How Patient Care Prepares You to Work With Startups

In this episode, I explore the powerful parallels between clinical care and startup innovation. As physicians, we are expert diagnosticians—trained to identify real problems, design strategic solutions, and build trust under pressure. Our ability to operate in uncertainty, assess risk, collaborate across disciplines, and drive continuous improvement positions us perfectly to thrive in the startup world. I walk through ten key analogies that show how our clinical mindset, from systems thinking to resilience and agility, translates directly into healthcare innovation. If you’ve ever wondered how to apply your skills beyond the bedside, this conversation is for you.

 Episode Highlights

[00:00] — Introduction: Why Physicians Are Natural Innovators
[02:30] — Diagnosing Problems in Startups Like Patients in Medicine
[06:00] — Building Strategic Solutions: Treatment Plans to Business Plans
[09:45] — Thriving in Uncertainty and Assessing Risk
[13:00] — The Power of Interdisciplinary Collaboration
[16:20] — Building Trust with Patients and with Startup Stakeholders
[20:10] — Data Collection, Learning Loops, and Agile Iteration
[24:00] — Knowing When to Ask for Help (and Why It Matters)
[27:15] — Resilience Under Pressure: A Shared Skill Across Fields
[30:40] — Systems Thinking: Seeing the Bigger Picture
[34:00] — Continuous Improvement: The Link Between Medicine and Startup Growth
[36:00] — Final Reflections: How to Leverage Your Clinical Skills in Innovation

