Uncovering Clinical Pain Points: Why Future Doctor = Future Founder

What we witness by observing patients and staff during clinical rotations, goes beyond textbook disease and enters the messy reality of real-world healthcare delivery. 

We see older adults struggle to adhere to complicated medication regimes post-discharge, due to health literacy and access barriers. We experience the heavy cognitive load placed on clinicians due to outdated EHR systems that fail to display patient data effectively. Every day we see first-hand the inefficiencies, frustrations, and unmet needs that compromise patient care and add unnecessary stress on already overburdened systems.

But as medical students we have a unique vantage point for spotting opportunities to innovate and improve care. We gain exposure to healthcare operations and workflows, developing skills in areas like clinical reasoning, communication, empathy and leading teams. Equipped with skills in design thinking and business planning, we could develop tools, training, or decision aids to improve processes for patients and clinicians alike.

Primed and ready with skills for innovation

The very journey of becoming a Doctor instils specialised skills and mindsets positioning us well for healthcare innovation. With some business fundamentals, we can translate our clinical insights into entrepreneurship.

Clinical observation: We learn to spot early abnormal signs and subtle exam findings indicating disease. Similarly, we can observe clinic and hospital operations to spot dysfunctional workflows, communication gaps or technology limitations compromising care.

Pattern recognition: We develop this analytical skill to discern meaningful symptom clusters, pointing to accurate diagnoses. Identifying such patterns translates directly to unpacking threats to patient safety, mapping care breakdowns, and stratifying interventions.

Team coordination: Managing rotating team members, we gain invaluable experience coordinating across specialties and roles. Entrepreneurially, this ability helps convene diverse stakeholder groups when designing solutions and building buy-in.

Communication: Explaining complex diagnoses and care plans in patient-friendly language becomes second nature. This art of distilling complexity into simplicity proves invaluable when pitching innovative ideas to investors or end-users.

Creative problem solving: Our clinical training focuses on developing differential diagnoses and treatment plans. But innovation demands creatively framing the right problems worth solving within healthcare’s complexity. Our insights into care delivery make us best suited to do so.

Empathy: Shadowing overburdened nurses, overwhelmed clinic staff and complex patients breeds deep empathy. User-centred design depends first and foremost on walking in the user's shoes - we do so every day.

 Doctorpreneurship 101 - Med Students as Change Agents

If more medical schools integrated principles of healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship into existing curricula, they would empower a new generation of clinician-innovators. Armed with deep healthcare domain expertise and driven by their first-hand encounter with real clinical problems, these clinical entrepreneurs could build better solutions and transform care delivery in ways policy interventions alone cannot.

Medical schools have a prime opportunity to cultivate future health-innovators early by integrating structured entrepreneurship skill-building. This could manifest through dedicated "Doctorpreneurship" modules and programmes woven into existing curricula. For example, the student selected components (SSCs) could be expanded to feature topics like healthcare innovation, design thinking, and business strategy tailored to clinical insights.

Beyond new modules, medical schools can better spotlight entrepreneurial pathways for future clinicians through alumni talks, featuring doctor-turned-founders sharing their unique trajectories. Fostering collaboration between medical, engineering and business programmes would also catalyse valuable cross-pollination of insights and skills from students tackling healthcare problems from diverse vantage points. Proactive support early on from medical schools provides fertile ground for translating clinical frustrations into validated ideas, and eventually healthcare enterprises equipping 'doctorpreneurs' - to drive systemic change.

Final thoughts

The clinic is not just a place we train to become competent Doctors, it is an incubator full of opportunities for us to creatively address the healthcare problems under our noses. We have enormous untapped potential to be forces of innovation. Our medical education just needs to hand us the right entrepreneurial tools. With them, we can build the next generation of healthcare solutions and fulfil the core purpose of medicine - leveraging knowledge to improve lives. 

***

To learn more about entrepreneurial skills, visit the Entrepreneurship Institute's website. 

Connect with Sonia on LinkedIn and Twitter.