Healthcare Innovation Absenteeism: The Rise of Physician Entrepreneurs & Medical Startups

For years, warning signs have illuminated imminent days of reckoning for stalled healthcare innovation across the dynamic American healthcare landscape. An evolving epic battle for healthcare innovation delivery has silently raged and set arena stages throughout the healthcare industry. Urgent innovative healthcare delivery is needed to ameliorate longstanding points of failures in providing healthcare delivery to society. Historically, the science of medicine has fostered cultural practices of innovation absenteeism and resistance to change. Mired by archaic processes, legacy systems, and fractionally useful equipment, our current healthcare ecosystems are unsustainable. Recently, some unhindered frontline physicians opted to take on a portion of critical healthcare challenges and followed their ideas to leverage clinical expertise and drive the agenda for changing healthcare innovation delivery. Our qualitative multi-case study design centered around empirical evidence that answered the research question: How do physician entrepreneurs navigate decision-making strategies for medical startups from ideation, innovation, to commercialization of new medical products and services? We examined 21 cases of physician founded medical startups to understand particularizations around physician entrepreneurship. Findings suggest three contributions towards knowledge accumulation about physician entrepreneurs and medical startups: exclusive decision-making processes, industry-specific insights, and illuminations of physician voices that might not otherwise be heard