Transcript

Alison Curfman: 0:00

Working with startups and working in clinical medicine actually have a lot of analogies, a lot of translatable skills. You are more than a subject matter expert, and frankly, you don't need to learn the business deeply to be able to be valuable in the startup world. You just need to translate what you already know, I hear a lot of people wanting to go get an MBA, which is great if you want to go do that, but I don't think it's necessary. Welcome to StartUp physicians. Please Like and follow our show to join our community of physicians who are reimagining healthcare delivery. Hi everyone. Welcome back to startup physicians. I'm your host, Dr Allison Curfman, and today we're going to explore what do startups and medicine have in common more than you might think. In this episode, I'll explore the parallels between clinical care, which you already do, and advisory work with startups, and why physicians are already wired for innovation, even if they don't see it yet. I hear it all the time from doctors who think that their skill sets are very narrow. They feel like they know a lot about their specialty, but they say, I don't know what a company would want from me, and even if all you knew was a lot of detail about your particular field of medicine that alone is very valuable. You have to realize that that piece is something that startups and early stage companies don't necessarily have, and that's why it's important to call on subject matter experts. But beyond just you know, one hour session to tell someone about what you know about endocrinology questions, there's actually a lot of transferable skills that I want to walk through. So today, we're going to talk through 10 parallels between clinical training and the startup mindset, and what physicians do every day is not just relevant, it's directly transferable to the startup world. So I want to talk through 10 powerful analogies that show how your clinical training actually does prepare you for innovation work. So let's get started. Number one, making a diagnosis is sort of a parallel to doing discovery. So startups really need help identifying the real problem. Just like you diagnose complex patients, you are trained in your field to gather data, listen to your patient and gather information from, you know, other notes and other people who have seen or taken care of the patient, recognize patterns and really distill down to what matters and what matters right now for this patient. And this is something you do every single time you go into an exam room or see a patient. And this is something that we've been trained to do over the course of usually almost a decade of training. And when you are an early stage founder with a good idea, or you think it's a good idea, the most important thing to do is to really do discovery and de risk. The idea you want to try to get to the core of, Is this really the problem that I think it is? Could it have the impact that I think it could? And you also will gather a lot of data. You will talk to a lot of experts and listen deeply. We definitely try to recognize patterns. So what are the things that are causing healthcare to be so expensive or so inaccessible for certain patients, and really distilling down to what matters? So you are already an expert diagnostician, because you are trained to do that, and so you can transfer that skill into the startup world, as you're trying to do the same sort of process with a concept instead of with a person. So number two, you design treatment plans every day, and the analogy in the startup world is strategy design. So startups need really clear action steps, and you are very used to creating personalized, sequenced plans with measurable outcomes and flexible responses. So what I mean by this is, let's say you see a patient, you do your discovery, which is really your diagnosis process. You're determining what is your assessment of this patient? What do you think is going on based on all of the information that you've gathered? And then you're making a plan, and the plan is something that is clear. You have, you know, maybe you prescribe medication. Conversations or therapies, maybe you give education for the patient of exactly what they need to do to get better or to manage their disease. So you do this every day, multiple times a day, and with strategy in startups, startups also need very clear action steps. They need to distill all that information from their discovery and create a path forward. Sometimes, when I work with companies like as an introductory consulting package, I'll do something called a roadmap design where I'm looking at their clinical model and I'm giving them kind of a step by step. Recommendation of what I feel like the next steps need to be about their strategy, and particularly around their clinical strategy. So this is something that you again do every day you create treatment plans. Every day you create step by step plans of what your patient needs to do after you've really done an assessment of them, and this is very similar to the sort of skills you need to create a step by step strategy. So moving on number three, your clinical judgment is parallel or analogous to strategic judgment. So you know how to assess risk, operate in uncertainty, and make decisions with incomplete information. This is something that we have to get comfortable with as physicians. We do not know everything. We have to use our very best judgment determine when we need information and make decisions with that information. A great example of this that I deal with on every single shift is the criteria for head imaging for children who have hit their heads. So head injuries and kids are really common. Anyone who works in the pediatric er deals with this on every single shift, everything from a toddler fell from standing and knocked their head on the coffee table and got a big goose egg, but is acting fine to you know, kid who you know has a serious concussive symptoms from a really bad football tackle, or maybe even getting, like ejected from a vehicle in a car accident. So those are very, very different levels of head injuries. And when we assess kids, what we really have to get to the bottom of is, do they have risk of a serious head injury that requires some sort of intervention, such as, like a traumatic brain bleed, and that's really what we're looking for. I mean, we don't diagnose concussions based on imaging. We diagnose it based on symptoms. You can't see a concussion on CT scans. So the test to definitively tell do they have a bleed in their brain or not is to do a CT scan, but that comes with risk too. So we try not to radiate kids heads. We try to really minimize the amount of radiation that we give kids. And so there's been a lot of studies on this, we've been able to really come up with a set of very solid guidelines that's based in evidence, called the P Carn criteria that really helps you create a pathway to assess the risk by scoring it and deciding, like, which kids need to be observed, which ones need a head. CT, which ones can you say? Okay, your toddler looks fine. They're going to have a little bruise. Go home. And, you know, I've used this over and over and over again. I mean, had multiple children that I saw last weekend that, you know, didn't need anything for head imaging, and we had the conversation that, like, is there a risk that this child really does have a head injury or a serious head injury, but I'm not scanning them. Yeah, there is, but it's very, very small risk. And so that's me operating in uncertainty. And then separately, I mean, I had a kid that I really felt did need a head CT, he wasn't quite acting right, even though his mechanism of injury was not super severe. I mean, he fell in gym class, but he had a head bleed with midline shift. We had to get neurosurgery involved. It was terrifying, but, you know, we have been trained to assess risk and to determine how do we operate in these uncertain you know, we're never going to have all the information, even if I took that toddler that bonked their head and scan them, and scan every single one like there's no saying that they couldn't have a bleed that shows up later and that the first CT doesn't show it. So we really have to use strategic judgment in our day to day practice to assess risk operate. In uncertainty and make decisions with incomplete information, and that is exactly what we do in startups. The biggest difference is that no one's life is on the line when we're making decisions with incomplete information. So a lot of times in these early stages, you're making a pitch deck or a business case, or you're trying to, you know, meet with potential clients, and you're making decisions within complete information, you could risk losing money or not getting an investment. But we're used to operating an uncertainty, where it's like, Man, I have to assess this risk and determine is this person's child at risk of dying because I made the wrong choice. So we're actually very good at this as physicians. Number four, the next parallel is that care teams have a lot of parallels to cross functional teams. So you've actually worked across silos your whole career. So you have been a leader to coordinate with nursing and pharmacy and social work and hospital administration or office administration and startups are no different. You're already fluent in translating concepts across disciplines and trying to advocate for clinical needs that you have a very unique and specific lens on. So if something is coming up with admin, and they're maybe not trained as physicians the way you are, you are going to go advocate for what the