Barriers to Digital Health Physician Entrepreneurship

It seems that almost everyone who has anything to do with sick care is trying to innovate, move the needle, disrupt, create game changers and win the 4th industrial revolution. It could be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.

That particularly applies to digital health physician entrepreneurship. While investments in digital health continue to rise, applications are evolving and use cases that demonstrate both a clinical and business ROI appear each day, there are persistent barriers to the mass design, development, testing, and deployment , dissemination and implementation into clinical practice. That's because there are many stops along the digital health innovation roadmap and the exits are not clearly marked.

They are:

1. The lack of an entrepreneurial mindset and the the courage, conviction and confidence to persist with an entrepreneurial venture.
2. Finding seed stage and follow on money or bootstrapping it
3. Deciding whether to and how to get FDA clearance for your product
4. Navigating the software and hardware IP issues and creating a product-market mix when your product is IP.
5. Lacking fundamental entrepreneurship knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies
6. Creating a viable business model with the proper product-market fit (translation:creating something no one wants to buy)
7. Knowing how to scale a business.
8. Overcoming the barriers to technology adoption and penetration, dissemination and implementation
9. Integrating your software or hardware product into legacy EMRs
10. Getting out of pilot purgatory
11. Staffing your startup team
12. Finding the right advisors and board of director
13. Not understanding how startup CMOs create value.
14. Confusion about whether you are being hired for execution or strategy
15. Not creating a digital health whole product solution
16. Deciding whether and how to do clinical trials for a digital health product.
17. Making your product cybersecure
18. Create a risk management and mitigation strategy
19. How to bridge the now, the next and the new
20. How to use digital health technologies to create value and help scale humans.

Overcoming all of these barriers can consume you for a lifetime. That is, at least between the 2 minutes you have between each patient visit. Someone should write a book about this stuff.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs