Googling “Cool Healthcare Startups”

Pursuing medicine has been fairly straightforward in terms of expectations. There’s prerequisite courses, exams, expected research and volunteer hours, etc. to reach where you want to go. Even more so, medicine has a history of being a very traditional field, with few expected deviations on one’s path. Personally, I like this in that I knew what I needed to do to continue to progress to the next step. However, recently, I’ve found interests that lie outside of this expected path: healthcare innovation.

In college, I studied biomedical engineering, and hated it, so I figured it wasn’t for me. I had written off the idea of healthcare startups under the assumption that they were all basic science/engineering based. What I didn’t understand then was that some of the most interesting work in healthcare lived within a spreadsheet. With a payer contract. With the gap between what a policy says and what actually happens when a patient walks through a door. These unglamorous aspects of healthcare had enormous leverage potential for change.

Then, somewhere in second year of medical school, I opened a browser tab and typed "cool healthcare startups", unsure of what I would find. I found many traditional device companies, analytics, all what you’d expect. But, I also found companies operating in the underbelly of healthcare economics. The problems felt familiar because they were the problems I’d watched play out in real clinical settings, just named differently. I reached out to one of them through their website and pitched myself for a role that didn’t exist.

They said yes.

What followed was less mentorship and more of a trade. They needed someone who had actually been inside a hospital — who understood what it meant when a prior authorization got denied at 4pm on a Friday, or why a reimbursement code on a spreadsheet represented something that had happened to a real person. I needed to learn how to think at scale, operationally, beyond the individual patient encounter. Neither of us had what the other had.

Medicine gave me a framework for understanding disease. This gave me a framework for understanding the system those diseases move through.

I’m walking back into the hospital this month with a little less time on clinical material than my peers. But I’m returning with something I couldn’t have gotten in a lecture hall — a map of the machinery underneath the medicine. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous for the learning curves I’m about to face, but excited to bring a new perspective to better advocate for my patients. I’m still figuring out what role physicians can and should play in shaping these systems, but I know I want to be in the rooms where it happens when I’m an attending.