physician needs or or what your patients need, and you're going to translate it into some sort of understanding that makes a lot of sense to them, and can can really get your point across? So startups are really no different. You are working across different service lines, whether it's like you're talking to marketing or the finance team or the legal team, or, you know, the executive team that they're not doctors, they generally will be thrilled to have someone with that clinical expertise, and you need to be able to translate it. Number Five Building Trust has a lot of parallels to building your product, because building trust is building trust. And whether you're treating a patient or helping to build a new solution, trust is absolutely everything. And when you are treating a patient or or dealing with their families and their various perspectives, you know that you need to communicate clearly. You need to frame the problems correctly, you need to listen to them, and you need to earn buy in they will never follow your treatment plans and get better if they don't trust you. And so the same goes for when you're supporting startups. Maybe you're doing discovery calls with them. Maybe you're trying to do some market research or even doing outreach to maybe they have a product that needs buy in from physicians, and you're helping head that up. You have to gain the trust of the people that you're connecting with, and that involves a lot of listening. It involves a lot of you know that that risk stratification and kind of checking your diagnosis or your plan in the context of these conversations. You know how to do this. You do this all the time with patients, and this is just applying that skill in a new way. Number six, I love the thought of collecting data and making a plan and collecting more data and then pivoting and every clinical encounter that you have is actually a version of agile iteration. And so agile methodology is a specific type of, you know, way of working that people can go get, like, trained in, and can implement in their in their day to day workflows, but a lot of it actually is very analogous to what you do as a physician. So you are able to learn and adapt in real time. So let's make an example. So you collect information on a patient who has abdominal pain, and you get all this information, and they tell you all about how it started and where it is. And you're examining them, getting information. You make a plan, so you say, like, oh, I need to make sure it's not a UTI or appendicitis or maybe it's just gastro. And maybe you're going to get some labs and some urine and and then you get your labs, and. Find out, Oh, they're pregnant, okay, like that. Maybe it was on your differential. Maybe wasn't the highest thing. But now we have to make a completely different plan, because and then the question is, are they pregnant and they have a UTI, or are they pregnant and that's causing the pain? So again, continuing to connect, collect information. Make a plan. Collect more information than pivot. And startups move really, really fast, and your ability to to learn and adapt in real time is a huge asset. Number seven, this is my favorite one, because I am an emergency physician, and it is calling a consult, so I feel like one of the core you know skills of being emergency physician is that you need to know what you know and know what you don't know. And so you do, you take care of what you know, and when you don't know something, you find someone who does so you know when to ask for help and how to bring in other experts and knowing, like, what is the question that I'm asking them. And so we've all learned in our, you know, med school and residency days, how embarrassing it is when you call a consult you don't even know what the question is that you're asking. And so we've all gotten a lot better at that over time, we know exactly what it is that we want to ask other experts, what is the piece of information that I'm missing to be able to care for this patient? And this is very similar to when you're, you know, calling consults as a startup, to reach out to advisors and other experts and really do more discovery on the concept. And maybe you're building a business case, and you're making an assumption about a certain variable, and you're not really sure, kind of just making something up. And so then you're going to rack your brain and be like, who would I need to ask to really get a better grasp on this, and so that humility and systems awareness is really so important in startup teams number eight is resilience under pressure. So you trained in chaos. You have worked through burnout and codes and system failures and COVID, which that was bonkers like that was such a bizarre time to be a doctor, and your ability to stay steady when things break is exactly what early stage companies need. I know how much we all hate it when we get the announcement that, like the EMR is going to be down or something is gonna just totally shift the way we have to work during a certain, you know, shift or week, or, you know, something's changing and or just like, a ton of patients show up at the same time with a lot of problems, or maybe you're triple booked in clinic, and it's just feels chaotic. But we don't all have to be, you know, emergency physicians level of chaos to have really developed skills of like, how to triage, how to determine, like, what needs to happen next and how to keep your cool when things get chaotic. So you already have that skill. And number nine, another analogy is that Systems Thinking is very analogous to the mindset needed to scale a business. So you instinctively understand how one decision affects the whole and as startups grow and scale their solutions, they really need that insight. You cannot just make a solution for this exact scenario at this exact moment in time. You really need to think more holistically about how decisions will affect, you know, something on the in the long run, and whether it could be applicable to other situations. And so you already do this. When you take care of patients, you think about how your decisions are affecting this person as a whole, and you're also finding ways to find solutions across, you know, pattern recognition. So like, maybe you've seen, you know, 12 patients in the past month with the same condition, and you're really optimizing how you take care of that, because you're doing pattern recognition, and you're determining how they're how your decisions are affecting the whole and number 10, continuous improvement, which we use those words a lot in medicine is a parallel to Iterative feedback loops. So whether you're doing this through more academic exercises like Eminem or Qi or other feedback loops that are built into your practice you have been practicing. Uh, iteration your whole career. And so that mindset is actually what drives startup velocity. So we are constantly putting out like a C plus product, getting information on it, and iterating rapidly. That's how you get to an A plus product, really quickly. And so the biggest difference here is that in medicine, we're never putting out a c plus product. We're always aiming for a plus plus work, which actually makes working with startups a little easier. Like I said, nobody's going to die because your pitch deck wasn't perfect. And so in a way, it's just interesting to shift these skills to a different environment. And I definitely had stories of when we were doing our early, you know, company build, and some of the other people on my team or at the firm would start to get really stressed about something, and I would kind of just like, laugh it off. I'd be like, Well, nobody's gonna die, like, we'll be fine. And so I think that you know this iteration that we do on our product and on our clinical practice, there's, there's a lot of analogies there. So that's it. There's my 10 reasons why working with startups and working in clinical medicine actually have a lot of analogies, a lot of translatable skills. You are more than a subject matter expert, and frankly, you don't need to learn the business deeply to be able to be valuable in the startup world. You just need to translate what you already know. I hear a lot of people wanting to go get an MBA, which is great if you want to go do that, but I don't think it's necessary. You've been strengthening these muscles your entire career, and this is a great opportunity to use some of your skills in new ways. And I think the biggest barrier for people is that they just don't have a pathway. They haven't, um, heard of working with startups in this way, or they don't have a robust network of people that are building companies and and that's really what I want to teach physicians how to do, is how to strategically grow your network, to be able to be informed and knowledgeable about things that are happening and growing and building and and and then become aware of opportunities to contribute. And when you think of it as more strategic networking, it's a lot less intimidating to say like, Oh, I'd love to have some conversations with some people who are building things in my field. And so my vision is that more physicians can join this space, can take this pathway, can find ways to translate these skills into the companies that truly need our expertise, and find ways to be part of those teams. So all together. Thank you so much for joining me. You have so many translatable skills, and I am excited to work with any of you who are interested in exploring this pathway. Thanks for joining, and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to startup positions. Don't forget to like, follow and share. You.