Imagine opening your clinical cases when your schedule allows it, rather than logging into a live webcam queue at an hour set by a staffing coordinator. In a clinic you run by message, you set your weekly availability window in your own time zone and answer patients from your phone or computer with no appointments and no shifts. Because your name is on the door, patients stay with you over months in a single ongoing chat thread. Day to day, longitudinal messaging fits the outpatient care that relies on clinical reasoning and follow-through: taking a history for a new symptom, reviewing lab results or connected wearable readings, adjusting a maintenance dose, renewing a prescription, or ordering imaging.

Practicing good medicine by message also means being plain about what needs a physical room. Acute presentations that could be emergencies, problems requiring a hands-on physical exam, and conditions needing a procedure belong in an exam room or emergency department, and FutureClinic doctors do not prescribe controlled substances (stimulants, benzodiazepines, opioids, testosterone, and certain sleep or weight-loss medicines). Every case is read and decided by a specific physician, letting you practice the thoughtful care you trained for rather than approving intake forms in bulk.

Most physicians exploring outside clinical work want that autonomy, yet standard side gigs rarely offer it. In Medscape's 2023 physician side gig report (Advisory Board summary, October 17, 2023; 1,939 physicians across 29+ specialties surveyed February 1 to May 10, 2023), 39% held a side gig, yet 72% reported they were not earning as much as they wanted. Where standard 1099 roles recreate employer rules, FutureClinic lets you run your own clinic by message.

What do common physician side gigs ask of your time and license?

Video-visit queues

Live video networks suit physicians who want a waiting room filled by a national platform and prefer synchronous consults during set blocks. In return, the platform controls the queue. Teladoc's 1099 24/7 Care posting (October 27, 2026) covers phone, video, and asynchronous visits with no stated minimum hours, while requiring contractors to serve members "requiring prioritization as identified by Teladoc's operations team" and work with operations "to ensure network needs are fulfilled." A closed Teladoc 1099 posting (December 2, 2025) required 20 hours monthly, while salaried primary care (October 14, 2026) requires 40 hours weekly Monday through Saturday including evenings and bars competing telehealth work.

At Amwell Medical Group (urgent care page, January 14, 2023), visits typically last 7 to 10 minutes across Associate (no minimum) and Partner (set weekly hours) tiers. Per Amwell's FAQ (May 12, 2025) and visit guide (February 22, 2023), doctors receive waiting-room alerts, cannot use phones or tablets, are expected to use video before prescribing in most cases, and commit to 10+ hours weekly (Monday to Friday, 8 am to 8 pm patient time) for primary care. SteadyMD's 1099 urgent care video role (October 13, 2026) lists flexible hours (10+ hours weekly in an October 29, 2024 copy).

Questionnaire review for white-label brands

White-label networks like Wheel and OpenLoop, and You Health Medical Groups (Hims & Hers), suit doctors with multiple state licenses seeking high-volume intake review. In a March 9, 2026 full-time physician posting, Wheel calls itself "the infrastructure layer behind leading telehealth brands" and asks for 36 clinic hours weekly (8 am to 8 pm Central), one weekend shift, and 4 supervision hours. Doctors review intakes, histories, medications, and photos, prescribe under "patient eligibility, formulary guidance, and safety parameters," use "clinical snippets," and undergo "periodic chart audits." Wheel's FAQ (September 27, 2023) sets 1099 asynchronous completion windows at 1 to 24 hours, and a September 11, 2026 operations posting tracks "visit delivery SLA commitments" and working to "Optimize program-level clinician pay cost."

Similarly, OpenLoop's 1099 weight-loss physician posting (May 29, 2026) asks for 20 to 40+ hours weekly "subject to platform needs" at $8 to $9 per asynchronous visit, and a January 12, 2026 You Health posting asked for five or more state licenses and 10+ hours weekly. OpenLoop's white-label pages (June 8 and August 5, 2026) state patients interact "only with the branded organization," which owns "the patient relationship." Reviewing questionnaires for small fees puts another brand's name on the door and prevents lasting patient relationships.

