Medical students and residents rotate on different specialty services during their education and training. They might spend 6 weeks in general internal medicine, 12 weeks on surgery and surgical specialties or a month on the psychiatric service. These rotations are the core of medical education under the oversight of attending physicians who are supposed to provide graduated levels of responsibility, supervision and accountability. In times past, before the present era of private beds only, there used to be wards where similarly diagnosed patients would be located during their hospital stay…a cancer ward, a TB ward or a gyn ward.
As a medical student transitioning to residency, your life is going to change significantly in the coming months. What are the best steps to prepare for those changes in both a clinical and personal capacity?
How about using the time between after you have matched and the start of your residency doing a rotation on the startup service?
Given the innovation and entrepreneurship imperative in healthcare, some are now creating the startup ward. The Texas Medical Center, for example, has partnered with Village Capital to create a campus-based accelerator space designed to create and launch new TMC based ventures. Likewise, New York-based Mount Sinai Health System is expanding its internal innovation and collaboration group by partnering with Edison Nation Medical, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based “healthcare innovation marketplace”. Other hospital systems are joining hands with local accelerators and incubators as well.
Here are 40 hospitals with care innovation centers. But do they really add value? Becker’s reported on 24 hospitals and health systems that opened or announced plans to establish new centers focused on healthcare innovation in 2021.
Eventually, interested medical students and residents and, whowouddathunkit, faculty, will be assigned rotations on these startup wards. Like their clinical experiences, they will be offered the education, resources, networks, mentors, and experiential learning they get during their 6-week rotation on neurosurgery. In addition, under the oversight of physician entrepreneurs-in-residence, business development experts and investors, they will be able to get “clinical experience” and be able fail in a safe place without inflicting too much morbidity on the patient.
It will take a while to adjust to this new reality and overcome the short sighted, myopic vested interests who don’t want it to happen. But it will happen. Who knows? The “innovation attendings” might even get promotion and tenure credit for doing it.
