At Lucens, we believe there's no one "right" way to build a fulfilling medical career, and every medical professional has a story worth sharing.
Our "Behind the Scrubs" series pulls back the curtain on the diverse journeys of remarkable individuals in healthcare. Join us and discover the human stories that make medicine such a rewarding field.
Meet Jennifer Peters, MD
Jennifer is an independent urological consultant. After decades of working in private and group practices, Jennifer followed her lifelong curiosity to start BetterUroLife PA, a private micropractice focused on long-term care and acute rehab facilities.
She graduated from UC Irvine and Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
Jennifer married her high school sweetheart, who provided full-time support and security at home for her and their two children. She is now an empty nester based in Florida and a serious NASCAR fan.
When did medicine first start to interest you?
I grew up in southern Oregon, and my parents were high school graduates with no advanced education beyond that. Medicine became a possibility for me when my aunt married a pharmacist. When I was in middle school, he had me come into the pharmacy and help him with some of the behind-the-counter tasks. I watched him interact with patients dispensing their medications. But he was encouraging that more options would be available and that I was smart enough to attend medical school.
So, did you know you wanted to be a doctor early on in life?
Before high school, I knew I wanted to attend medical school because I wanted the academic challenge. However, I didn't really understand anything about what practicing medicine was going to be like.
After my freshmen year of high school, my parents divorced, and I moved to Southern California with my father and was very independent.
I started 10th grade there but then went to Germany as a foreign exchange student for a semester. I lived near Nuremberg and took my SAT exams at an Air Force Base. So, I only attended a traditional American high school for two and a half years, and by the time I was in Germany, I was looking to move on to the next phase and started applying for colleges.
Did you ever second-guess going to medical school?
I was always interested in the science of medicine, so I never second-guessed my path. Plus, my sister went to law school, which did not appeal to me whatsoever. The academic challenge of medical school was more consistent with my introverted tendencies, and law school would have been the absolute opposite.
I did my undergraduate studies at UC Irvine and medical school at Loyola University Chicago. Being from the West Coast, I wasn't used to extreme cold and humid summers and missed the mountains. I remember looking at the overpass over the freeway in Chicago and recognizing that it was the highest point of elevation anywhere around me.
Another challenge during that time was the logistics of placement after medical school.
My husband and I were high school sweethearts, and when I moved to Chicago for medical school, he moved to Seattle for college. The match process for residency is uncertain, and we didn't know where we would be going for residency until match day.
I was traveling and interviewing in different parts of the country, and he didn't wait until the match day to know where we were and where I was going before he proposed. So he committed that he would move to wherever it was that I ended up matching.
He picked me up from the airport after I interviewed at Johns Hopkins University and proposed.
I did not expect it since I thought we would wait until we knew where I would be for the next five or six years. We got married the night before I graduated from medical school. That was a wonderful weekend of celebration with our families.
After medical school, what inspired you to specialize in urology?
I expected that I would be most inclined to do OBGYN during most of medical school until I did a rotation as a medical student and realized that the chaos and unpredictability of obstetrics were not suitable for me.
Pelvic anatomy was very challenging, and the people in urology I had rotated with and gotten to know were all interesting. I just really enjoyed the focus. I could see that urology affects people's quality of life.
I've always followed a "choose your own adventure" pathway.
I had both of my children during residency. I had my daughter when I was a third-year resident and my son when I was in my sixth year. I wasn't the first one to do it in our residency program. A year ahead of me, a woman also had two children during residency. That gave me the confidence that I could continue to choose the life I wanted, no matter the challenge.
I'm thankful that one-third of our residency program was female, which was the highest in the country at that time because there is a predominance of male urologists.
After residency, I wanted to get back to the West Coast for the weather and landscape, so I joined a small private practice in Tucson, Arizona. After about six to eight years, we merged with a couple of other urology groups to become a larger group. After 10 years there, I decided to focus on women's urology care.
So, in 2019, I moved to Florida, going from private practice to an employed multi-specialty group specifically to see women with urology issues.
You were an early proponent of telehealth while practicing in Arizona. Why does telehealth matter?
One of the things that frustrated me about the private practice I was in was the excessive 70 percent overhead. Each physician had to support seven or eight employees to run the practice.
I saw that the patients I was taking care of with urinary incontinence, with urinary tract infections in particular, needed only to be examined once, and most of their follow-up could be managed with telehealth.
Telehealth is also super time-saving for patients.
I had patients who drove an hour and a half to come to their appointments, and we would talk for 20 minutes at the most. Telehealth saved our patients time and the cost of driving to appointments.
It also saves on overhead and is much more efficient because doctors can talk to more patients. Urology is a specialty with a shortage, so improving our practices could enhance access to urologists.
You did more than talk about telehealth; you actually got in the weeds of legislation. Can you share how that started?
When I was in Arizona, I was part of the Arizona Medical Association (AMA) that lobbied the state legislature to establish pay parity for telehealth, a state-by-state regulation at that time. We were lobbying to gain equal payment for telehealth and in-person visits.
We met with some of our AMA district representatives, and the representatives from the Northern Arizona district had been attempting to hire a urologist for a number of years without success.
They were putting patients in helicopters to be flown down to Phoenix to have a urologist see them. We said if we could just get a telehealth doctor paired with the emergency physician or their attending physician, we might be able to reduce the excessive cost of transporting those patients.
So, we met with the different members of the legislative committee. And it was approved to get out of the committee. The only way that we were able to get this legislation passed in the state was actually tying it with telehealth services for substance abuse because they were also having so much of an issue with opioid addiction that they needed to expand the availability of their services for substance abuse treatment.
And so they put urology with the substance abuse to allow telehealth services.
Why did you do all that extra work?
It was a matter of survival. It wasn't optional. It wasn't extracurricular. It really was about finding a way to stay and survive in our practice.
What's the biggest misconception about urology?
With urology, it's not so much of a misconception as it's a specialty that is very challenged because of the balancing of surgical and nonsurgical management of the urinary organs. And I say that because the doubling time of information is so fast.
One reason for maintenance of certification programs is because of the fast doubling time. Our board says that the urology breadth of information doubling time is about 44 days, and that's a pretty high rate. I'm now choosing to do a nonsurgical practice, but the other part of urology is still surgically focused. That's a big challenge.
We still are massively underutilizing telehealth. There are quite a few startups in that space, but organized medicine and institutions are still underutilizing telehealth tremendously.
What’s next?
You can tell I've been questioning how everything gets done my whole life. So, I've always been interested in geriatric urology. I think we are blind to the senior citizens in society in many ways but the growing or aging of our population will require more attention.
And so I'm part of a Facebook group called the Thriving Urology Practice. The urologist there interviewed a nurse practitioner who described her practice as consulting in long-term care.
This was a revelation to me because the only places I had seen urology practiced were in the hospital or clinic settings. I arranged to visit and shadow her for a couple of days. Within a couple of weeks, I gave my notice at my employed position and began setting up my own company to do consulting in long-term care centers.
Other specialties have done it, but it is not typical for urology. It's a challenge to figure out how to make it work in the area that I am. I have been going in person to meet administrators and nursing staff at long-term care facilities, and I've gotten on staff at a couple of acute rehab hospitals.
I'm really interested in the issues of incontinence and urinary tract infection. And those are so prominent in that population.
I named my practice BetterUroLife because I want a better life for me and for my patients.
