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In this episode, we have Samantha Lai, a medical student as our guest. She will discuss the disparity in venture capital investment for startups led by women, and how this gap can be narrowed by encouraging female physicians to become entrepreneurs. Despite the traditional and risk-averse nature of the health care industry, it is a field where there is a relatively level playing field for women and a wealth of opportunities for innovation. Samantha explains how it affects women in male-dominated fields and how organizations like the American Medical Women’s Association are working to provide a nurturing environment for female physician-entrepreneurs through events such as innovation challenges and pitch competitions. Tune in to learn more about how we can bridge the gap in gender representation in entrepreneurship and health care.

Samantha Lai is a medical student.

She shares her story and discusses her KevinMD article, “Medical innovation: a serendipitous step toward gender equity.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Rate and review at KevinMD.com/rate. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today on the show, we have Samantha Lai. She’s a medical student, and her KevinMD article is titled “Medical innovation: a serendipitous step toward gender equity.” Samantha, welcome to the show.

Samantha Lai: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Pho: So we’ll get into the article a little bit, but first off, briefly share your story and journey to where you are today.

Samantha Lai: Sure. So I’m a little less experienced than a lot of the guests you have on your podcast, but I am a second-year medical student right now, and I just started my clinical year just a week ago. Before medical school, I went to undergrad at UC Berkeley, where I majored in neurobiology and computer science, and I always thought I was going to do something kind of in the intersection between those two fields. So after college, I took a couple of gap years, and I worked at a health tech startup in Berkeley, and that really sparked my interest in bridging the gap between the world of tech and the world of medicine.

After the couple of gap years, I ended up deciding to still apply to medical school, but it really informed how I see the role of someone in medicine as it relates to tech. As both fields advance, sometimes in kind of different directions, I think it’s more and more important to think about that relationship and how we can best bridge it.

Kevin Pho: I know you’re just at the beginning of your medical school journey, but I’m interested: During your gap years, when you were working for that health tech startup, what are some of the biggest things that you learned? What are some of the more eye-opening observations that you saw?

Samantha Lai: Yeah, so I think one thing was that it is absolutely crucial, when you’re innovating in the medical field, to include the people who are going to be working with that technology. I might get a little flak for saying this, especially with my inexperience, but I think both the fields of medicine and tech are very proud fields. Everyone’s really proud of the work they do. Everyone’s very highly educated, super smart. What I realized is that I think we have to take a look at that hubris sometimes when we’re trying to bridge those two fields and try to, I guess, extract the best of each side.

So tech moves super fast. They’re all about failing fast and innovating, and that allows them to move as quickly as they do, with the kind of exponential growth that we see as characteristic of the technology world. Medicine, on the other hand, can’t really do that. We’re really rooted in evidence, and research moves slowly, and that’s because we want to keep people safe. Sometimes those things can seem antagonistic, but I think that there’s a lot to learn from seeing how we can bridge those things in a helpful way.

So while I was working in tech, I thought it was really important to include the user, which ended up being people working in the health care field who are super concerned about patient safety, but also not to adopt what seems to be very common in medicine, which is this idea that the status quo is just how it is. I think that’s something that medicine can really learn from tech. So I guess what I learned was that sometimes it’s really frustrating to try to bridge those two fields, but there’s definitely a lot to gain.

Kevin Pho: Now, from that tech lens, while you were working there, how did they reach out to medical professionals? How did they reach out to get that input from people who are on the front lines of the health care field?

Samantha Lai: So we would work really closely with certain practices, like small private practices, and have them literally demo our product in their practice, little by little, trying to gauge whether it was helping, making them more efficient, or whether it was slowing it down. They would give us really candid feedback on how it was affecting their work, and that was really helpful, because you can theorize however much you want about what you think is going to help a physician in their practice, but when they’re sitting in front of a patient, and the patient has a real-world concern about how their health problem is going to affect their life, you kind of have to throw all those theories away and just think about what’s sitting right in front of you. So it was a good feedback loop, getting those physicians in there.

