GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

I think doctors have linkedout. Others have offered reasons why. Some disagree claiming that 1M doctors and nurses are on Linkedin. While that may be true, as the owner of a group that is approaching 30,000 members, I’ve observed:

1. Linkedin is mostly about finding a job. It does not fit the needs of doctors. Unless, that is, you didn’t match or a tired of medicine and looking for your next gig.

2. Social media sites are a useful way to educate, inform, market, build networks and communities of interest and build a business or start one. Most doctors are not interested in those things.

3. Doctors don’t have the time to actively engage to the extent they need to to be effective.

4. There are many competitive physician networks that offer more of a value proposition.

5. Doctors like to hang out with other doctors and feel uncomfortable expanding their networks outside of medicine.

6. They are afraid of liability risks and are just learning about how to use social media correctly.

7. Using Linkedin is a great way to build international networks. However, 10% will be talkers and the other 90% will be gawkers.

8. Linkedin can be used as a freemium business model. However there are risks and unless you offer a lot to premium members, it will fail.

9. Doctors use professional and specialty associations as advocates, as ineffective as some think they are. Not much get’s done on Linkedin.

10. The opportunity costs of their time is high. They don’t want to waste what little time they have left each day surfing on Linkedin

On the other hand, the kind folks at Linkedin have been sending me suggestions, based on my search history, that I connect with more MD/MBAs, so maybe I’m missing something.

That is unfortunate because in addition to not getting sales and marketing, doctors also don’t seem to understand that Linkedinnovation i.e. bottom up collaborative online innovation networks is the main model for creating and adding value. Here are some reasons why Linkedin can help you:

1. Finding a job if you are a biomedical graduate student of a health professional looking for a non-clinical job

2. International graduates looking to connect with US colleagues

3. A place to post a blog to create awareness and build individual brand equity

4. A place to build a collaborative online innovation network and announce meetings

5. A place for physician entrepreneurs to connect to service providers, investors, other entrepreneurs and innovation stakeholders

6. A place to learn from others, particularly those outside of your industry

7. A place to mentor someone else

8. A place to get business intelligence about your competitors

9. A place to monitor trends, threats and opportunities

10. A place to share with other social media sites

Building a network takes time and persistence and you should make it an entrepreneurial habit. Here are the best ways to use social media to build your network.

Here are the most common mistakes made by bioscientists, engineers and medical professionals.

Plus, those over 65 who are more engaged on social media, like Facebook or Linkedin, are healthier and seem to have less cognitive decline, although one might not be causative of the other.

You can tell doctors on Linkedin who are as unengaged as they are where they work. Their profiles have no picture. Some have no last name. Most don’t complete their profiles and make you guess who they are, where they live and what they do. They make you struggle to connect with them. Sound familiar?

Getting doctors engaged on Linkedin is as difficult as it is at the hospital. While it can be a useful tool, most clinicians will be Linkedout and not engaged.

Of course, now that Microsoft has bought Linkedin, all that might change. But, given how sick care workers think and behave, it will still take a while for the majority of biomedical scientists and sick care workers to engage.

 
Image Credit: Pixabay

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Doctors aren’t feeling the love. Many are discouraged, frustrated and angry. They discourage their children from growing up to be doctors. They drop out or burn out. Perhaps, if those who employ and regulate doctors treated them more like customers instead of provider cogs in an impersonal system, they would feel a whole lot better.

Happy employees make happy customers and doctors are no different. No sector is immune.

For example, if employers treated their employed doctors like customers they would start by doing a physician customer satisfaction/engagement inventory. Here are some suggested questions:

1. Definitions of engagement vary, but it generally includes pride, loyalty, and commitment. When engagement scores are low, physicians take little pride in the hospital, would not recommend it to a job-seeking colleague, and believe that the hospital’s mission and vision are not in sync the needs of patients. On the other hand, engaged physicians are more likely to perform better in every area, including patient care, education, and research, which benefits everyone. Using this definition, how would you rate your level of engagement (1-low, 10-high)

2. What do you think if the biggest barrier to physician engagement? Lack of transparency? Adminstrator-physician conflict and misalignment? Differing metrics for doctors and administrators? Corporatization of medicine? Others?

3. Do I know what is expected of me at work?

4. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

5. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

6. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

7. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?

8. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

9. Do I have the freedom to take risks?

10. Is this a learning organization that excels at innovation?

Here are some ways to measure physician engagement outputs:

1. The number of idea or invention disclosures and whether they do it more than once
2. How eager they are to engage in conflict resolution
3. Whether they cover each other’s back
4. How they talk about your organization and treat fellow employees
5. Attrition rates. Measure the footsteps out the door
6. How often they volunteer to do things and actually show up and do them
7. How often they do things out of pure self-interest instead of organizational interest
8. What they talk about on the grapevine
9. Trust levels
10. The quality and quantity of internal and external networks.

Based on the responses, then focus on solutions:

`1. Create solutions for the jobs doctors need to get done, eliminate the pains it takes to get them done and create a whole product solution that exceeds their expectations.

2. Create metrics to measure the results, like alignment, execution, engagement and satisfaction.

3. Use data analytics to measure compliance and positive outcomes and create a personalized doctor experience.

4. Use e-marketing and behavioral economic techniques to reward and encourage positive behaviors

5. Turn employees into advocates and brand allies by showing them attention, affection and appreciation.

6. Translate doctor customer satisfaction into patient customer satisfaction

7. Lead innovators instead of managing innovation

8. Create policies and procedures that are user friendly

9. Create a sandbox that is fun

10. Practice open innovation

11. Give them the education and training they need to move from being knowledge technicians to strategic thinkers

12. Eliminate useless mandates, administrivia and non-value adding health IT chores

13, Practice corporate emotional intelligence

14. These techniques apply not just to health systems, but BIG PHARMA and BIG DEVICE as well as they go “beyond the pill” and transforming med tech to techmed. For example, here are five strategic efforts can help biopharma medical affairs teams master customer engagement in the digital age. They can be reduced to the 5Cs: 1)Knowing the customer and subsegments, 2) creating communication channels, 3) distributing content, 4) determining and measuring the culmination or results of your efforts and , 5) continuous engagment improvement based on your findings.

15. Give them the tools they need to win the 4th industrial revolution.

If you really want to get fancy, create a sample group that gets the intervention and compare it to a control group that did not and remeasure satisfaction/engagement at an appropriate time after your intervention is complete.

Sick care practices its share of stupid business tricks. They don’t seem to understand that happy, sustainably engaged doctors make happy, sustainably engaged patients and that, in most instances, you can’t have one without the other. Ultimately, it is the players on the field who score the points, not the coaches on the sidelines.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Biomedical entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of uncertainty with scarce resources with the goal of creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model. Consequently, there are many ways to practice entrepreneurship without doing it full time and without necessarily creating a new company. The goals are stated to be better quality, lower costs, equitable access, a better patient and doctor experience and improved efficiencies and effectiveness of business and operational processes.

However, the fruits of our entrepreneurial labors in sickcare are neither equitably available nor equitably disseminated.

Taking DNA testing, for example. Seizing on the surging popularity of at-home DNA testing kits, top academic medical institutions are opening clinics that promise to probe much deeper into your DNA — if you’re willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars out of pocket to learn about disease risks that may be lurking in your genes.

Health care inequality is when one group of people in an economy are in much worse health than another group. In the United States, health inequality is correlated with income inequality. Research has found that the higher your income, the better your health.

Envision biomedical entrepreneurs working to create a world without sick care inequities. What will it take?

1. Resolving the ethics of business with the ethics of medicine
2. Changing the rules
3. Patient and physician education, engagement and enablement
4. Measuring the impact of innovation and entrepreneurship on underserved populations
5. More diversity and inclusion in innovation ecosystems, including clinical trials
6. Recognizing the differences between equity, inclusion and diversity
7. A systems engineering approach to the causes of disparate health outcomes
8. Changing patient and physician behavior
9. Monitoring and modifying the adverse impact and unintended consequences of technology
10. Eliminating technology adoption errors
11. Reforming medical education and training
12. Measuring equitable innovation outcomes, dissemination and implementation, not process
13. Viewing biomedical entrepreneurship as a social enterprise
14. Practicing reverse innovation
15. Changing mindsets
16. Avoid iceberg innovation
17. Overcoming unconscious bias and racism in decision making
18. Interprofessional entrepreneurship
19. Acclerators and scalerators designed to launch products and services that serve diverse populations equitably
20. Social enterprise sickcare startup funding

