This spring, thousands of medical graduates will cross the stage and become doctors. Yet practicing medicine isn’t the only career for these young professionals; the path to becoming a doctor also provides ample skills for entering the innovation economy.
Today’s medical students are perfectly poised to change the gridlock of the U.S. health care system — and medical schools should empower them with the support and business exposure necessary to tackle these problems. As a practicing physician, an individual could help hundreds of lives over a lifetime. But consider the scale of technology: How many lives can a physician touch if she invents a new medical device, therapy or technology? In any health care startup, that number grows by an order of magnitude into the millions.
Kemp Battle, an expert on building teams within businesses, once told me that an individual is most valuable in the first five days on a job, and again during the last five days of that job. The most surprising insights come from those with fresh eyes, or those leaving with the benefit of hindsight. Young doctors, whether recent grads or residents, are in this position to see medicine’s pain points and then dream up a fix. While established physicians perform important and noble work, they are entrenched in the system. On the flip side, all medical students on rotation and new residents experience a moment when they’ve wondered why things are done a certain way — and the answer is usually just because that’s the way it’s been done forever. But why?
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