To become a physician entrepreneur, you don’t have to establish a biodesign laboratory within a large health system the way that Korak Sarkar MD, MHDS, did. Dr. Sarkar thinks that most physicians with innovative ideas are engaged in some degree of entrepreneurship, even if they don’t realize it.
”You’re probably already doing it,” said Dr. Sarkar, a neuro-rehabilitation physician with Ochsner Health, a nonprofit health system based in New Orleans. “We all have workflow bottlenecks that we have workarounds for. That’s the seed right there. That was a need that was recognized and solution that was deployed.”
Dr. Sarkar sees entrepreneurship as a needs-based endeavor. He believes physicians’ advantage as healthcare entrepreneurs is their awareness of unmet needs and the non-intuitive complexities of modern care delivery.
To equip more physicians to develop solutions to the needs they see, the AMA Physician Entrepreneur Forum will be held Aug. 7–8 at the AMA headquarters in Chicago. Designed for physicians, residents and students interested in health care entrepreneurship and business leadership, the event will feature health care leaders who have built successful businesses, practices and ventures. Learn more and register now.
Know what’s needed and how to get it
Dr. Sarkar has pursued innovation through his roles at Ochsner Health. Along with providing patient care, he’s the founding director of the BioDesign Lab and an associate chief medical informatics officer.
His nonclinical pursuits are an example of “intrapreneurship,” which is the development of new products or services within an organization using its resources rather than working independently. “We have a laboratory here of 40-plus hospitals, diverse clinical needs, and supportive leadership,” Dr. Sarkar told the AMA.
In addition to identifying needs and potential solutions, healthcare intrapreneurship also depends on understanding which needs are most important to a physician’s organization and aligning efforts with those priorities, Dr. Sarkar said. “That’s serious work, triaging the needs of the organization and having a map of how you get things done within an organization.”
Ochsner Health, which serves the Gulf South region, includes 47 hospitals and more than 370 clinics and has 5,000 employed and affiliated physicians. It is part of the AMA Health System Member Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.
The system’s Biodesign Lab had humble beginnings. “It was just me nights and weekends in a shared office with a couple of printers on a bookshelf in a corner,” Dr. Sarkar recalled. “I was doing everything.”
While the lab’s core staff remains small, it now includes biomedical engineers, augmented intelligence (AI) engineers, data scientists, information technology staff and other Ochsner Health personnel. As the lab has grown, Dr. Sarkar’s role has evolved into acting as a translator helping bridge the knowledge gap between disciplines.
“The surgeonzmay not completely understand the biomedical engineer, and the biomedical engineer may not understand the surgeon,” Dr. Sarkar explained. He can help keep his colleagues and team in sync.
3D imaging and neuro rehab tech
His work with the Biodesign Lab also led to Dr. Sarkar’s informatics and CMIO roles. Initially, the lab focused on developing patient-specific 3D digital and physical models from medical imaging, an endeavor that soon “required an understanding of a diverse set of clinical informatics concepts like DICOM file types and PACS solutions, as well as how novel tools like 3D printing and Virtual Reality could be integrated into existing healthcare IT infrastructure,” Dr. Sarkar said.
He regards the intersection of imaging and neurosciences to be the vanguard of healthcare AI and credits Ochsner Health for putting him in a position to work on it. “Thanks to the organization being so forward-thinking, I had the opportunity to see AI unfold in vascular neurology, one of our organization’s earliest clinical adopters, and see first-hand the complexities of AI integration and governance,” Dr. Sarkar said.
Ochsner Health’s innovation pursuits now are focused on two neurorehabilitation-related projects. One is developing a noninvasive brain-computer interface that would help restore everyday function for patients. The other is using virtual reality to expand and personalize the delivery of neuro-rehabilitative care.
“The average person has to wait over 30 days and many drive over 60 miles to see a neurological specialist, and the need is only growing deeper,” Dr. Sarkar observed. “We have to think differently about how to deliver care to our community.”
These efforts extend Ochsner Health’s leadership in innovative clinical care delivery, Dr. Sarkar said. “We face many of the same challenges in care delivery as our peers across the country. We don’t have any special advantage other than our deep appreciation of the need to transform healthcare and a willingness to innovate to do so. If we can get it to work here, we can get it to work in other places.”
From AI implementation to digital health adoption and EHR usability, the AMA is fighting to make technology work for physicians, ensuring that it is an asset to doctors. That includes recently launching the AMA Center for Digital Health and AI to give physicians a powerful voice in shaping how AI and other digital tools are harnessed to improve the patient and clinician experience.
Be ready to be wrong
Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship alike require a big mental adjustment for physicians, Dr. Sarkar told the AMA: “You have to be comfortable being wrong, and that is not what we select for.”
“You can’t be unsafe. There’s a thin line between being uncomfortable and being unsafe,” he continued. “If you want to grow and enhance your function, you have to be uncomfortable, you have to learn fast and adapt quickly.”
Innovating within a health system has certain advantages compared with pursuing an entrepreneurial venture on one’s own. For one, ““It is often more straightforward for physicians to establish an internal institutional track record for healthcare innovation than to build a successful NIH-funded research portfolio or a track record of investment and company building” Dr. Sarkar noted.
In addition, doctors working within their organization already will know whom to ask for assistance in both clinical areas and operational departments such as IT.
Enlisting colleagues is a necessary step if a doctor wants to scale an idea within a health care organization and make it sustainable. “You can’t shy away from submitting a ticket to IT or engaging with your security team,” Dr. Sarkar instructed. “If there’s reimbursement involved, talk to your revenue folks.
“This becomes part of the job too, identifying, coordinating and translating between all those different stakeholders.”
