Physician Entrepreneurs Are Reinventing Themselves

A flourishing community of support is emerging for entrepreneurial physicians who believe they may have the next great idea for healthcare.

As more physicians leave private practice to join hospitals and health systems as part of the employed workforce, some in the industry are raising questions about the disappearing identity of physician entrepreneurs.

If the definition of a physician entrepreneur is limited to a resident who opens a private practice, then it is easy (in some parts of the country) to say the days of physician entrepreneurs are drawing to a close.

But there are plenty of examples that point to a flourishing community of entrepreneurial physicians who believe they may have the next great idea for healthcare. 

In Austin, Texas, Tim Gueramy, MD, an orthopedic surgeon, and Tracey Haas, MD, a family physician, head up The Walters Physician Incubator, a sort of training ground for doctors who want to pursue their own business idea. Gueramy and Haas are husband and wife who launched their own product two years ago, DocbookMD. It's an app that allows physicians to share HIPAA-compliant information. Haas and Gueramy say they are using the lessons they learned from creating DocbookMD to help their fellow "doctorpreneurs."

"Six years ago, we had a need," says Haas. "We went to our hospital, we went to Motorola, we went to big corporations and said, 'Doctors need to be able to communicate better, but we have to do it in a secure way,' and we got laughed at. So we started our own company, and we really think physicians stepping in to answer a problem is a trend." 

The Austin-based incubator formally launched in 2013 and is open only to physicians. What started out as informal Thursday afternoon conversations with other doctors at the DocbookMD headquarters has grown into structured monthly meeting with increasing interest. Haas says 97 physicians are registered to attend the next incubator meeting.

Physicians 'DIYers by Nature'
"The doctors that come to our meetings are a diverse group," she says. "From residents to physicians in their late 60s. Some people are looking to improve processes, some have ideas for gadgets or surgical tools."

The meetings are free and there are only two rules:

1. You must be a physician.
2. You must have a business idea.

The incubator does not pair physician ideas with investors, though that may happen in the future as the incubator matures. Instead, Gueramy and Haas address what physicians need to do to launch their idea, which often starts with teaching them how to work and rely on other people. Physicians are DIYers by nature, explains Gueramy.

"Getting into medical school—you do it yourself; getting into residency—you have to do it yourself; you treat patients by yourself," he says. "We have been taught that we are an island to ourselves. You really have to change your view of how to work with other people."

Gueramy believes he and Haas are able to break through the cultural barriers because they had to learn the same lessons when bringing DocbookMD to market.

"We had to learn to open ourselves up," he says. "We had to talk to a lot of people; we had to be a lot more collaborative to get our ideas out."

'Compassionate Capitalism'
The grass roots type of physician entrepreneurship building in Austin is not surprising, according to Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA, President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SoPE).

"Top-down, cluster-based innovation is being replaced or significantly supplemented by community-based innovation," he told me. "Most of the innovation is coming from the trenches, not from the academics."

Meyers has co-founded four companies, and is a professor of otolaryngology, dentistry, and engineering at the University of Colorado in Denver. He is passionate about the physician as an entrepreneur, which is why he helped start SoPE in the first place.

"The unmet need that I saw was based on my own personal experience of doctors having ideas, but either not knowing what do with them, or knowing what to do with them but having such a hard time getting the resources, they just gave up," he said.

Originally, SoPE was focused on "ear, nose, and throat surgeons who were gadgeteers," but it became all-inclusive when it garnered interest from other physicians. Meyers has written extensively on the opportunities and challenges of physicians becoming entrepreneurs, including the idea that medicine and entrepreneurship are not compatible.

"I call it compassionate capitalism," he says. "The primary interest has to be the patient. As soon as you replace the patient with a profit motive, you're toast."