Inequality is a major social policy problem. Until and unless we address how sick care entrepreneurs create products and services that are equitably created, developed, launched and disseminated, we continue to be part of the problem, not the solution. Some say the future is now, just not evenly distributed. Keeping it that way is not a sustainable future.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Doctors looking for nonclinical careers often think of consulting for medical-device, delivery-platform or pharmaceutical companies as a viable transition career option. Some doctors favor working with smaller, startup or early-stage companies because they want to avoid the rat race they are trying to escape and want some freedom. If you are thinking of consulting to a startup or early-stage company, serving as an advisor, on the management team or board of directors, just having initials after your name won’t mean much. You will have to deliver the value that startup CEOs are looking for: money, marketing, making something, management, manpower, mentors, monitoring the environment and mergers and acquisitions.

Money

In most instances, the company has already crafted its plan of attack, has validated it with a few customers and is moving along according to its business plan with a management team that is experienced, but at this stage of the game, needs capital to get to the next level. Unfortunately, when approaching private-equity or venture capitalists, the usual response is “too early and too much technical or regulatory risk.” The team scales back its expectations for raising capital, reducing it to about $500,000 to $1 million, and seeks investments from high-net-worth individuals such as doctors or angel investors. That’s where you come in. The team wants you to use your network to raise money from colleagues, friends or others who might be interested in the idea or who practice in the specialty.

Marketing/social Media

In addition to money, they also want you to use your network to connect them to potential customers, strategic partners or other advisers who can help place the product, reduce barriers to use or lend a favorable ear to the product offering. Your job is to bypass the gatekeepers, connect the leadership team to the decisionmakers and put in a good word. You are also expected to use your brand equity to create buzz on the internet and inform and educate stakeholders.

Management

Once you have earned your stripes, then—and usually only then—will early-stage companies be interested in your being on a scientific or business advisory board, or more certainly, the board of directors. They want to test whether you can deliver, whether you are someone who plays nice with others and whether you can help them meet their next critical success factor.

Making Something

New product development requires an intimate understanding of the problems customers face when doing their jobs. Doctors are in a unique position to provide that intelligence and know where to go to identify those affected.

Monitoring the environment

One of your jobs is to be the eyes and ears of medicine and biotechnology and report threats and opportunities to the leadership team. Telling truth to authority is a required skill.

Manpower

You were hired because you are connected. That means you have access to a big network of talented people looking for jobs and eager to work for companies that come recommended from trusted resources. Winning the war for talent is an insider’s game and you are in the right place to help win it.

Maturity

Perhaps the most valuable but least rewarded contribution is the clinical and business judgement derived from years of experience. While difficult to measure, instincts and that gut feeling are invaluable if they contribute to preventing the wrong move or step.

Mentoring

Teachers educate. Coaches teach a skill. Mentors help with personal development. Advisors help with business strategy and execution. Sometime you have to act like all of them depending on the situation.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Companies grow organically or through mergers and acquisitions. One role an advisor can play is to connect the management team with potential strategic partners or M/A targets and help with the due diligence process.

Consequently, when you are interviewing for an advisory role, be sure to cover these bases:

1. Whether you are a good fit
2. Whether and when you can help achieve the company’s next critical benchmark
3. What role you will play in the company and for how long
4. Whether you will have any conflicts of interest
5. Approval from the other founders to participate
6. Compensation
7. Metrics attributable and trackable to your contributions
8. Expectations about timelines and benchmarks
9. How you will work with other members of team, particularly in communications, business development and engagement tactics
10. Tax consequences of any equity arrangements

Another consideration is whether a given company is a startup, a scale up or a grown up company. The goal of a startup is to find a scaleable and repeatable business model that typically generates less than $1M in revenue. The goal of a scale up is to generate revenue from aboub $1M-5M or 10M. The skills required to do so are different in one situation v the next. For example, startups need people to create the right product-market fit and a minimall viable product or pilot. Scale ups mostly need management, money and marketing. Grown ups need monitoring to avoid being left behind by other startups that will steal their market share or technologies that make them non-viable.

