The basic mechanic

Expert networks connect paying clients — usually investment firms, consulting firms, or corporate strategy teams — with domain experts for short, structured conversations. The client pays the network, the network pays you, and you never have a direct financial relationship with the end client.

For physicians, the work typically looks like: a recruiter emails you about a project, you reply with availability, you take a 30–60 minute call, you get paid within 2–4 weeks. No clinical practice, no patient contact, no licensure risk. Your specialty, training site, and recent experience are the entire product.

The big four networks

GLG

$300–$800/hr

The biggest and most physician-active network. High call volume, strong compliance processes, and the fastest onboarding for most physicians. Rates scale with specialty rarity and tenure. A good first network if you've never done this work.

Guidepoint

$250–$600/hr

Second-biggest by volume, with particularly strong demand in healthcare and life sciences. Rate offers tend to start slightly below GLG but are often negotiable, especially once you've completed a few clean calls.

Techspert

$300–$700/hr

Smaller but growing fast, with heavy focus on health tech and digital health. If your practice or research touches software, clinical AI, or device workflows, Techspert's project mix is unusually well-matched.

AlphaSights

$250–$650/hr

Strong presence in private equity and strategy consulting. Projects skew toward market landscaping, competitive positioning, and due diligence. Call topics often assume a more commercial lens than purely clinical networks.

What a 45-minute call actually sounds like

Most consults follow a predictable arc: 2–3 minutes on your background, 30–35 minutes of the client asking questions they've prepared, and a few minutes of Q&A. You're not delivering a lecture; you're being interviewed. Good calls involve you answering directly and saying "I don't know" freely.

Common question types:

  • Market sizing. How many patients in your practice would realistically be candidates for X drug or Y device?
  • Adoption barriers. What would have to be true for you to actually change your prescribing or procedural default?
  • Competitive landscape. If you had to pick between products A and B for a specific patient, which and why?
  • Workflow integration. Where does a new tool, drug, or process actually fit in a clinical day?

Disclosure and compliance basics

Expert networks run compliance screens and ask you to confirm before every call that you aren't sharing material non-public information about a publicly traded company, you aren't violating any employer policy, and you aren't under any pending consulting agreement that would conflict.

For most employed physicians, this work is outside clinical scope and doesn't conflict with employment agreements. But a few specific employer situations to check: academic faculty at publicly traded hospital systems, principal investigators on industry trials, and physicians with equity in startups should each run the network's standard disclosure check against their contract.

How to actually get consistent calls routed to you

  1. Complete the profile fully. Networks route based on a combination of self-reported experience, publications, and past call performance. Thin profiles get thin demand.
  2. Respond to recruiter emails within 2 hours. Most client requests have tight turnarounds. Faster responses dramatically increase the share of available calls that route to you.
  3. Nail the first few calls. Network-side ratings after each call determine your long-term rate and volume. The first 3–5 are outsized in setting your trajectory.
  4. Stack 2–3 networks after you've validated the first. Demand fluctuates; different networks have different project mixes. Most active physician experts work with 2–4 networks in parallel.

The physicians who report steady expert-network income aren't doing anything exotic. They're responsive, they have complete profiles, and they've cleared their first few calls without issues. That's most of the moat.