Building a bank for doctors: How to start a financial company in the COVID-19 pandemic

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, is president and co-founder of Panacea Financial. Here he describes the circumstances around trying to start a bank during the COVID-19 pandemic

Medical Economics: Trying to get started in year 2020, a lot of doctors and everybody else have memories about that year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Did that pose any additional challenges?

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd:Absolutely. So it's interesting is, you know, so we started on it during residency, which would have been more 2014, 2015 and then when Tyler joined kind of the cause in early 2020, I was inpatient. A lot of that time, my clinic duties were restricted. We were only able to do telehealth. Meanwhile, some of the specialists were totally shut down, outpatient. You know, we were still seeing patients, quote, unquote, virtually in the office with N95 and next to our colleagues on the phone all day. And then when I wasn't in clinic, I was in the hospital on COVID units and doing inpatient medicine. And so it was certainly not as stressful as as obviously the people who are directly affected by the disease or lost loved ones, but as a doctor, it was a very stressful, a very chaotic time. Also, we were spinning up this company, and so I'm working kind of two jobs at the same time. That was very stressful. And then, quite honestly, through probably ‘20 to early ‘21 some of my clinical duties started to shift. So my school-based health time changed because school-based health centers were closed. My outpatient time was changed because some of the outpatient centers were closed on primary care, and so some of those things kind of fortuitously happened, where some of my clinical duties were shifting while my work on Panacea was kind of spinning up. And then eventually, honestly, it became too much, and I left full-time clinical medicine, and I've still practiced part-time since that time, but really focused a majority of my waking hours on how to support doctors through Panacea.