There are significant gaps in the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies of doctors who are interested in working with companies, whether it be as a part-time consultant or full full time chief medical officer. Some of those are:

1. Product development

2. Strategic thinking

3. Sales and marketing

4. Financing new ventures

5. Integrating digital health solutions into existing workflow

6. Legacy EMR integration and basic technical aspects of health information technologies

7. Overcoming the barriers to clinical dissemination and implementation

8. Measuring the scaleable impact of an intervention

9. Business development

10. Leaderpreneurship

Here are some things to think about before joining a startup

Here is CMO School for Dummies

Boards of directors have a fiduciary responsibility, unlike advisors, and governing AI and innovation in the 4th industrial revolution has taken a front row seat along with compliance, compensation and competitive strategy.

Bioentrepreneurs can be in independent practice, be part of a startup team trying to build a scalable company, be social entrepreneurs, work for someone else (intrapreneurs), or more recently, be an independent contractor working as a 1099 consultant. If you decide to be the last of these, then deliver the seven M’s. Unlike medicine, you won’t get paid just for effort. You will get paid for execution and delivery. Here are some ways to monetize your network.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

A business school colleague recently said that academics, frustratingly, are more about process than outcomes, and, that, occasionally, the process results in favorable outcomes. When processes are designed and portrayed as efforts to create innovative outcomes with out results, it’s called innovation theater. Some cynics call it strategic planning.

He was referring to organizational culture— the set of values, beliefs, and behaviors that determine “how things get done” in an organization. It is the job of leaderpreneurs to create, scale and sustain a organizational culture of innovation.

But organizational innovation only happens when intrapreneurs i.e. employees with an entrepreneurial mindset trying to act like entrepreneurs, are able to work in and engage with a culture of innovation with the goal or creating stakeholder defined value through the deployment of innovation. There needs to be structure, process, culture and leaderpreneurs driving favorable outcomes.

Most of us know toxic, anti-entrepreneurial work cultures when we work in them, or, maybe, contribute to them. But, how do we know we are getting the results we want? Like the saying goes, you get what you measure . Try measuring 1. Program/rollout engagement KPIs

2. Storytelling that celebrates champions and teams

3. Behaviors that reflect change

4. Financial, operational, sales and marketing metrics

5. Economic development and technology transfer metrics

6. Stakeholder conversion rates

7. Employee engagement rates

8. ROII (return on innovation investment)

9. Multiples of user defined value compared to competitive offerings or the status quo

10. Burnout and turnover rates

Or, just ask yourself one simple question. Would you recommend where you work as a place to innovate to a family member, friend or colleague? This cultural innovation net promoter score should tell the tale.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The NSF iCorps experience is a 7 week program that is designed to help scientists, engineers and health professionals commercialize their ideas, or give them a merciful death, based on evidence garnered during a customer discovery interview process.

I recently participated as part of a team composed of an entrepreneurial lead, a principal investigator, and an industry expert. The idea is to validate hypotheses on your business model canvas, or reject them and pivot.

Here are some of the more common rookie mistakes:

1. Too many customer segments
2. Defining an industry segment, not a person, as the customer
3. Creating a value proposition that is about features of your solution, not the benefits to the customer segment and trying to be all things to all segments. Here are the B2B elements of value.
4. Not quantifying the customer pain and what they would be willing to pay to get rid of it
5. Not understanding the customer archetype or persona such that you can walk in their shoes
6. Mistaking a technology for a product for a business
7. Grossly underestimating the barriers to adoption and penetration and the ability to cross the chasm to the early majority from the innovators and early adoptors
8. Not appreciating the cost of customer acquisition in the different kinds of markets, particularly when there are more and more well healed incumbents
9. Wasting a lot of time trying to understand an industry ecosystem because you don’t have the right mentor to guide and inform you
10. Not planning on how you are going to keep and grow customers once you get them
11. Not creating a unique value proposition for each segment
12. Ignoring the non-technical value factors that make customers want your product.
13. Built to sell or license as the primary revenue generator. The goal is to get someone to buy your value, not sell it.
14. False negative or false positive conclusions based on biased interpretation of information derived at interviews.
15. Not interviewing people face to face but instead by phone.

To be successful, every business model needs to be VAST 

1. Validity Regardless or which elements of your model you choose, they have to be valid. In other words, the dogs have to eat the food. When the dog won’t eat the food, you’ll have to change your approach and try again.

2. Automaticity At the very start of planning your venture, you should think about how you are going to work on your business, not in it. Reducing hands on time to manage operations will give you more time to lead the company and create strategies for growth and give you more personal time to enjoy the fruits of your success. Outsourcing, automating or using technologies to ramp up operations, sourcing and distribution is a key part of scaling, and something that investors want to see…which brings us to the next piece.

