The Biggest Obstacle to Physician Entrepreneurship Is…

Physicians themselves are the biggest obstacles to physician entrepreneurship i.e. creating user-defined value through the deployment of innovation.

But, it is not all their fault.

Why?

Here is a list. You decide:

1. They lack an entrepreneurial mindset.

2. Applicants get accepted to medical school because they can memorize lots of useless information and outperform others on a standardized test that has no correlation with future performance as a doctor

3. Medical training is about conformity and any creativity, imagination, or inventiveness is beat out of you during it resulting in a large proportion of graduates being depressed, cynical, or suicidal before they even finish

4. Medical schools have craniorectal inversion syndrome and little or no interest in teaching students and trainees the business of medicine or science

5. The culture of academic medical centers, despite lip service, is frequently anti-entrepreneurial

6. Doctors, like many other entrepreneurs, suffer from entrepreneurial psychopathologies and a "warrior mentality"

7. They lack mentors and external networks and hang out with like-minded people with the result that the blind are leading the blind

8. They deceive themselves into thinking that the future of medical innovation can be found at medical and scientific meetings. Sick care cannot be fixed from inside.

9. They ignore the socioeconomic determinants of disparate health outcomes.

10. They don't put their money where their mouth is or walk the talk. Most are wannapreneurs.

11. They believe that doctors make terrible business people.

12. They believe they are the problem and not the solution.

Many potential physicians never get the chance to practice entrepreneurship because they were born in the wrong country, the wrong ZIP code (translation: had to go to terrible schools that did not make them competitive applicants), or picked the wrong parents. In short, they had lousy luck.

There are few entrepreneurial physicians in part because there are so few entrepreneurial medical schools.

Some of these wounds are self-inflicted and some are outside their control. However, innovation starts with an entrepreneurial mindset and, by increasing the innovation clock speed, continuously improving and adapting to change, the other things can be made irrelevant.