Questions (because HN has the best advice):
What other career paths are available to MDs?
Do you know of any companies that need MDs?
Do you have any experience working with MDs?
Do you have any other advice for me?
Generally, the perception of MDs in business, especially outside medical startups, is that they're horrible. First, they're usually convinced they're the smartest in the room, and even if they may be, that they're also the most knowledgeable about any given domain -- even if they have no idea about it. They often end up involved in mediocre small businesses, taken advantage of in scams, etc., due to being rich and bad at business.
They're also super-expensive; education and debt. The best are probably military doctors who leave after their first tour, but even then, they're mid/late 30s.
Within medicine, having an MD as the medical interface of your company (could be CEO, could be bizdev, could just be a chief medical officer) is essential. One of the factors limiting medical IT startups is that they're really just IT startups with some additional hassle, but the pool of suitable MDs willing to work in a startup is low.
I think there are a lot of great opportunities in medicine: the PACS/Telemedicine field is open (especially for consumer-facing systems, or for SaaS); various forms of automation (pharmacy, EHR/EMR, lab, etc.) exist, but generally have been developed by large companies and aren't as well engineered as one would like, or as innovative -- the long product cycle, conservative buyers, and FDA regulations slow this, but the effect is greater than this can explain. Probably the best opportunity for disruptive innovation is direct, consumer-facing health, especially in less or unregulated areas. Scott Adams (Dilbert)'s idea of passively monitoring one's daily life, then when you get sick, go back and look at the previous N months of data archive and identify causes or lifestyle issues; then do statistical analysis across people, is one idea. Providing better realtime advice and decision support about things with health impact (diet, exercise, various drugs, ...).
I guess the most relevant question is about you -- aside from liking HN/TechCrunch, and being an MD, are you someone who wants to code? Work on hardware? Business? Do you like quick/simple projects, well-funded low risk big projects, or true startups? Are you location-specific at all?
If it were me, if I didn't have 100% answers, I would probably try to intern or contract/consult with a variety of companies or projects, just to get a feel for how they work. Founding a startup is a 5-10 year project, so spending a year figuring out exactly what kind of startup, or if you want to do a startup at all, is probably worthwhile.
My next project is actually an IT infrastructure thing, which has healthcare and defense as primary markets.
To answer some questions: I definitely want to be involved in the coding and technical aspects of a company. If I had to pick it would be a startup over the lower risk/higher stability of an established business. I would choose software over hardware due to the length of the development/approval cycle and the fact that I very much enjoy the creative process of coding. I'm flexible about location.
I agree that there are a ton of great opportunities in medicine. For the past 18 months I have been on clinical rotations and have quickly realized how poorly the current model of healthcare functions. Far too much time is wasted on tasks that distract from providing better patient care. These pain-points and inefficiencies could be easily addressed with simple software solutions. I truly believe that the talent on HN could change the way medicine is practiced. We could decrease the number of deaths due to mistakes (estimated ~100,000/year) and increase doctor/patient satisfaction.
I find the current enterprise software used in the hospital to be the most frustrating. The modern patient is a data-generating machine, yet we still use outdated programs to manage these patients. It's not customized to the clinical situation. It's ugly. It's unintuitive and difficult to use.
I'm interested in improving healthcare from a tech perspective. Providing better analysis and visualization of data. Creating a collection of tools that make everyone's job in the hospital easier. From my perspective there are a bunch of situations where the solution is an adaptation/translation of an established technology from outside the hospital.
3 examples - (I have a huge list):
1. a twitter/yammer/googlewave-like application that would be patient-centric and keep the whole healthcare team up to date on the management of the patient (a new member to the team could easily be brought up to speed on a patient)
2. a panic status board application for the inpatient consult service (once I call the consult I have absolutely no idea where they are in the proces - sometimes for days)
3. a stackoverflow/wiki on location-specific hospital logistics and information (I can never remember all the details of ordering a rare test/procedure - plus it would accelerate the learning curve for the new residents/staff each year)
ps - as for your assessment of doctor's egos, you're definitely correct (you should see what happens when you put 20 or 30 in a room together).
I think huge conglomerates like Kaiser, which provide insurance and care through a single network, could go a long way to improving healthcare IT. At some point, they become big enough to actually become a device manufacturer, software developer, etc., or at least to allow a single product to take over their entire practice. It would almost make sense to have an IT-focused medical hedge fund which develops a great IT system, then goes around and buys practices in strategic markets to convert to the IT system; sort of like the medical borg.
Mobile interfaces to existing EMRs would be interesting -- either within a hospital, or for consults outside. Being able to quickly check and see where someone is in the process would be great. The problem is this either requires huge amounts of customization to work with existing workflow, or adjusting workflow. Radiology with PACS is really the only case where workflow has been totally changed by IT, and that was mainly to allow perhaps the laziest specialists of all to work from home or the beach.
EDIT: I should add, I was the co-founding CTO of Hotjobs.com, amongst other things -- this isn't some mickey mouse thing.
It lends creedence to the placebo effect :)
seriously.
The most soulless way for an unethical MD to make money is probably to work with insurance companies to deny coverage, or work with lawyers to either award or defend cases, in cases where the medical science and financial interest don't align.
