Clinicians in Health-Tech: Diverse Roles and Exciting Opportunities

Health technology is a rapidly growing field reshaping healthcare. Clinicians, with their unique expertise and insight into healthcare services, are increasingly vital in this transformation.

Let’s explore various roles that clinicians can pursue in health tech.

The most frequent career options are listed below. This list is not exhaustive and is based on the following premises:

• Roles do not require complete retraining, i.e. giving up the clinical practice (like pivoting from medicine to stack developer or data scientist)
• They allow to leverage clinical experience and non-clinical skills like leadership or problem-solving.
• They may require some additional training/upskilling but not necessarily extensive and prolonged training or a completely new degree.
• The health-tech job market is continuously evolving. The roles sometimes overlap, and often, each company has its own definition of duties and expectations.

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Content Curator / Creator

It's probably the most accessible entry role. Usually, it does not require highly specialist medical expertise, which makes it attractive even at the very early stages of your career (even at the level of a medical student). Many health-tech companies need clinicians to create/edit/review evidence-based content related to their operations. It could be writing blog posts, creating educational or promotional videos, running social media pages, etc.

Skills: Clinical knowledge, communication, and creativity.

Medical Advisor / Clinical Consultant

In this role, clinicians advise health-tech companies on product development, ensuring that products meet clinical needs and comply with medical standards. This role is particularly relevant to start-ups who often have the technical know-how but lack an understanding of the complexities of the healthcare system, regulatory process, existing workflows, and local arrangements. The roles can vary from ad-hoc once-off advice or feedback on digital solutions to more regular engagement for a period while working on certain problems.

Skills: Clinical expertise, knowledge of healthcare regulations, and problem-solving.

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Founder or Co-Founder

Clinicians with an entrepreneurial spirit can start their own health-tech companies. They are uniquely positioned to identify gaps in healthcare that technology can fill. There are also opportunities within early startups to become co-founders to a main non-clinical Founder.

Skills: Clinical knowledge, business acumen, leadership, and innovation.

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Chief Medical Officer (CMO)

The CMO is responsible for overseeing the clinical aspects of a health-tech company. They play a crucial role in strategy, product development, and maintaining clinical integrity. The scope of this role varies a lot between companies and can include extensive duties blending clinical advice, clinical supervision of other members/clinicians, managing staff, building relationships and marketing to potential buyers, involvement in clinical governance and safety and many more. The more developed the company is in its journey, the narrower and more specific its duties.

Skills: Extensive clinical experience, leadership, and strategic planning. Often requires some additional training/upskilling.

Clinical Safety Officer

This role involves ensuring that health-tech products are safe for patients and comply with clinical safety regulations. A critical role in the development and deployment of new technologies.

Skills: Knowledge of clinical safety standards, risk management, and regulatory compliance. Usually requires additional training/upskilling.

Research and Development Specialist

Clinicians in this role work on developing new technologies or enhancing existing ones. Their clinical experience is invaluable in guiding R&D efforts. This is the most established role within Pharma companies, but many health-tech companies expand into pharma and advertise for such roles.

Skills: Clinical knowledge, research skills and experience, innovation.

User Experience (UX) Consultant

Clinicians can guide the design of user-friendly health-tech products, ensuring they meet the needs of patients and healthcare professionals. Skills: Clinical experience, understanding of user needs, communication.

Telemedicine Specialist

With the rise of telehealth, clinicians can work as telemedicine specialists, either providing care remotely or advising on best practices for virtual healthcare delivery and establishing telehealth services.

Skills: Clinical skills, adaptability to technology, communication.

Training and Development Coordinator

This role focuses on training healthcare professionals to use health-tech products effectively and safely.

Skills: Clinical knowledge, teaching skills, communication.

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Additional remarks

• Time commitment – roles can vary from freelance to part-time (fractional roles) to full-time.
• Location – some jobs can be done remotely, while others require a specific location. A hybrid model is sometimes seen as well when most of the work is done remotely with periodic office visits.
• Compensation – it varies widely, depending on the type of company (early startup vs established company). Freelance jobs like content creation or medical advisory are usually charged at an hourly rate or per unit of content. More regular jobs will attract some salary. Start-ups, especially very early ones, mostly offer freelance rates or equity-based remuneration (% of company equity).
• I have not included any salary ranges, most job ads in the UK (unlike the US) do not specify offered salaries
• Some positions, especially in content curation, can be advertised as unpaid internships - be cautious when deciding to engage in unpaid roles!

Good luck with your job hunt!