Do Medical Schools Foster Entrepreneurship?

April 24, 2014


Medical startups, which typically utilize new technologies and digital capabilities in exciting ways, are important to societies in which healthcare costs are a burden, especially in a healthcare industry that's particularly slow to change. As providers of service, physicians are not universally or intrinsically involved in the business-end of the medical field. Why is this, when both doctors and business executives hold advanced degrees and are expected to have developed robust intellectual capabilities?

For the sake of understanding the question fully, we should clarify what it means to be an entrepreneur. In a piece for Entrepreneur.com, Sarah Pierce discusses the entrepreneurial spirit. To her, there are 5 principal qualities that help define what it means to be an entrepreneur:



  • Passion: accepting the call, the desire and drive to do something great. She offers Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, as an embodiment of this ideal. She points to his enthusiasm for life and adventure as testaments to his drive.


  • Positivity: never allowing yourself to be defeated. Pierce uses Amazon.com as an example, particularly in its monumental recovery from the dot-com burst.


  • Adaptability: being willing to customize, improve, and refine in order to craft the best customer service. Google serves as a powerful example of this concept.


  • Leadership: leaders hold a set of attributes and characteristics that make them good role models, they build integrity, teach, are enthusiastic and team-oriented.Mary Kay Ash, who founded Mary Kay Cosmetics, is an example of a great business leader, named one of the 25 most influential business leaders in the last 35 years.


  • Ambition: knowing that you have a lot to give despite odds, not willing to stop. From her first cookie store in 1977 to a $450 million company, Mrs. Field's is the example Sarah uses to tell a story of ambition.


Jonathan O'Donnell on KevinMD.com offers a number of reasons why medical education might discourage the entrepreneurial spirit, that can be said to embody all of Pierce's above characteristics. He uses three main points to support his argument:

Image Source:  FreeDigitalPhotos.net Image Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net



  1. Traditional Learning Pathways: To O'Donnell, medical students are led away from entrepreneurship during their undergraduate studies, since they are expected to make very precise choices about the activities in which they participate and the classes they take. The rigidity of their options, paired with the fact that many higher-level science classes are based on memorization of processes and systems and not creative thought, stymies the ability to think with innovation in mind.


  2. Time is an object. Since medical students spend the bulk of their week studying or spending time in the hospital, trying to soak in a vast body of knowledge, O'Donnell argues that there's no time to experiment in entrepreneurial activity. This point of his argument fails to consider that dabbling in entrepreneurship might happen after medical school for aspiring medical entrepreneurs.


  3. Money is also an object. In what is perhaps his most salient point, O'Donnell points out that most medical students are leaving school with a lot of debt, which is promptly piled upon their undergraduate debt. Debt makes risk all the more riskier, so that even the most intrinsically entrepreneurial person would hesitate to go out on a limb with, say, over $100,000 of debt coming out of school.


In the Medical Startup Who's Who, How Important is the M.D.?


Nate Gross, MD : Co-founder of Rock Health

Image Source: Stanford Health




Startups and accelerators are where ideas in medical practice and implementation meet the world of business and investment. In a piece titled 12 entrepreneurs reinventing health care, CNN Money covers shining stars in the field. These individuals represent thought leaders in the medical startup and accelerator field, all of whom must exhibit entrepreneurial spirit. Of the 12, only four are listed as having (or are in the process of obtaining) medical credentials. They include:

  • Nate Gross, MD co-founder of Rock Health and graduate of both Emory University School of Medicine and Harvard Business School

  • Tom Lee, trained as an MD and with an MBA from Stanford, founded a company that aims to provide all patients with concierge-style medical service

  • Peter Hudson and Wayne Guerra are co-founders of iTriage, which seeks to help users answer the question "What's wrong with me?" and "Where should I go for treatment?" Both have a history as ER doctors in Denver. Wayne also holds an MBA from the University of Denver.


The rest of the list lacks medical credentials, but obviously needs to work very closely with partners in the industry. There are definitely other examples of medical entrepreneurs who have medical credentials as well. From this perspective, however, that doesn't seem to be a requirement for entry into the field.