Questions for sickcare AIntrepreneurs

So, you are a technologist, data scientist or health professional who wants to be the founder of an AI company i.e an AIntrepreneur?

How will your MVP be different? How can you use AI to create and test your MVP?

Or, maybe you are a cross trained academic doctor-data scientist intrapreneur interested in leading the newly created AI department in your medical school , i.e an AI intrapreneur?

An AIntrepreneur is someone who pursues opportunities in healthcare AI under VUCA conditions with the goal of creating user or stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model.

The process can be from outside in i.e a vendor looking for customers in health service organizations, or, can be an intrapreneurial process, started by employed physicians or other sickcare professionals, interested in creating value for their employers, and eventually, the patients they serve.

If so, you will need to overcome some hurdles at four different levels of the healthcare AI value chain-personal, company, consumer or end-user and the sick care ecosystem of systems.

In his landmark book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank?provides hands-on instructions on how to go about customers, sales, marketing and building your company at different stages of your business.?

But, when it comes to using artificial intelligence in sickcare, the process is even more complicated and involves not just ideation (problem seeking) and invention (problem solving) but integration in legacy IT systems and workflows and implementation by end users and staff.

Doing so means you will have to find the answers to these basic questions:

PERSONAL

1. Do you understand the definition and goals of physician entrepreneurship?
2. Do you have the requisite entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, attitudes and competencies to be successful? Do you know why your startup will fail? Do you know why non-sickcare entrepreneurs fail?
3. Do you understand the people part of AI?
4. Do you know how to close the doctor-technologist digital divide?

COMPANY

4. Do you have a clearly defined customer?

5. Do you understand their problem and the pain it is causing?

6. Are your underlying business model canvas hypotheses valid?

7. Do you have a regulatory approval strategy?

8. Do you have an intellectual property strategy?

9. Do you know how to run a minimal viable pilot?

10. Do you have a reimbursement or revenue generating strategy?

1. Do you understand how customers vet HIT companies?

END USER

7. Do you know how to overcome the barriers to AI dissemination and implementation?

8. Do you know how to create a cultural transformation in the end user community?

SICKCARE SOS

9. Do you know how to overcome the systemic challenges of AI dissemination?

10. Are you offering an AI product or service that will transform sickcare to healthcare and add at least 10x value compared to existing offerings?

Here is how to build accountability into your AI product or service life cycle.

Here are the 3 steps to AI intrapreneurship

Digital health entrepreneurship and AIntrepreneurship, specifically, requires a multilevel approach to solve problems that are unique to the sickcare system of systems. Start by answering the above questions to judge whether you are prepared to take the journey.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship