Medical Misfits

Let me start off by saying that Zoe is doing exactly the things which I should have done while I was in medical school. During her second year in medical school, she decided she wanted to try out something different on the side, and sent out around 30-40 applications for internships in various companies. That landed her her current part-time job at Melon, an EdTech startup where she works as Community Associate. I met Zoe quite randomly via LinkedIn as I saw one of her posts about how she get her tech job as a doctor. I thought that was really cool because not many medical students even consider the possibility of working at a tech startup during medical school - or even after medical school, for that matter. I was super excited to talk to Zoe because I think that many listeners of this podcast, especially medical students and junior doctors, could be very interested to learn about her experiences: How the hell do you get a tech startup job as a medical student? And how do you make it work, is there even enough time? And, if she had to choose, which job would she prefer right now?

I feel like that, with each guest I describe here, I always start off with “man, this person was really interesting and we had so much to talk about”. So I don’t want to sound repetitive or so, but man, Stephen Gilbert really was quite interesting and we had so much to talk about - so much that we ended up going over our scheduled time of one hour. There’s so much to unpack here. First off, we talked about Stephen graduating as a veterinarian (to those non-native English speakers: that’s a doctor who treats animals) and how he started working on the food and mouth disease outbreak in the UK. That already could probably fill a podcast! We did however manage to move on and talked about him transitioning first into research and then into working at a medical device manufacturer, Biotronik, in Berlin. After that, he worked at Ada (like a few other guests on this podcast). Now, he’s a professor for regulatory science at the University Hospital in Dresden. What the hell is regulatory science? Glad you ask, because that’s one of many things we talk about on the podcast. But that’s not it - we also went further into the topic of “ChatGPT” and other large language models in Healthcare, the promises they offer and the (regulatory) problems we might encounter when bringing them to patients. So, you see, we covered a lot. Listen to this episode to hear it for yourself!

Damn, where should I start - maybe with the fact that Johan was a professional poker player and, as a medical student, would spend nights playing poker to earn some money on the side? Or with the fact that he also worked as a warehouse worker, as a nurse, and was a semi-professional soccer player? Suffice to say, there are so many interesting things about Johan that one hour’s worth of time in the podcast only enabled us to scratch the surface. Still, I really enjoyed scratching the surface by talking to Johan for an hour and I hope that other people find our conversation similarly fun and insightful. Johan Hedevåg is a doctor, product manager, co-founder of and advisor and investor in Healthcare companies. He also worked as a warehouse worker, as a nurse in a hospital, as a teacher and was a semi-professional soccer player and a professional poker player and coach. He is best known as being the Senior Director of Product at Kry which is a telemedicine company from Sweden. He left Kry in 2021 and has since founded his own company called 4scale Ventures. With 4scale Ventures, Johan supports companies to reach their ambitions on growth, efficiency and leadership. Concretely, they invest in companies and offer consulting and coaching. I actually met Johan virtually when he was trying to recruit me for Kry. That recruiting obviously didn’t work, but we got along pretty well and loosely stayed in touch in the following years. Our conversation was not limited to the typical “medical misfit” questions on why he didn’t end up working as a doctor, but we also went further and talked about Digital Health in general. If you’re interested in that, too, you should definitely tune in!

The first thing which struck me when talking to Fabienne was that she was currently working from Bali. She’s an avid surfer and she describes it as a dream come true to be able to surf everyday while working remotely. The second thing which I found really interesting was that Fabienne was the first guest ever on my podcast who considers going back to the hospital as a doctor at some stage. Not due to unhappiness in her current job but simply because she enjoyed working with patients. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s start at the beginning! Fabienne Cotte is a doctor and now working as a clinical studies team lead at Ada Health in Berlin. She studied medicine in Berlin and started working at Ada Health as a medical student on the medical knowledge team. After that, she worked in the clinical evaluation team before joining Ada Health full-time after graduating as a doctor. Now, she’s working in the area of clinical studies, which I was quite excited to talk about with her because I could imagine that many medical students and doctors could be interested in working in a similar area themselves. And that’s exactly why I think Fabienne is a great guest: While her career path is yet another one from those we’ve seen, it’s still something which seems viable for many medical students and junior doctors out there. After all, she still is working in a somewhat medical capacity as she’s dealing with clinical trials.

