Wanted: Physician Entrepreneurs

Sickcare USA, Inc., is undergoing profound change and is gradually migrating to healthcare. Our response to these challenges will determine whether the US maintains its dominance in biomedical and health innovation or continues to yield that position to another country. One part of the formula for getting health ideas with value to patients is educating a cadre of bioentrepreneurs who have the knowledge, skills, abilities, experience, and networks to get health ideas, like digital health, business process innovation, care delivery innovation, and process and systems innovation to patients by deploying new ideas using sustainable business models. Armed with primarily only a technical background in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and math, most physicians and other healthcare professionals need entrepreneurial education and training that specifically addresses how to get a drug, device, diagnostic, healthcare IT, or service delivery model or platform to the market.

There are 3 main reasons why doctors, healthcare professionals, scientists, and engineers should embrace health entrepreneurship and acquire the knowledge, skills, and abilities to practice it and participate in commercialization initiatives or other ways to deliver and harvest value to patients.

First, sick-care and health innovations do no one any good until they get into the marketplace. The health innovation pipeline is broken; despite billions of dollars poured into basic research, relatively few true game-changers have emerged from the bottom of the funnel due to significant gaps in development, testing, validation, deployment, adoption, and penetration.

Second, you can make money, sometimes lots of it, by commercializing your idea as well as having a sense of self-fulfillment .There are several ways to participate, including working within your organization or with industry partners in various advisory and management roles, licensing your ideas, or creating your own company. How you play is up to you.

Finally, health entrepreneurship provides an outlet for doctors who want to use their entrepreneurial, intellectual, and problem-solving skills to make a difference and add another dimension to their lives and the lives of their patients. They can, for example, move from taking care of patients one at a time for their entire professional careers to creating a digital health company that helps thousands and employs hundreds. If you find joy and challenge in learning new things, are undaunted by the complexities of commercializing health care inventions, and don’t mind working long hours you’ll do well as a health entrepreneur. Good luck with your new venture.