The Society of Physician Entrepreneurs (SOPE) has grown into an international organization with members and chapters all over the world. SOPE’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA, discusses physician entrepreneurship in this interview.
SOPE is a global biomedical and healthcare innovation network that was founded as a non-profit organization by three physicians in 2011. It is the only international organization founded and led by physicians which focuses on supporting other physicians who need help developing and commercializing biomedical innovations.
Dr. Meyers believes many physicians have good ideas, but don’t know what to do with them. Community physicians are the most significant source of commercial healthcare innovations. However, community physicians in private practice have limited business education, as well as demanding jobs leaving little time to develop entrepreneurial ventures, let alone investigate the feasibility of their ideas.
“They think of a good idea in the shower and it goes down the drain,” says Dr. Meyers. “That was the market opportunity that SOPE addresses.”
Dr. Meyers believes that only about one percent of scientists, engineers, and doctors have an entrepreneurial mindset. There are substantial barriers to developing and commercializing innovations. Significant time, effort, money, and risk is required. Most doctors are risk averse and don’t embrace this profile.
“Most biomedical innovation has been driven by large hospitals, the med tech and biotech industry, and payors,” says Meyers. “In general, they don’t fully engage the end users. The two most important elements, doctors and patients, are left out. EMRs are a prime example. They excluded end user input and now doctors have to use the mess.”
Meyers finds that even research-focused academic medicine is not always conducive to entrepreneurship.
“The cultures, knowledge, skills abilities, and networks are all different,” says Meyers. “The culture of academic medicine is ‘publish or perish’. Industrial culture is protecting ideas until they are ready to develop. We need to change the anti-entrepreneurial mindset. Most doctors have resistance to change.”
Research in academic medicine follows a top-down model of innovation driven by a cycle of grants, post-doctoral fellowships, research, publications, and more grants.
However, innovation from community physician employs a bottom-up model driven by the practical needs of doctors and patients. Most of SOPE’s members are interested in these bottom-up types of care delivery innovations related to new business models, processes, platforms, and digital health.
“The good news is that traditional top down innovation is being supplemented by community based bottom up innovation,” says Meyers. “Community physicians have access to tools now that they may not have had before.”
The internet and mobile based apps now allow community physicians to participate in clinical trials. Raising money for a new venture, which has long been a black art, is now possible through crowdfunding platforms. SOPE also gives community based practitioners access to a network of non-physician professionals to assist them in their ventures.
“SOPE members are not just doctors,” says Meyers. “We intentionally made it eclectic. The knowledge, skills, abilities and requirements are different whether you license it, spin it out, or sell it. Part of the reason we created this was because we don’t believe healthcare can be fixed from inside. We need interdisciplinary people from other industries.”
BIO:
Dr. Arlen Meyers is a professor of otolaryngology, dentistry, and engineering at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical campus and President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs. You can register to join SOPE at www.sopenet.org.