Locum tenens and utilization review

Locums suits doctors wanting agency shift blocks, while utilization review suits those preferring non-clinical file evaluation. CompHealth's California telehealth locums listings (October 27, 2026) require 20, 32, or 40 hours weekly between 5 am and 11 pm Pacific including holidays, and Locumstory (September 8, 2026) notes two- to six-month weekday family medicine contracts and 8- or 12-hour urgent care blocks. In utilization review, MCMC (April 24, 2024) lets reviewers choose when and how much they work, and both MCMC and AllMed (undated) require reviewers to practice at least 8 hours a week. EviCore's full-time cardiology medical director role (September 17, 2026) requires a Monday-through-Friday schedule and wired router ("Wireless connection is not permitted"), and Elevance Health's part-time Medicare role (October 26, 2026) requires weekend and holiday rotations and in-person training. Under IRS common-law rules (May 6, 2026), control over what is done and how defines employment.

Side-by-side comparison of clinical options

How do video shifts, inbox messages and asynchronous visits compare on time?

In a UC Davis randomized trial of 65 young people with type 1 diabetes (Crossen et al., Pediatric Diabetes, August 26, 2026), monthly video visits took 29.8 minutes of endocrinologist time on average compared with 17.2 minutes for asynchronous remote-monitoring encounters. In a Kaiser Permanente cluster randomized trial of 1,753 patients (Lieu et al., February 1, 2025), physician-managed e-visits for COVID-19 medicine took 4.2 minutes of clinician time each.

Whether video sessions by themselves cause clinician fatigue is mixed in the literature: early pandemic surveys of therapists noted tiredness after online sessions (Aafjes-van Doorn et al., August 2022; Buckman et al., November 2021), while later psychiatry and pediatric hospital studies found video visits unrelated to fatigue or linked to improved well-being (Steidtmann et al., June 2024; deMayo et al., January 2022). What makes live video side work demanding is the operational structure around the camera: fixed shift blocks, weekly hour minimums, and waiting-room queues run on someone else's schedule.

Physicians also know how unpaid portal messages feel in employed jobs, where inbox messages pile on top of a full day of office appointments. In a national study of 17,034 Veterans Health Administration primary care clinicians across 138 health systems from 2020 to 2023 (Apaydin et al., Journal of Medical Internet Research, September 5, 2025), burnout rose by about 1 percentage point for every 43.7 additional secure messages per 1,000 patients, while video volume was unrelated. As one physician told Medscape's 2023 survey after working a side gig, "I have to deal with messages that stacked up."

How running your own clinic on FutureClinic works

On FutureClinic, the message is the visit itself inside a clinic under your own name. You set your weekly availability hours in your time zone, choose your patient cap and the conditions you treat, and answer when you choose with no video queue, no shifts, and the option to go private any time or attach a short video or voice note (the Human Signature). You bring patients through your own clinic page and link, or you can pick up cases from an available pool of patients who came to FutureClinic. Follow-ups, refills, and new questions return to you in the same chat, and you can offer a cancel-anytime monthly membership so patients stay with you over time.

Before you open a case, FutureClinic's AI works like a chief resident: it takes the history, asks the follow-up questions you have trained it to ask, and drafts a reply in your style for you to read, edit, and sign, while screening out controlled substances and flagging possible emergencies. You make every medical decision, and the AI never gives medical advice on its own. Because FutureClinic sells no medicines or products, you prescribe for the patient's chosen pharmacy and order labs or imaging based purely on what fits the patient, with prior authorization help and one shared medical record that includes outside records and consented Apple Health, Android Health Connect, Oura, or Garmin readings. Patients can also start a visit from inside ChatGPT or Claude.

As a 1099 contractor, you set and change your own visit and membership prices or see patients for free, with no setup fee, monthly fee, or minimums. FutureClinic keeps 25% of what you charge (you keep 75%), covering billing, refunds, 1099s, monthly payouts at the start of each month, and malpractice cover from your first case under the FutureClinic Medical Group's $5 million group policy with a $5 million excess layered on top and tail coverage if that policy ends. If you are employed elsewhere, an August 2026 contract handout for the Texas Academy of Family Physicians by a Wick Phillips attorney (not legal advice) notes that physicians can protect outside telemedicine by defining approval terms and limiting restrictions to work that materially interferes with duties, misuses employer resources, or competes during scheduled hours.

FutureClinic believes this personal connection between doctor and patient is the future of healthcare and a durable way for physicians to practice for decades to come. Over 300 doctors (MD, DO, or MBBS) across more than 60 specialties have signed on to care for patients in the states where they are licensed. Confirm your NPI in minutes and FutureClinic checks your state licenses, helps you add states through its medical licensing partners, and supports your clinic with human support, FutureClinic University, and the Grow tab for a head start on posts and pages in your own voice. Download the FutureClinic Doctors app or start at https://futureclinic.com/doctors.