Latest / The Side Hustle Career Podcast with Fexingo: Second Income, Freelancing While Employed / How a Nurse Built a 12000 Monthly Side Hustle in Telehealth Triage Auditing
Transcript
- Lucas: Alright, let's talk about a side hustle that most people don't even know exists until they're the one on the other end of a bad telehealth call. Luna: I feel like I've been there. You're on a video visit, the provider seems rushed, you hang up and think wait, that didn't feel right. Lucas: Exactly. And the reason I bring it up is I found this nurse — let's call her Jenna — who turned that exact gap into a twelve thousand dollar a month side hustle. She's a registered nurse, works full-time in a hospital emergency department, and on the side she audits telehealth triage calls for a large virtual care platform. Luna: Twelve thousand a month on the side? That's more than a lot of full-time nursing salaries. Lucas: It is. And she's not doing it fifty hours a week. She told me she spends about fifteen to twenty hours per week on her side hustle, which breaks down to roughly six hundred to eight hundred dollars per hour of her time. The key is that she's selling her clinical judgment, not her time. Luna: So she's not taking patient calls herself. She's evaluating the calls that already happened. Lucas: Right. The platform records every triage conversation — nurse to patient, usually via phone or video. Jenna listens to a sample of those calls and scores them against a rubric: Did the nurse ask about allergies? Did they document the chief complaint correctly? Was the disposition appropriate — send to ER, schedule an appointment, or manage at home? She writes a brief report for each call, and the platform uses that feedback to coach their nurses. Luna: That makes sense. Telehealth companies need quality assurance, but they can't have their own full-time clinical staff auditing every call. So they outsource to someone like Jenna. Lucas: Exactly. And the reason she can charge a premium is she brings credibility. She's a certified emergency nurse, she's worked triage in a busy Level 1 trauma center, so when she says 'this call should have resulted in a higher-acuity referral,' the platform trusts her judgment. She charges two hundred and fifty dollars per audit hour, and she typically completes two full audits per hour once she's in the flow. Luna: Two hundred and fifty an hour. That's consultant territory. What did she need to get started beyond her nursing license? Lucas: Surprisingly little. She did take a short certification course in telehealth quality assurance — it was about four hundred dollars and took her maybe six weeks part-time. But the bigger hurdle was finding the first client. She cold-emailed the clinical operations managers at three large telehealth platforms, offering a free pilot audit of ten calls. Luna: That's smart. Prove your value before you ask for money. Lucas: Exactly. Two of the three said yes. One of those turned into a long-term contract at a hundred and fifty dollars per hour initially, which she renegotiated to two fifty after six months when she showed them her audit findings reduced their clinical error rate by forty percent. Luna: That's a powerful number. Forty percent reduction in errors. That's not just a nice to have, that's a liability issue for them. Lucas: Right. And that's the lesson here. If you have a professional certification in any regulated field — healthcare, finance, legal, engineering — there's probably a quality assurance or compliance consulting side hustle waiting for you. The trick is finding the specific pain point that companies are required to monitor but don't have the internal bandwidth to do well. Luna: So if someone listening is a nurse, a pharmacist, a social worker, even a certified public accountant — the same model could work. Lucas: Absolutely. I talked to a pharmacist last year who audits medication reconciliation workflows for a chain of long-term care facilities. She makes about eight thousand a month on the side doing that. The model is identical: listen to or review a recorded interaction, score it against a standard, write a brief report. Luna: And the beauty is, you're not doing this during your work hours. You can do it in the evening, on weekends, at your own pace. Jenna does her audits in two-hour blocks after her kids go to bed. Lucas: Yeah. And she told me the biggest mistake she made early on was underpricing. She started at seventy-five dollars an hour because she thought, 'I'm just listening to calls, that's not worth that much.' But the platform was paying a full-time employee equivalent of about a hundred and twenty thousand a year plus benefits to do the same work internally. At two fifty an hour, she's still a bargain for them because they're not paying payroll taxes, health insurance, or managing a full-time employee. Luna: That's a great point. You're not competing with an hourly wage, you're competing with the fully loaded cost of a salaried position plus the headache of recruitment and training. Lucas: Exactly. And if you're a nurse listening and thinking, 'I don't work in telehealth, I work in a hospital,' Jenna's advice is to start by auditing your own department's calls or documentation for a few weeks. Build a sample portfolio of what you find — trends, recurring errors, improvement opportunities. That portfolio is what you show a prospective client. Luna: So you don't need to have an established side hustle to pitch yourself. You just need evidence that you can do the work. Lucas: Right. And one more thing Jenna emphasized: Get a separate business bank account and an LLC. She had a client who delayed payment by three months, and if she'd been running everything through her personal account, the tax paperwork would have been a nightmare. Plus the LLC protects her if a client ever tries to sue over an audit finding — which hasn't happened, but it's a possibility in healthcare. Luna: Good advice. And she had a non-disclosure agreement in place too, I assume. Lucas: Yes. Every client required one. And she had to sign a business associate agreement under HIPAA because she's accessing protected health information during the audits. That's non-negotiable if you're in healthcare. Luna: For sure. So let me ask you this: What if you're not in healthcare but you have another kind of expertise — say you're a former teacher, or you have a background in project management. Does this model still work? Lucas: It does, but the price point might be lower. A teacher auditing curriculum alignment for an ed-tech platform might charge eighty to a hundred dollars an hour instead of two fifty. The key is the certification or credential that gives your opinion weight. In healthcare, that credential is a license that can be revoked, so it carries a lot of value. Luna: That makes sense. The more regulated the field, the higher the premium for a qualified auditor. Lucas: Exactly. But even in less regulated fields, there's opportunity. I know a former restaurant manager who audits food safety compliance for ghost kitchen operators at seventy-five dollars an hour. He's a certified ServSafe instructor, and he charges for virtual audits of their kitchen setup and documentation. Luna: So the common thread is: find a process that's being recorded or documented, and offer to review it against a standard that matters to the business. Lucas: That's the whole model. And Jenna's story is a perfect example because she started with zero clients and built it to twelve thousand a month in about eighteen months. She didn't quit her nursing job — she's still in the ER three days a week. The side hustle gives her financial flexibility and, she says, makes her a better nurse because she sees patterns in the calls that she brings back to her own practice. Luna: That's a nice bonus. It's not just extra income, it's professional development. Lucas: Yeah. So if you're listening and you have a professional certification — nursing, pharmacy, accounting, engineering, even a trade license — think about what gets recorded in your field and who needs it reviewed. That's your side hustle.