Describing Luka Opasic as an interesting person would be quite an understatement. He is a doctor, software developer and researcher - and none of these titles describe him very well, as he's somehow a combination of all of these, but then again something different, too. He studied medicine in Zagreb, Croatia, and later did his PhD in Germany. In that context, he worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology (where he was the first medical doctor ever), focusing on writing software to simulate the evolution of tumors. That work resulted in a software called CancerSim, written in Python and published as a paper and on GitHub. He continued his research at the Cleveland Clinic for a year. For the past 1.5 years, he worked at a Norwegian Healthtech company called Bulbitech where he was Chief Data Officer. Bulbitech develops software to detect eye movement disorders. Now, he's an AI Projects Clinical Coordinator at ZEISS Medical Technology. I was really excited to talk to Luka. He went down the "hardcore maths coding route" when he got into his evolutionary biology research, so he's not really a “normal” software developer and much less a normal medical doctor. In addition to that, he has successfully made the transition from research to industry which many people I know have considered very difficult - it’s often hard to find your first job or you simply don’t know what job you're looking for. And, on top of that, I think Luka is simply incredibly smart, so I was really excited about our conversation!

The first thing I realized when talking to Paulina was that she has lots of stuff going on due to her impressive amount of energy - I wished I would have had that sort of motivation in medical school! But, before we got into all of that, I think the most interesting thing about Paulina is that she’s still working as a doctor in the hospital while building up her startup on the side. So she’s in the middle of making the transition out of the hospital. Additionally, I think Paulina is very interesting because her path is yet another one than Ramin’s and Matt’s, my two prior guests - while Ramin worked as a software developer and Matt went down a hard-to-summarize public policy, regulatory and Chief Medical Officer route, Paulina’s approach is yet another one. Listen to the episode to find out more! Some background on Paulina: Paulina Cecula is a doctor and now, most recently, a co-founder of Dama Health. She studied medicine at the Imperial College in London and, in parallel, also did a Bachelor of Science in Management at the Imperial College Business School. Around a year ago, she co-founded Dama Health with the goal to empower patients and their clinician to make personalised contraception decisions. At the same time, she’s wrapping up her first foundation year working as a doctor at the Imperial College Healthcare Trust & Hospitals in London. She’s doing in Obgyn, geriatrics and acute medicine there. I always try to put myself in the perspective I had when I just got out of medical school and knew I didn’t want to work as a doctor, but had no clue what exactly I was going to do and, most importantly, had no network to rely on. Accordingly, I asked Paulina how she built up her network and how she ultimately came up with co-founding her startup, Dama Health. I also ask her about studying management (she did a Bachelor’s degree during medical school) and whether other doctors should consider doing the same. I really enjoyed talking to Paulina and I’m sure you will enjoy listening to her answers, too!

Matthew "Matt" Fenech is a doctor and now co-founder of a startup called Una Health which develops an app for diabetics to improve their nutrition and blood sugar management. Before co-founding Una Health in 2021, Matt worked at a think tank called Future Advocacy and as Medical Safety Lead at Ada Health. I think Matt is a really interesting person to talk to because his career path is by no means "linear", what he might have called it - I don't know of any doctor who would have considered working at a think tank, simply because no doctor seems to be aware of these sort of job opportunities. And that's not all - after that, Matt worked at Ada Health, a well-known healthcare startup developing a symptom checker app. And now Matt co-founded his own startup. Looking back at Matt's past activities, he says (and I think it's a quite smart observation) that there's been somewhat of a progression in his jobs: First, at the think tank, he worked on what sort of Healthcare policy might make sense. Then, at Ada Health, he worked in a company where he could actually be closer to real-world changes; and finally, now, in his own startup, he has even more degrees of freedom in building things and implementing the changes he envisions for the Healthcare system. I ask Matt about how he got his first job. Also, as he worked in diabetes research before completely leaving the hospital behind, I asked him whether he thought that his research experience was beneficial for his later jobs - or was it all for nothing? After touching upon what the hell employees of think tanks actually do I ask him what his new company, Una Health, is about and how he plans to improve diabetes care through it.

Ramin Azhdari is a doctor, software engineer and now a co-founder of his own startup, Vie de Médecin. We talk about how he transitioned to becoming a software engineer, why he thinks developing software is really exciting as a doctor, how he got his first software engineering job and about his own startup, a social network for doctors.