Physician Entrepreneur Success Skills

Being a successful clinician requires demonstrating competencies in decision-making, technical expertise, and communication skills. Unfortunately, during medical training, the latter is ignored. Here are the ACGME competencies:

Patient Care

Residents must be able to provide patient care that is compassionate, appropriate, and effective for the treatment of health problems and the promotion of health.

Medical Knowledge

Residents must be able to demonstrate knowledge about established and evolving biomedical, clinical, and cognate (e.g. epidemiological and social-behavioral) sciences and the application of this knowledge to patient care.

Practice-Based Learning and Improvement

Residents must be able to investigate and evaluate their patient care practices, appraise and assimilate scientific evidence, and improve their patient care practices.

Interpersonal and Communication Skills

Residents must be able to demonstrate interpersonal and communication skills that result in effective information exchange and teaming with patients, patients’ families, and professional associates.

Professionalism

Residents must be able to demonstrate a commitment to carrying out professional responsibilities, adherence to ethical principles, and sensitivity to a diverse patient population.

Systems-Based Practice

Residents must be able to demonstrate an awareness of and responsiveness to the larger context and system of health care and the ability to effectively call on system resources to provide care that is of optimal value.

Being a successful physician entrepreneur requires a different set of competencies, although there is some potential overlap:

A mental package of mindset, internal motivation, and creativity. Vision without execution is just a dream.

Knowledge, skills and abilities in subdomain areas like biomedicine, digital health and education, policy, or care delivery. Each ecosystem is different and has different innovation pathways.

Resources

Networks/mentors/sponsors

Experience

A life science and career development road map

Team building and leadership skills. Leadership is about creating vision, direction, and inspiration or influence and the core competency is the ability to communicate.

Luck. Many successful people don't acknowledge the contribution of luck to their success. They think it is just about talent and determination.

The right opportunity, doing what is important, not what is interesting

Judgment derived from experience and taking ownership of and learning from mistakes

The core competency of a physician entrepreneur is the ability to create user-defined value through the deployment of innovation that has a viable, VAST business model.

Doctors have the potential to make great entrepreneurs. However, few have an entrepreneurial mindset and the culture of medicine is not supportive of true creativity or imagination.

If you are thinking of making a career transition or adding entrepreneurial capabilities to your job portfolio, what you got you to where you are now won't get you to where you want to go.