After completing four grueling years of medical education, a select cohort of highly talented individuals attain the honor of calling themselves doctors. However, their training is far from complete as their residency will require another three to seven years filled with 80-hour workweeks. Including the time spent in their undergraduate education, it will take these physicians-in-training a total of eleven to fifteen years before they are able to practice on their own. Given the rigorous medical training they endure to one day practice medicine, it is surprising to witness that a growing number of these doctors are choosing to leave clinical medicine in order to help patients in a very different manner.
Since the emergence of digital technologies, an increasing number of doctors are leaving medical practice to join and begin their own healthcare startups. One such example is Dr. John Abrahams, who left his neurosurgery practice in 2006 to found Endomedix, a biomedical device startup focused on developing new sealant technology. Dr. Abrahams then went on to found three more companies, including MDChat, a startup that develops tools to improve workflow productivity and communication between physicians. Dr. Sandra Whitehouse left her practice in emergency medicine in 2011 to found Shift Health, which provides interactive surveys for patients before they visit their doctor in order to improve pediatric patient engagement during their appointment. Dr. Reid Robison left his psychiatry practice in 2012 to begin Tute Genomics, a company that developed a platform to discover and interpret new genes involved in disease. Dr. Vishesh Rohatgi was a cardiologist who founded SmartRx Healthcare in 2011, a company that developed tools to educate patients on what they need to know prior to an upcoming procedure or how to care for themselves after they have been discharged. Instead of founding their own companies, many more doctors are serving as medical advisors to healthcare startups, often in exchange for a portion of the company’s equity. This type of affiliation allows them to collaborate in the startup’s growth while maintaining their existing medical practice.
What drives individuals to leave clinical medicine after enduring more than a decade of medical training? Often it is due to their dissatisfaction with the status quo. They see a problem in healthcare that is being inadequately addressed and strive to improve upon it with their entrepreneurial spirit. In an interview with Forbes, Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle stated his motivation for founding Iora Health, a startup that provides an innovative model of direct primary care:
“As a practicing physician it soon became obvious our current model of care delivery does not work; instead of simply complaining about it I felt I needed to try to fix it, but got frustrated trying to do it within existing health systems, and found studying the problem (in academics), working through the government, and consulting was not effective. I decided that the best way to make change happen quickly was to simply strike out myself and just do it—being an entrepreneur allows you to break what others think are the rules (they aren’t) and take change into your own hands.”
Physicians’ interest in creating new healthcare technologies and delivery models is matched by the enthusiasm of investors. In 2015, $4.5 billion of venture capital was invested in digital health—the term given to the most recent merger of technology and healthcare. The same year also saw $1.4 billion raised in digital health across five initial public offerings on stock exchanges. These figures are a substantial increase over the recent past. From 2011 to 2015, healthcare venture investments grew 32% annually. The majority of these investments fall into a few subcategories, most notably companies in healthcare consumer engagement (e.g., ZocDoc), wearables and biosensing (Jawbone), personal health tracking (23andMe), payer administration (Collective Health), telemedicine (Doctor on Demand), and care coordination (TigerText).
While one may argue that physicians are needed in society to practice clinical medicine, one could also argue that physicians are equally in need to transform the healthcare industry as a whole. Their experience provides the in-depth understanding of medicine required to improve patient outcomes and remediate healthcare’s glut of inefficiencies. Rejecting the status quo and founding their own startup may be one manner of doing so on a scale never possible for a doctor in the clinic.
- Baum S. Physician entrepreneurs are in nearly half of StartUp Health’s latest class of early stage companies. MedCity News. April 8, 2014. http://medcitynews.com/2014/04/physician-entrepreneurs-dominate-14-additions-startup-health-academy-class/
- Farr C. Why So Many Doctors Are Advising Startups. Fast Company. April 24, 2016. https://www.fastcompany.com/3059231/why-so-many-doctors-are-advising-startups
- Shaywitz D. Why Physicians Are Turning to Startups. Forbes. August 5, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidshaywitz/2014/08/05/why-physicians-are-turning-to-startups
- Wang T, King E, Perman M, Tecco H. Digital Health Funding: 2015 Year in Review. Rock Health. https://rockhealth.com/reports/digital-health-funding-2015-year-in-review
Jason Paul Singh is a student at The University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix, class of 2020. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor with a BS in economics. His academic interests include alternative healthcare models and methods to improve efficiency in medicine. In his spare time, Jason enjoys traveling, reading and running. Please feel free to contact him at jpsingh[at]email.arizona.edu with any questions or comments.