Ah, Residency, the soul-crushing yet pleasantly painful experience of going from an amorphous blob of medical knowledge to a slightly less amorphous blob of specific medical knowledge. The demands are massive, your free time is little, and most of the time you feel like you barely have your head above water. Throughout this process it may feel like you are just a cog in the wheel, praying you make it to the end so you can finally have more free time to focus on all the things you’ve been neglecting, including potentially even starting your own health-tech company. Okay that’s just me. Maybe you’ve heard about healthcare startups, and while it sounds interesting, you reflexive shy away from it because you think: “How can I start my own company when, among other things, I barely have any experience in Medicine? I’m just a Resident, how can I actually solve anything?”
Well, I believe Residents are the BEST suited people within healthcare to tackle challenges, ranging from either system processes to daily workflows, for the following reason: Middle Child Syndrome. Being residents, we are forever stuck between the medical student (who receives all the indulgences of medical training without any major responsibilities) and Attending (who receiving most of the Privileges and high-level responsibilities). We’re left with the ill-defined role of being the workhorse of the family and making sure things run smoothly on a day to day basis, patching together solutions on a near-daily basis. We arguably spend the MOST time with patient care in the entire hospital and thus are the CLOSEST to problems with effective care delivery.
While our time may be limited due to various residency demands, I do believe Residency is the perfect time to prepare yourself for building your healthcare startup. It may seem like they are opposite from each other, but they do in fact work in synergy. So, how does one actually take advantage of Residency? Below are 2 strategies I’ve used for the last 1.5 years:
- Observe and DOCUMENT all the problems you see in residency— This is by far the most under appreciated aspect. It’s easy in residency to become frustrated with the dozens, if not hundreds of challenges we face on a daily or weekly basis when it comes to delivering patient care, ranging from finding your point man in the Radiology department to speed up the read of the MRI you ordered, to becoming frustrated with waiting for patient transport and instead transporting the patient down yourself. It’s extremely easy to think that “this is just the way it is”, and that nothing will actually change the system. But I guarantee you, these problems are real, they’re known but probably being ignored by everybody else, and can be the basis for your potential X-million-dollar startup. As an example, here are some problems I noticed during residency:
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- Extremely poor care coordination, especially upon discharge from Inpatient rehab facilities
- Social worker overwhelm
- Poor coordination between the rehab team— Rehab is the most multi-disciplinary, multi-career based approach to care. It is extremely easy for stakeholders of the team to be silo’d off and just do what they needed to do, leaving other teams in the dark, causing further downstream problems.
- Extremely poor organizational approaches to working with EMR
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In November 2018, I took these problems to the MIT Hacking Medicine competition, won 1st place and created my first Healthcare startup that attempted to mitigate Caregiver burnout. I then spent the next 6 months working on this project with a team of 5 other people, and learned a TON along the way.
- Develop relationships with EVERYONE in the healthcare chain of command— This is your last chance to be a “student” and let curiosity guide you to understanding the system from a pseudo insider/outsider perspective (before the soul-crushing administrative responsibilities that come with being an attending). Learn from as many people as you possibly can, especially people with other roles in the hospital. It might seem crazy, but reach out to the CEO of your hospital, ask to shadow him/her for the day (you’d be surprised how rarely, if ever, they’re asked to do so), use the excuse of being a “Curious Resident” who wants to understand the system better and how he can make a bigger impact. Speak to the population health officer at your hospital. More than anything, try to understand what each person’s pain points are. By speaking to enough stakeholders, you may just start to see a theme, and then you can try to find out why it’s not being addressed.
Following the above 2 suggestions will help you take advantage of the time and opportunities you have in residency. While these sound extremely easy to perform, actually IMPLEMENTING these into your workflow will require a bit of creativity. If you have any additional tips/suggestions please let me know in the comments below!