Physician Archetype Test

How this assessment works

1. Physician archetype (questions 1 to 7). Each answer adds one point to one of CMT's four physician archetypes: Optimizer, Guardian, Disruptor, or Pragmatist. Your highest total is your primary archetype. If your top two archetypes are within one point of each other, the result notes a blend.
2. Energy and meaning (question 8). This asks how much of your week goes to the work you find most meaningful. It is not scored. It is compared with published research on physician burnout and career fit.^[11]
3. Your patients (questions 9 to 14). These come from the former Patient Match Score and place your practice on the two axes that define the CMT patient segments: how insurance-oriented your patients are, and whether they are upgrading care they like or leaving care that was not working. The strongest signal is whether patients want claims filed: in the Patient Study, patients who said it matters a lot averaged 4.22 of 5 on insurance importance, those who did not care averaged 2.81, and those who said no averaged 1.69, across 1,045 responses. Patients whose top priority was cost averaged 2.37, compared with 3.26 to 3.36 for those focused on relationship or convenience, across 665 responses. Patients switching from another concierge or membership practice rated their prior doctor higher on trust and likability (4.17 and 4.27) than those leaving traditional practices (3.42 and 3.45), across 652 responses. Generation is a weaker, correlational signal, reflecting that Medicare eligibility begins at 65. Answer values come from those averages.^[28]
4. Patient segment fit. Each segment receives up to 4 points for how strongly you match the physician archetype CMT pairs with it, and up to 4 points for how close your practice sits to that segment on the two axes. Segments are ranked by total.
5. Why the types appear after the test. Archetype and segment descriptions are shown only with your results so they do not influence how you answer.

Frameworks that shaped this test

This test starts from CMT’s own research and books, then adapts ideas from the outside authors and organizations listed after them. None of those outside authors or organizations created, reviewed, endorsed, or validated this test, and CMT is not affiliated with them. Applying their ideas to medical practices is CMT’s interpretation.

• Michael Tetreault and Concierge Medicine Today. This test is built first on CMT’s own work: the CMT Patient Study, nearly two decades of editorial coverage, and four CMT books by Editor-in-Chief Michael Tetreault. Its guiding philosophy is CMT’s: it is no longer about being the best doctor in the world, but the best doctor FOR the world, FOR your patients, and FOR your local community.^[28]
  • Marketing Your Brand of Membership Medicine (2025): lead with trust, not price; speak plainly instead of using model labels; and build community so your practice never becomes a commodity. This shapes your practice promise.^[29]
  • Remark-ology (2025): walk the 13 scenes of a patient visit and fix the roughest ones first. This shapes your service playbook and Step 3 of your plan.^[30]
  • No More Waiting Rooms (2024): the front desk, the first phone call, and small personal gestures decide who stays. This shapes the team section of your service playbook and the “Would your patients miss you?” section.^[31]
  • The Doctor’s Expanded Guide to Concierge Medicine (2022 edition): who actually searches for concierge care, and how practices really grow. This shapes the patient section of your results.^[32]
  Figures from CMT’s books come from CMT online polls and physician-search data. The books describe these polls as not scientific; respondents chose to participate, and results have not been independently reviewed.
• Donald Miller, StoryBrand. The customer is the hero and the brand is the guide, with a clear plan and call to action. Here, the patient is the hero and the physician is the guide. Your results follow that order, including StoryBrand’s three layers of the problem: external, internal, and philosophical.^[14][27]
• Marcus Buckingham, strengths and "red threads." A strength is an activity that energizes you, not just one you are good at. This shapes question 5 and the energy section of your results.^[12][13]
• Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time. The DRIP Matrix sorts tasks by whether they give you energy and whether they create value: Delegate, Replace, Invest, or Produce. His Buyback Rate and Replacement Ladder guide what to hand off first. This shapes the time section of your results and Step 1 of your plan. Martell writes for entrepreneurs, so the test limits his delegation ideas to administrative work that can appropriately be handed off.^[25][26]
• Jeff Henderson, Know What You're FOR. Two questions: what do you want to be known FOR, and what are you actually known FOR? This shapes question 7 and the practice promise in your results.^[15][16]
• Horst Schulze and The Ritz-Carlton. The motto of Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen, and the three steps of service: a warm welcome, anticipating needs, and a fond farewell. This shapes your service playbook.^[17][18]
• Elizabeth Dixon, The Power of Customer Experience. Five elements: mindset, culture, knowing your customer, defining your differentiator, and continuous innovation, including her point that the customer experience is never better than the employee experience.^[19][20]
• Havas Group, Meaningful Brands study. A long-running global study measuring whether brands deliver functional, personal, and collective benefits. It studies consumer brands broadly, not medical practices.^[21][22][23]

Limitations

• The physician archetypes are CMT's proprietary framework, adapted from the broader archetype tradition that began with Carl Jung.^[24] They have not been statistically validated.
• The archetype-to-segment pairings are a CMT hypothesis, not a proven relationship.
• Patient segments and their shares come from the CMT Patient Study (n = 561, respondents from 2018 to 2024). Respondents were a self-selected CMT audience already searching for a concierge doctor, not a random sample of the general population, and the study has not been independently reviewed.
• Third-party research is cited for context. None of it studied CMT's archetypes, segments, or pairings. Statements that go beyond the research are labeled as CMT inference.
• This is a self-assessment. It reflects how you see yourself, which may differ from how patients and colleagues see you. Most physicians draw on more than one archetype.

Sources

Sources reviewed September 2026. Figures may be updated by their publishers after this date.