The Health care Entrepreneur

The health care entrepreneur is a special category of entrepreneurs that often can generate immense amount of positive benefits for both patients and industry. Yet health care entrepreneurs have demonstrated some common characteristics. Some are common to all entrepreneurs (drive to succeed, willingness to assume and manage risks, leadership, lifelong learning, etc), while other characteristics distinguish them among others. For example, the health care entrepreneurs in biopharmaceutical are oftentimes renowned researchers who opted to leave the comfort of the ivory towers of academia to pursue a daring drug candidate. Other times, they may be an average individual who identified an unmet need or improvement to an existing process. Regardless of where one comes from, the health care entrepreneurs are often driven to this industry because it is a chance to do something special, for the benefit of a wide spectrum of users and customers.

Why is this industry so attractive? Health care is a field filled with highly motivated and passionate people, it offers a wide spectrum of opportunities, it represents the future, and offers immense growth potential.

What makes health care entrepreneurship difficult?

Unlike many traditional industries, health care is fundamentally a multi-stakeholder industry. Usually, there are multiple "customers" - the patient, the health care provider, and the payer. An entrepreneur focused on delivering innovative products to the market needs to consider a myriad of complexities ranging from patient satisfaction, regulatory approval, marketing and sales to hospitals, reimbursement, and more. Many of the products are results of research carried out in universities and research organizations, and untangling legal challenges and competitions.

While the challenges are daunting, the only way to proceed is forward.

Version

• 02.11.2017 Initial Revision