Could clinician entrepreneurs benefit Canada’s health and economy?

Clinical entrepreneurs—physicians, nurses, and other health care professionals—who understand Canada’s health care challenges first-hand could help improve the health system and grow the economy, argue two physicians in a commentary published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“Successful Canadian-controlled private corporations developed by these entrepreneurs could fuel economic growth and help protect the sovereignty of our health care system,” according to Drs. Kumanan Wilson of Bruyère Health Research Institute and University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, and Dante Morra, founder of the CAN Health Network and a physician with THP Solutions and the University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario.

However, health entrepreneurs in Canada face many barriers that will need to be addressed. These include lack of product fit for the market; risk aversion and fear of failure; financing challenges, such as access to capital for start-ups; complex intellectual property protection; and conflict of interest concerns.

“Even if a clinician entrepreneur is successful in creating a business, Canada does not have a successful record of supporting Canadian-controlled companies, and competition from international companies can be difficult to overcome,” the authors write.

“Finally, there is the concern of clinicians leaving practice while Canada faces a crisis in health human resources.”

The authors recommend creating clinician entrepreneurship programs in academic centers, analogous to clinical scholar programs for scientists. These programs would provide business expertise to clinicians interested in entrepreneurship and create academic recognition and incentives for entrepreneurship.

The programs could work with local business accelerators to create health-care-specific partnered entrepreneurship programs, pairing people with business expertise and clinicians to co-found companies. Changes in public health system procurement policies are key to ensuring the adoption of solutions created by Canadian entrepreneurs.

“Leveraging and training talented, motivated clinicians to work with partners to build successful companies can produce useful solutions to important health care problems and generate revenue to sustain our health care system. This requires a fundamental cultural change to how Canada’s health care and academic enterprise views the role of clinicians as entrepreneurs, who can drive much-needed change in Canada’s health care systems.”