teach us anything, it’s that uncertainty remains the cost of admission for an active, full life. There is no way to get stronger financial returns without taking on the risk of investment, such as in the stock market. You can’t opt out of the uncertainty of any specific career, job, or path of study. There is no way to wait on the sidelines for a winner to appear and step onto that particular train.
Accept the uncertainty and live life. There is no alternative worth considering.