3. Scalability Your business model is primarily a way to create a business machine that can produce an infinite number of products. Think of it as a device that takes in customers and creates profits out the other end and can do so at quicker and quicker speeds.

4. Time and Traction Finally, your model need to create as much profit as quickly as possible with a growing customer base that is loyal to your brand.

Most of the time, with experience, these mistakes get corrected as you go through the process of experimentation and data analysis. But, why waste the first 3 weeks making them when, with some forethought, you can avoid them?

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

I co-authored a book called The Lifescience Innovation Roadmap. I now realize that the title is misleading. You see, the entrepreneurial journey is more like finding your way from one place to the envisioned next without clear roads, exits or navigational aids. Instead, it is mostly about exploring, experimenting and pioneering in uncharted waters without clear landmarks, signs or directions.

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity under conditions of uncertainty with the goal or creating stakeholder/user defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model.

There are many reasons why doctors have the potential to make great entrepreneurs. One reason is their ability to deal with uncertainty. In medicine, there are no guarantees, only probabilities, judgement and intuition. Like business people, doctors make decisions with incomplete information. Sometimes they have to do things based on their gut. In fact, they do so more than they would like to admit. Only about 25-35% of medical decisions are based on scientific evidence.”

However, that skill does not make physician entrepreneurs immune from the pervasive and common side effects of uncertainty in the medical practice and business environment:

1. Change fatigue

2. Burnout and depression

3. Fight or flight reaction

4. Pulling back on investments and capital improvements, like IT systems or advanced technologies

5. Greater risk aversion

6. Fear

7. Irrational, perturbed decision making

8. Focusing even more on the now instead of the new

9. Downsizing and layoffs

10. Overwork,stressing people with more work and trying to do more with less

The point was recently made by Todd and Kim Saxton in their new book, “The Titanic Effect: Successfully Navigating the Uncertainties that Sink Most Startups They note that “A road map is comforting because it has a starting point A, destination B and a detailed plan for getting from one to the other. However, it’s not an accurate representation of the strartup journey. In reality, founders almost never have such information regarding highways and byways of their path. Instead, the path itself is unceratin . The founders resolve the uncertainty through interative interaction with customers, advisors and others. The strategy constantly evolves as internal resources, competition, the environment and market dynamics change.

David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers, tells the tale of the brave pioneers who settled the Ohio valley and new Northwest after the signing of the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolution. They had no roadmaps, only acres and acres of trees to clear, Indian populations, weather, disease and social issues, to make a new nation that eventually reached the Pacific Ocean. Likewise the challenges were the same for those on the Santa Fe trail, the Oregon trail, those who built the Erie Canal or Lewis and Clark figuring out how to get from Pittsburgh to the Pacific for the first time.

Innovation takes courage precisely because the waters are unchartered and it takes creativity and ingenuity to overcome the barriers. Be sure you start your voyage with the right equipment and mindset to survive it.

and Co-editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Physician entrepreneurship, the pursuit of opportunity with scarce resources under conditions of uncertainty with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of product, process and policy innovation using a VAST business model, has gone mainstream.

Many erroneously think that innovation is just about about products and services. In fact, there are many other ways to create something new or something old in a new way, most commonly business models, processes, experience or delivery channels.

The other common misconception is entrepreneurship is exclusively about creating a company.

Like most , physician entrepreneurs do it primarily to help patients and create patient defined value.. In part , they do it to generate a profit. Some , social entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, have other motivations. It seems profiting from biomedical and clinical innovation rubs some people the wrong way, who consider the entire enterprise as immoral profiteering. When doctors and other members of the biomedical industrial complex put profits ahead of patients, the conclusion is justified.

There are many reasons why people fear physician entrepreneurs:

1. Because they are afraid they will place the profit motive above patient interests.

2. Because they don’t trust “business people” and, when it comes to medicine, “money is dirty” and the root of all evil.

3. Because they think entrepreneurship is about creating a business.

4. Because they think entrepreneurs are dishonest.

5 Because they think it corrupts the professionalism of medicine and encourages conflicts of interest.

6. Because they think it attracts the wrong kind of person into medicine.

7. Because they think it is a waste of a medical school education and has no place in the curriculum.

8. Because they are fed up with “high priced suits” who don’t add value ripping off the system.

9. Because they don’t think doctors can do both and should stick to medicine.

10. Because they think doctors are innately lousy business people and should just pay attention to taking care of patients.

