Sick tech side gig microeconomics

The kinds of sick care professionals looking for a non-clinical side gig or career has gone from a few disenchanted clinicians to medical students who intend to graduate, medical students who are looking for an exit ramp during school, residents who intend to graduate, residents looking for an exit ramp and clinicians in every stage of their clinical careers, be they the young and the restless, desperados or the old and the grumpy.

The doctor 2025 persona is driving change. They want the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies to do just that, rather than just pushing the rock up the hill.

As a result, the non-clinical career ecosystem and industry has exploded to fill the market opportunity that medical school and residency training program administrators are unwilling or unable to fill.

If you are a member of the sick care workforce seeking an entrepreneurial opportunity, here are the 6Rs of career transitioning.

Whether you can get a sick tech side gig or career depends on many factors, most of which fall into three categories: 1) the industry demand for sick care worker talent, 2) the sick care workforce supply interested in entrepreneurship and, 3) the state of the talent matching infrastructure and ecosystem to identify and match the members of the two-sided market.

In other words, the law of supply and demand.

Supply side factors are:

• The economy
• Investment trends
• Hiring trends
• Startup, scaleup, grown up trends
• Jobs to be done
• Labor markets
• New market entrants
• Competition
• Technology
• Sources of innovation

Demand side factors are:

• Burnout and disengagement
• Student debt
• Student and resident personas
• Post COVID drop out doc rates
• Immigration regulations
• Resident match trends
• Education and training
• Have to (disability, disciplinary action, divorce, unmatched) or want to drivers
• Labor participation rates
• Demand for safer jobs during a recession

You also need to decide whether you want to work with or for a startup, a scaleup or a grown up company.

The issues are about leadership, culture, resources, responsibilities, and compensation.

Organizations in distinct stages of development come with both pros and cons.

• Small-Scale Organizations. These organizations employ nearly half of all U.S. employees and might have just a couple of workers — like microenterprises and early startups — or up to 500 employees. Working at one can offer you great opportunities for learning, more decision-making power, and the ability to make a big impact. But, job stability can be a concern, there may be limited resources, and advancement can be a challenge.
• Medium-Scale Organizations. Mid-sized organizations can employee one thousand to several thousand employees. These organizations typically offer a positive balance between the agility of startups and the structure of larger organizations, can have more resources for employees, and usually offer a variety of options for growth. However, they can still be limited in terms of specialized roles, there will probably be a little more bureaucracy, and market competition from both smaller and larger companies can negatively impact workloads.
• Large-Scale Organizations. These companies might have thousands, to hundreds of thousands of employees. Because of their size, these organizations typically have extensive resources for employees, abundant career options, and even opportunities to work abroad. However, large organizations can be very slow moving, may make you feel like you’re having less of an impact, and will probably require you to participate in office politics.

Tens of millions of Americans have changed jobs over the past two years, a tidal wave of quitting that reflected — and helped create — a rare moment of worker power as employees demanded higher pay, and as employers, short on staff, often gave it to them.

But the “great resignation,” as it came to be known, appears to be ending. The rate at which workers voluntarily quit their jobs has fallen sharply in recent months — though it?edged up in May?— and is only modestly above where it was before the pandemic disrupted the U.S. labor market. In some industries where turnover was highest, like hospitality and retail businesses, quitting has fallen back to prepandemic levels.

?A year ago, a recession was seen as a foregone conclusion — and yet the Fed appears to have successfully lowered inflation without triggering a recession. Many of the negative forecasts followed a pattern of underestimating the U.S. economy’s resilience, typically because they were based on historical models and precedent, not situational and idiosyncratic context. While the soft landing may be progressing with promise, it won’t be an end state — a new disequilibrium will emerge. Leaders can’t wait for macroeconomic certainty or stability. Instead, they must recognize that the macroeconomy will remain untamed by models — and that what matters is judgment.

Your job seeking research should include an analysis of the sickteck job market, whether it be drugs, devices, digital health, care delivery, medical education technologies, fintech or some other segment. Pick your E-spot. Develop your competencies. The job dynamics of each subsegment of sick care are different.

For example, if you are interested in a bioinformatics/ AI job, a straight-line relationship emerged between how aggressively companies have been building up their talent around AI and their average overall-effectiveness scores, with those marks descending quartile by quartile, from 60.2 to 53.8 to 48.0 to 46.0. The same pattern held true in every individual category covered.

In Q2’23, global digital health funding slipped for the sixth straight quarter, while deals reached an 8-year low. However, investors continue to back promising startups, with Q2 seeing upticks in early-stage deal sizes and mega-round deals.

What our inquiry couldn’t answer, however, is the big chicken-or-egg question: Do more-effectively managed companies tend to be ahead of the game and, therefore, have they been leading the way in AI over the past three years? Or is their heavy deployment of AI helping them to become more effective in the first place?

Using CB Insights data, we highlight key takeaways from our State of Digital Health Q2’23 Report, including:

1. Global digital health funding and deals fall to their lowest levels in years.
2. Care delivery & navigation tech companies lead among categories in both deals and funding.
3. US digital health funding drops to its lowest point since Q3’17.
4. The median deal size for early-stage rounds ticks up.
5. Mega-round funding and deals increase for the first time since Q4’21.

Many have wondered about — and feared — the impact that gen AI will have on labor markets. Some compare it to past innovations, like robots, whose effects have been relatively modest, while others have forecasted that its impacts will be more long-ranging, given gen AI’s fundamental ability to improve itself over time. New research analyzed over a million job posts for online gig workers to see what affect the introduction of tools like ChatGPT and image-generating AI have already had on the quantity of posts, job requirements, and pay of online workers — and which fields and professions have been the most impacted. The researchers offer insight into the challenges and potential opportunities of these shifting markets. These results suggest that after ChatGPT’s launch, automation-prone jobs have become slightly more complex, requiring a wider range of skills, and that employers are willing to pay more for these jobs.

Focus your search, upskill with AI, increase your success, and determine your value and your price.

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