Post by Dr Wiktoria Milczyńska

Doctors are pretty well-placed to build healthcare products. Hardly any of them do. Here's what I think actually stops us: 1/ Leaving is expensive. It's not just quitting a job. You step off a training path you've spent years on, and getting back on later can be slow and hard. It's a real risk, not just cold feet. 2/ We're trained to wait for certainty. Medicine teaches you to follow well-established evidence. Startups need you to act before the evidence is in. Those are opposite habits. 3/ The identity is sticky. Being a doctor becomes part of who you are. Swapping that for "founder" doesn't mean much until the thing works, so it can feel like a step down. 4/ Nobody shows you the door. There's a clear way into medicine. There's no clear way out, and it's no one's job to tell you leaving is even an option. Now there is more support & resources than ever before, but you still mostly find out by doing it. 5/ You don't realise your skills transfer. Clinical judgement, triage, staying calm under pressure, explaining hard things simply. All of it transfers to building. But no one tells you that while you're still on the ward, so you assume those skills only count in a hospital. I'm not arguing every doctor should go and build. For plenty of people it wouldn't be the right call, and we badly need physicians staying in medicine 😅 But I suspect more would try, if leaving didn't cost so much. If you're a clinician who thought about leaving but didn't, what stopped you? #healthtech #healthcare #innovation #entrepreneur #careerchange