Kevin Pho: And then from that tech company, did they say, “We need to adapt based on how these end users are using our product,” or did they say, “We know better. Doctors are Luddites, and they should just do things our way”? So what was their response to some of that feedback?

Samantha Lai: Definitely more on the side of, “Since this is our end user, we really need to be designing for them.” I think every company has a vision and mission that they’re trying to advance, and so I think the higher-level direction of the work was always trying to achieve that vision. But when it came down to exactly how the product worked and how it was going to impact the physician’s day-to-day practice, they’re the expert on what they’re doing day to day.

Kevin Pho: All right, let’s talk about your KevinMD article, titled “Medical innovation: a serendipitous step toward gender equity.” Now, how did this article come together?

Samantha Lai: Yeah, so I think that I’ve always kind of had an interest based on my undergrad background and how I converge my two fields of study. I guess what I realized, as I was in my gap years deciding whether I wanted to apply to med school, was that I felt like by choosing medicine, I was kind of afraid that I might be giving up some of the agency that you can take in tech to pick a problem and then really research it and innovate toward making it better. That kind of freedom I felt was characteristic of the tech world, and, maybe naively, I thought that it was not characteristic of the medical world. What I realized, like I’ve kind of touched on already, is that I think there’s a huge gain to be had from finding a way to bring that kind of spirit of innovation into medicine. So this article is just one step in my ongoing journey in figuring out what that actually looks like.

I guess the reason I wrote it was because I was helping with a project with the American Medical Women’s Association, and they’re putting on the first-ever AMWA Innovation Challenge, where they’re inviting these physician innovators to present their projects and potentially get funding to support them and bring them to life. It really made me question why this isn’t more of a thing in medicine. It’s also been found, kind of separate from the world of medicine, that there is a pretty big disparity in the amount of venture funding that’s given to women versus men. I guess when I say women, I should also include other gender-identifying minorities, and part of that is

Kevin Pho: How big is that disparity, just to give us an idea?

Samantha Lai: So the research that I cited in the article showed that only 3 percent of venture funding is represented by women and gender minorities. So I think that’s obviously a huge disparity, and I think the obvious question then is: How do we bridge that disparity? How do we minimize that disparity? Women receive significantly less funding when they’re asking for funding in fields that are predominantly made up of men.

Basically, the idea is that there’s a two-pronged approach to mitigating this: Either we make the stage of looking for venture funding more equitable, or we start with fields that are already more equitable and generate or encourage more venture funding to be pushed toward those areas. I guess what my article is talking about is how medicine is a really serendipitous place for this innovation to start picking up, just because tech and medicine are growing so quickly, and, kind of independently of the gender disparities in venture funding, there actually are shrinking gender disparities in medicine. We’re in a time now where fully half of medical school classes are women, sometimes even more.

So the kind of discrimination that women may face when seeking venture funding may not exist in the form of, “This person doesn’t belong in their field. This person is a woman seeking funding in a predominantly male field.” So I guess for me, when I connected the dots there, it seemed like medicine is a great place for people to start innovating, just because, with the exception of a lot of different situations, there are many situations in medicine where women do feel welcome. Women obviously do belong in medicine. As for the kind of obvious gender disparity, I guess we’re lucky that it’s shrinking to the point where that part of the venture funding discrimination might have a lesser effect, because we have such improved gender equity in medicine. Not to say that it’s perfect, but hopefully that’s a good place to start.

Kevin Pho: So if you’re a woman in medicine, or a female medical trainee, and want to become more active in the innovation space, obviously you have a background in this, but for someone who doesn’t have your background, how can they get more involved in that space?

Samantha Lai: Yeah, I guess one place to start, not to put a plug in for the project that I was working on, but AMWA, the American Medical Women’s Association, is hosting the very first Innovation Challenge, and they’re going to try to make it an annual event. It’s really just a space for people to bring their ideas, however formed they are. They might just be an idea that they had that they haven’t really written up or anything, or they could have a full-fledged startup. This is the kind of space where we’re inviting women in medicine who have had innovative ideas and acted upon them to present them.

