Sickcare entrepreneurship challenges

Sickcare entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources under conditions of uncertainty with the goal of creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of biomedical and clinical innovation using a VAST business model.

Here is a list of what healthcare executives think are their biggest challenges. COVID presents its own set of challenges.

Finding solutions will be the job of biomedical and clinical entrepreneurs and leaderpreneurs like these.

The immediate objective is responding to and surviving the crisis. The longer-term objective is to lower costs, improve outcomes, eliminate w and access and the experiences of patients and those who care for them. If successful, we will realize the goal of transforming sick care to health care i.e. preventing people from getting sick or those with chronic diseases from getting sicker prematurely.

However, many obstacles are facing sick care entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. My top 10 are:

1. Transforming sick care to health care through public health and policy initiatives
2. Creating a cyber nervous system that is getting more open, interconnected and distributed using voice to text technologies, among others, like blockchain and the internet of medical things
3. Educating and training healthcare professionals to win the 4th industrial revolution
4. Transforming fee for service to value-based practice
5. Changing the behavior of doctors and patients
6. Rethinking the medtech/tech mad, digital health, care delivery, and biopharma value chain
7. Creating an IP, regulatory and reimbursement environment that catalyzes innovation but, at the same time, protects the public health and safety For example, how should the FDA regulate AI products and services? How should doctors be paid when they recommend the use of digital therapeutics?
8. Recruiting and developing SCPs (sick care professionals) with an entrepreneurial mindset
9. Eliminating the toxic innovation culture of corporate sick-care enterprises and value chain friction
10. Enabling access to education, resources (esp seed-stage money), networks, mentors, peer to peer support, non-clinical career development 
11. Equitably distributing entrepreneurial value and opportunity
12. Restoring the lost tribe of medicine
13. Making medicine trusted high touch again

In the late 1800s, three innovation platforms shaped the world as we know it today: the telephone, electricity, and the internal combustion engine. Today, five powerful innovation platforms are accelerating at the same time: DNA sequencing, robotics, energy storage, deep learning, and blockchain technology.

Overcoming these roadblocks will probably take generations and require a radical restructuring of medical education and the US sick-care system of systems. Many have already taken the first steps of this journey of a thousand miles.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Twitter@ArlenMD and Facebook