Stop Making Money Dirty

We need a 21st century sick-care and disease-prevention workforce and we are seeing the evolution of how it will take shape. Advanced practice practitioners are in more demand than primary care doctors. Healthcare data scientists are growing and we need more doctors with an entrepreneurial mindset to create value through the deployment of innovation.

The medical education establishment needs to take 10 steps now:

1. Change the culture of medical education from one that sees money as "dirty" to one that values innovation and those that create it.

2. Make biomedical and health innovation and entrepreneurship a legitimate academic domain.

3. Create the structure and processes necessary to create incentives and reward those that practice the scholarship of innovation.

4. Recruit for innovation

5. Recognize and recruit those who have a desire to add patient value by doing something other than seeing patients for their entire careers.

6. Develop on-campus early seed stage funding mechanisms.

7. Develop knowledge exchange programs.

8. Envision and articulate a vision of an entrepreneurial university.

9. Create interdisciplinary programs and remove the barriers to collaboration.

10. Create biomedical entrepreneurship experiential learning opportunities

Money in medicine is not dirty. I am not saying that greed is good or that doctors should abandon the patient's primary interest. But, we should reward those who create patient value, not marginalize or stigmatize them. The workforce of the future should have the tools, motivation and incentives to help patients in many ways and see that there is nothing wrong with doing well by doing good.