Starting Residency + "Founder Rounds"
Ideas/Reflections from the first 3 months of residency + "founder rounds" new office hour drop-ins for healthcare founders
A lot has happened since my last post here! Amazed that somehow readership to this Substack has grown 50% in the time since the last time I posted in Nov 2022. Since then, happy to share that I’ve graduated medical school in NYC, moved across the country with my wife, and am now 3 months into my intern year as an emergency medicine resident in California. Though I may not post as often, I want to actively continue highlighting various learnings and opportunities I find in my training to improve access and efficacy of care while I still have fresh eyes to the many things around me.
For folks who are newer to this blog or have been recently referred to it by others, I’m an emergency medicine resident physician at Stanford and venture fellow with the a16z bio+health team. I’ve felt incredibly fortunate to be at the confluence of these two worlds, being able to translate my experience as a former operator and product manager in digital health to improve access and efficacy of the “real world” of clinical medicine. I see most of my future path in residency and beyond, doing much of the opposite - trying to draw connections out of my day-to-day clinical setting to upstream health systems issues that healthtech founders and healthcare innovators are tackling.
I want to share a first cut of an ideation journal inspired by reflections on various rotations (e.g., trauma surgery, ICU, orthopedics, OB-GYN) as I complete throughout my intern year - hoping to add 2-3 ideas every month or so as I continue to rotate through different services and sites. It’s incredible to also imagine how we could translate the best of different systems from our clinical sites - from safety-net hospitals to the integrated Kaiser system to the academic powerhouse of Stanford Hospital.
As a fun mental break from residency, some of my most energizing conversations recently have serving as a thought partner to founders early in their ideation journey in dreaming up the next big healthcare company. Far too often, I see incredibly talented aspiring founders in healthcare going after problems that I know may be fraught with challenges from clinician adoption or broader health system misalignment. This may be a byproduct of the technologist adage “if you build it, they will come” which is difficult to execute in healthcare or founding teams new to healthcare.
Announcing “Healthcare Founder Rounds”
Rounding is an important part of any medical services as it offers a way to regularly touch base and make meaningful progress on care plans for patients. I want to offer a similar touchpoint to founders exploring early ideas in healthcare. If your company would benefit from a clinical perspective, I would love to offer my time as a digital health operator turned physician giving feedback company’s products or services. In a similar vein, if you’re looking for guidance on which “big problems” in healthcare to go after, I’d love to offer help narrowing down problem areas based on my experience as both a clinician and venture investor looking at many different problem spaces in healthcare.
Through MD+, I’ve been blessed to be part of an incredibly rich company of physician-innovators who are all at the cutting edge of adopting technology in their specialties. As part of this initiative, I’d love to begin spinning up ad-hoc “grand rounds” with a number of other expert clinical minds in any particular specialty if your company expands outside of my area of comfort clinically.
As founders in my network will tell you, I’ll gladly take off my “investor hat” in these conversations to give you candid feedback on both your product offering and, if helpful… share my 2c on your broader vision for the company.
If this sounds helpful to you or a founder in your network, I’d love to meet! Please fill out this short survey and I’ll reach out to an initial cohort of 5 over the next few weeks
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