Should Your Healthcare Startup be Virtual?

Kids benefit from less homework. Ironically, their parents are doing it more and more. Doctors are spending more and more pyjama time on electronic records and it is burning them out.

Here are are the pros and cons of telecommuting. More than two-thirds of people around the world work away from the office at least once every week, according to researchers.

A study released Tuesday by Zug, Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG found that 70 percent of professionals work remotely — a phenomenon known as telecommuting — at least one day a week, while 53 percent work remotely for at least half of the week.

But, when it comes to creating a startup, is doing it virtually a good idea? Here's how to create a virtual biotech company. Want to save thousands in your startup budget? Get a library card

Certainly, there are benefits. But, there are also potential downsides and challenges like:

1. The challenges of working in global virtual teams.
   
   
2. Building and measuring high performance teams.
   
   
3. Not getting out of your house to identify and analyse market signals.
   
   
4. Restricting your internal and external networks.
   
   
5. Reducing the chances of innovation seeding serendipitous interactions with other people.
   
   
6. Hampering your ability to build and scale a culture.
   
   
7. Having to go to all those coffee shops for those nasty but inevitably necessary face to face meetings. Finding an electrical outlet or a phone charger there is another story.
   
   
8. Running Zoom meetings with screaming kids and barking dogs in the background.
   
   
9. Loss of productivity when Comcast interferes with your broadband service or your dog eats your cable.
   
   
10. Having to go through an IRS audit because you screwed up your home office deduction.
    
    
11. Getting too comfortable at home might cause you to ignore your cognitive biases.
    
    
12. It's expensive to create an innovation space in your basement or spare bedroom. Plus, I mean, who decides what fabric to use to cover the sofa or whether to get a stand up desk or not?

Creating a successful startup is hard enough and will probably fail 90% of the time regardless of where or how you do it. Any computer knows that the success rate has more to do with whether you create a category killer than where you create it.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD and Co-editor or Digital Health Entrepreneurship.