Outsiders from around the world, particularly those who live or come from a country with a single payer, universal system, scratch their heads in amazement at the costs and “immorality’ of the US system and , when painting it with the broad brush of criticism, indict physician entrepreneurs and those like them with the same stroke.

About 20% of US consumer spending is on sickcare and is expected to continue rising. Angry patients who are paying more and more despite their insurance think greedy doctors are the problem. Others point to drug companies, politician and payers as the culprits. Patients don’t think they have much to do with budget busting sick care spending and costs and instead are the victims of a capitalistic ethos that has no place in medicine. While patients trust their doctors, admittedly less and less, they overwhelmingly distrust “the system” and the parts that make it.

For physician entrepreneurs, the challenge is to reconcile the ethics of business with the ethics of medicine by practicing compassionate capitalism. Critics are justified in exposing those who violate that social contract that places the interests of patients first and profits second. Beyond that, marginalizing and stigmatizing physician entrepreneurs is unjustified and will interfere with us innovating our way out of the US sick care mess.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Sick care badly needs innovation if it is to become healthcare . Yet, it’s questionable whether it can be fixed from inside. Despite the popularity of open innovation and community based, participatory innovation networks, healthcare organizations and doctors seem to shun outside ideas and collaboration and are perceived as arrogant know-it-alls, stuck in the ivory tower or healthcare city , when it comes to knowing what’s best for patients. They have a silo mindset that blocks collaboration with other stakeholders in the innovation supply chain. The challenge for most organizations is to create and engage stakeholders.

Silos are prevasive in every industry and are sapping creativity and productivity.

The problem is not unique to sick care. In fact, it is very unusual for any industry to significantly transform itself from inside. In most instances, it happens when ideas or technologies from one industry segment has sex with ideas from another industry segment.

In his book, “Where Good Ideas Come From”, Steven Johnson calls this process adjacent possibilties where edge technologies or platforms collide by chance or serendipity and it is catalyzed by big networks.

The same is true in the ivory towers of academia. Most faculty have no clue who is their neighbor, what they are doing or areas of common or complementary interest let alone faculty interests in other buildings, campuses or the college down the street.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is happening now. It is defined as the collision of physical (sensors, robotics and AI, for example) technologies and machines with advanced information technologies (storage, softward and hardware, e.g.) with biotechnologies. The winners and losers will be those that have the skills developing the heart, mind, soul and body to resist and thrive.

There are several key steps in the process including defining the target community of interest, creating a value proposition, developing a strategic communications plan and executing it and measuring the results so you can change it.

For a start, here are ways to get out of your office, either physically or digitally:

1. Create campus incubators or accelerators that are free from the physical, cultural and organizational constraints of the mother ship.

2. Recruit for innovation and those who are connected and have robust networks outside of healthcare.

3. Create external networks and platforms to support them, driving the pressure and flow of information. Varied networks lead to more and better ideas.

4. Expand academic-healthcare organization-industry knowledge exchange.

5. Aggressively pursue vendor, supplier and patient collaboration while at the same time manage, mitigate or eliminate conflict of interest

6. Balance the conundrum of protecting but sharing data.

7. Create partnerships with researchers interested in validating and deploying digital health products and services

8. Create an organizational concierge, charged with being the one stop contact for your organization to those interested in collaborating.

9. Create a staff research directory that identifies specific areas of interest and contact information

10. Create an organizational asset map, listing your capabilities, assets and core competencies.

11. Have a eMarketing plan that integrates your resources and makes your message relevant.Can you answer yes to all these questions?

I can easily integrate my existing offline and digital marketing channels.

I have the freedom to choose best-of-breed partners.

I can easily integrate new marketing technologies into my stack.

I have a single view of my customers across channels.

I can create seamless customer experiences.

I collaborate with my marketing partners to deliver more relevant marketing.

I can accurately close the loop on every campaign to know which investments are delivering the best results, and optimize accordingly.

I can personalize marketing while respecting consumer privacy.

I am always in compliance with data privacy regulations.

I can deliver relevant, personalized marketing at scale.

12. Find a connector who knows how to build and engage a community of interest.

13. Find a high level sponsor who can provide political cover, clout and admin resources to help connect the dots.

Here are some tips on how and when to work in collaborative teams.