The word we’ve been using is to “socialize” their ideas, because we know that when people socialize their ideas, more people know about them, and they’re more supported. It’s really just encouraging people in the health care field, not necessarily just physicians, to see innovation as a path that they can take, and not just something that people in other fields do, or something that’s so far removed from the world of health care that they can’t participate in it.

Kevin Pho: Now, would they need a special background in business, as a student in an MBA? Do you need a background in tech or science to participate in these innovation challenges?

Samantha Lai: No. So I think the idea we’re really trying to push here is that the field that they are in, and the background that they have from being in that field, is the expertise that they need, because they’re the person who can best identify the challenges and the daily inefficiencies and points of friction that they could potentially solve with a new idea, a new innovation. That’s kind of in contrast to someone on the outside who is looking in and hoping to impose a new product or an innovation on the field. It’s really important to show people that whatever they are doing, they’re the experts on it, and we need their input.

Kevin Pho: So tell me your ideal world. If all your ideas and passion get implemented, your ideal vision, what would happen next?

Samantha Lai: I think it would look like a person who identifies an inefficiency in their field and feels like they can do something about it, instead of feeling like, “Oh, this is just the way things are,” like, “Oh, this product is so poorly designed, but it’s just what we use.” I know that the steps from having an idea to actually having a different product in your hand, that’s a whole other story. But I think in my ideal world, people feel agency to take action on that kind of feeling of “I wish this were better,” and agency that they can be the effectors of that change.

Kevin Pho: Now, among your medical school peers, approximately what percentage of them have that background or passion when it comes to innovation?

Samantha Lai: There are a few. So at my medical school, we do have an innovation in medicine club, where we host panels, for example, of people who have taken a path similar to this, who have used their expertise to create a product or a service based on a need that they saw in their training. I think it really speaks to the fact that this is a growing sentiment in medicine, that people in medicine belong in tech, that people in medicine, I guess, deserve to have that kind of agency over the environments that they work in.

Kevin Pho: How about formal training? Do you feel like medical schools in general have any formal training for those future physicians who are interested in tech and innovation?

Samantha Lai: Probably rarer right now. I know a lot of medical schools, including mine, have a kind of MD-MBA track, but it’s definitely, I think, while a growing sentiment, a less common one. But I’m hoping that’ll change as people realize that we all have agency in contributing to the products on the market and solving the problems that we face. It’s not something that only someone else can do.

Kevin Pho: Now, other than this AMWA Innovation Challenge, what other resources would you recommend to those medical students and physicians interested in going into that tech space?

Samantha Lai: I’m sure at a lot of different institutions there is a group or some kind of organization focused on this intersection between tech and medicine. I would honestly just recommend searching up your institution name and “innovation” or “tech,” and just seeing what comes up, and talking to people. This is a pretty new and growing way of thinking in medicine, I think, and so sometimes the most valuable conversations I’ve had about this have just been on the fly, rather than reaching out to a specific published resource or something.

Kevin Pho: And my final question: Tell us some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Samantha Lai: Yeah, I think we’re really great at questioning the status quo in terms of social situations, like making sure that people are treated equitably and equally in their medical care, and I think that’s really important. At the same time, we also need to question the status quo when it comes to the tools that we work with, and not feel like what we’re given is all that we can work with. That goes from the medical hierarchy sometimes, and interpersonal things, to literally the tools that we work with. If we feel like they’re not well designed, or there can be improvements, we need to feel like there’s actually something that can be done about that, and that it’s not just, “Oh, that’s just how we do things,” or, “That’s just how it is.”

So I would just encourage people to maintain that agency whenever possible. I understand this may come off as naive, just because I’m so early in my training, but I really think, I don’t know, what do we have to gain from not believing that we can have that agency?

Kevin Pho: Samantha, thank you so much for sharing your time and insight, and thanks again for being on the show.

Samantha Lai: Thanks for having me.