Physician Entrepreneurs Are Leading Indicators

Economists like to follow leading and lagging indicators. When it comes to tracking biomedical and clinical innovation and biomedical entrepreneurship and the growth of the sick-care industry, they should pay attention to patient and physician entrepreneurs as leading indicators. Bureaucrats, politicians, and regulators should be thought of as lagging indicators.

Rules create ecosystems. Member of those ecosystems will create business models that facilitate innovation when the rules are favorable. When they are not, entrepreneurs will either head for the sidelines or go somewhere where they are treated better.

Technological advances, like the Internet or mass computerization, lead the rules creation process to cope with it by many generations. Politicians are almost always playing catch-up. Every once in while in US history, a leader emerges that creates a vision, usually during a time of extreme crisis, real or imagined.

On the other hand, community-based innovation networks and those entrepreneurs in the trenches are mobile enough to innovate and create strategies to work around non-functioning, inhibitory obsolete rules and regulations. Black market eCare, using non HIPAA compliant communications platforms like Google Hang Outs, is an example.

Black market entrepreneurship might be off the radar, but it continues to thrive. Smart rules will make it mainstream. Stupid rules will keep in the shadows.

In the meantime, physician entrepreneurs will continue to innovate and the smart money should take notice.