Tre medici e un ex studente ci mostrano come si possono combinare tecnologia e medicina
Articolo di Alicia Clegg sul Financial Times
As a visiting scholar at Stanford University in 2012, Joshua Landy spotted student doctors in hospital rummaging in their whitecoat pockets for their smartphones. They were using them to photograph unusual symptoms and test each other on what patients’ ailments might be.
Today, Dr Landy alternates working as a hospital critical care specialist and as co-founder of Figure 1, a Toronto-based start-up that allows doctors and nurses to share clinical images. “[Until now,] as healthcare professionals, we’ve had to resort to less than perfect communication tools, such as emails or texts, when a picture would do the job better,” he says.
Such combining of medicine and entrepreneurship has spawned its own noun, doctorpreneur, and a number of networks, including the eponymous UK-based Doctorpreneurs.
Surgeons in particular have always invented devices out of clinical necessity. What today’s innovators may have in mind, however, are not so much technical improvements but using technology to help redesign healthcare, from the grass roots up. As Arlen Meyers, a doctor and chief executive of the US-based Society of Physician Entrepreneurs, puts it: “A doctor can treat 20 people a day for his or her entire career — or build a device that allows a million people to be treated or not get sick in the first place.”
Doctors starting a business have insights into where healthcare is failing and the pressures that medics face — although, as with insiders in other sectors, this is not always an advantage.
“When something has caused you a lot of pain, it’s easy to assume the problem — and hence the business opportunity — is bigger than it is,” warns Ophelia Brown, an investor at venture capital firm Index Ventures. Physician entrepreneurs may have less variety of contacts and lack experience of running a company, raising finance or knowing how to fit into a world where technical proficiency does not trump everything. continua a leggere