The Associate Chief of Ambulatory Cardiology splits time between direct patient care and clinical operations leadership. The clinical side is outpatient cardiology on the National Jewish Health campus, built around a schedule that gives you more time per patient than most practices. The operational side is the leadership work that keeps clinics, scheduling, and testing running across sites.
Your clinic runs up to 16 patients per day, with 60 minutes for new patients and 30 minutes for follow-ups. That is more time per visit than many cardiology practices offer. Clinic days are four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon, and you decide how to distribute your protected admin time across the week around those clinic blocks.
There is an active need for echocardiography reads. On testing days you are assigned to echo, stress, and monitor review, and you can add clinic patients to those days to manage volume. Testing has grown busy enough that the division is considering additional protected time and additional readers to keep up.
You would care for cardiology patients drawn from the local Denver area and from the broader referral base that National Jewish Health serves. Centralized scheduling routes patients to the right provider based on need, whether that is general cardiology, heart failure, or another subspecialty.
About 20% of your time is protected for the operational work that defines this role. That work includes:
The goal is to interface with the people who run each piece of the operation rather than to run every piece directly. You are the connective point who makes sure the parts work together.
Call is optional and paid as a stipend on top of salary. It is taken from home, and the structure is built to be light.
| Call Type | Stipend | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Weekday | $500 per night | Phone coverage from home |
| Weekend | $2,500 | Rounding on the partner hospital, one night of coverage for the covered hospitals |
Coverage spans four hospitals at night, two of which have cardiac surgery programs and sicker patients. A house supervisor and nursing staff screen issues first, and many calls are informational updates rather than requests to come in. When a true emergency needs a procedure, an interventional cardiologist on call handles it directly, so you are not called in for acute interventional needs.
Most physicians work around six weekends of call per year. Expected additional call earnings run about $20,000 per year, depending on how much call you choose to take.
Inpatient and major procedural work currently happens through the partner hospital, including cardiac surgery and cath lab services. National Jewish Health has a small non-cardiac inpatient program with telemetry. There are active discussions about expanding on-campus services, which could include low-risk admissions and additional procedures such as echo, stress testing, and advanced imaging. A candidate interested in this work could help develop that program.
Research is available but optional and shaped to fit the operational focus of this role:
The role is built first around clinical operations leadership. Research participation is an option layered on top for the right candidate, not a core requirement.