Aligning corporate strategy is key to success.The best performing companies are often the best aligned. But who in your company is paying attention to how well aligned your strategy is with your organization’s purpose and capabilities? In my research and consultancy with companies, I observe that, oftentimes, no individual or group is functionally responsible for overseeing the arrangement of their company from end to end. Multiple different individuals and groups are responsible for different components of the value chain that makes up their company’s design, and they are often not as joined up as they should be. All too often, individual leaders seek — indeed are incentivized — to protect and optimize their own domains, and find themselves locked in energy-sapping internal turf wars, rather than working with peers to align and improve across the entire enterprise.

12. Clusters and advanced industry segments should compare notes from time to time and hold a Technology Innovation Collision Conference. In other words, an Idea Orgy. Here isan example.

Healthcare and academic medical centers are stuck in a series of boxes. If we don’t encourage and expand interdisciplinary collaboration with those in other industries, we will make only incremental progress in an industry that needs mega-change and needs it fast. Like fingers in a glove, we can grasp the future when they work together. When you put fingers in mittens, though, you get the added benefit of warmth and closer contact.

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GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Physician entrepreneurs have different goals and play different roles. Some are trying to get an invention or discovery to patients. Some are social entrepreneurs trying to improve the human condition. Some are intrapreneurs, employees acting like entrepreneurs. But, they all have something in common- the pursuit of opportunity with the goal of creating user defined value through the deployment of innovation using a VAST business model.

Medical practice entrepreneurs are not different. Running a medical practice these days should be about medical practice entrepreneurship not medical practice management.

“Practice management” is an archaic, out-dated term that limits the scope of what 21st Century physicians need to know and know how to do to serve the need of their communities of patients, while making a fair profit doing it. While operations management is important, instead, the future belongs to those who add user defined value through innovation. In other words, medical schools and graduate resident education programs should offer mandatory courses, and require demonstrating competencies, in medical practice entrepreneurship, not practice management.

A course in medical practice entrepreneurship should provide the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for medical practice professionals to create and scale a medical professional services organization. As we know by now, a medical practice is not a flower shop or a restaurant and it requires particular entrepreneurial skills which are not taught in medical schools or during residency training.

At a minimum,courses should include:

1. Revenue Cycle Management including coding, billing and collecting

2. Human Resources

3. Digital Health, Social Media and Information Systems

4. Innovation,Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship

5. Marketing

6. Personal Financial Planning, risk management, asset protection and managing student debt

7. Basic Accounting and Financial Statements

8. Operations Management

9. The legal and regulatory environment of health

10. Comparative health care systems and alternative delivery channels

11. Business Models, Business Plans and business strategy

12. Exit strategies

13. Financing your new practice

14. Intellectual property

15. Product development and product line extension

16. Stress management and anti-burnout coping techniques

17. How to assess and choose a medical practice business model

18. How to read an employment contract

19. Two- physician family issues

20. Alternatives to full time clinical practice

21. How to create, scale and sustain an organizational innovation culture

22. Leaderpreneurship

23. How to build a personal and professional brand

24. Networking

25. How to build organizational ambidexterity and resilience

The competencies should provide practitioners with the ability to practice Othercare . The ACGME should include running a practice using a viable business model as another competency for residents.

Medical practice entrepreneurship is about innovating and innovation starts with the right mindset.

The entrepreneurial mindset is both similar, but different, from the clinical mindset.

The future of medical practice depends on whether you see the glass half empty or half full. One thing is clear, though, and that is that medical practice is changing and practioners need to adapt. Here are some observations, resources and comments that might help you find your way:

10 Reasons Why House Calls Are a Bad Idea

10 Signs It Might Be Time to Quit Medical Practice

How to Convert Prospects to Patients

The 5 Stages of the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Screen Time vs. Face Time?

Practice Othercare not Obamacare

The Patient-Funded Practice

10 Things Doctors Don’t Get About Sales and Marketing 

10 Myths About Physician Entrepreneurs

It’s About Time

There are many ways to offer these courses and education through medical societies, business schools, trade associations and non-profit educational and research foundations. However it is done, practitioners need to use the information to evolve from knowledge technicians, to managers, to leaders to entrepreneurs to leaderpreneurs. It will be the primary way for doctors to regain control of our profession.

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