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Introduction

AI, digital health, and personalised medicine are reshaping healthcare, but doctors despite their deep understanding of clinical challenges remain users, not innovators, due to structural and cultural barriers. Redesigning training, incentives, and collaboration is essential to change this.

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Structural barriers keeping doctors out of innovation

• Time Constraints Due to Clinical Demands: Heavy patient load and administrative duties leave little room for creative exploration.
• Lack of Entrepreneurial Training in Medical Education: Medical curricula focus only on clinical practice with no exposure to product development or innovation.
• Inherent Risk Aversion in Medical Practice: The profession prioritizes certainty and safety, which discourages innovation that involves uncertainty or failure.
• Perception of Innovation as Non-Medical Domain: Doctors often consider technological innovation as the responsibility of engineers.
• Focus on Conventional Service Delivery: Medical entrepreneurship is typically restricted to opening hospitals and clinics, not disruptive innovation.
  Eg: Most doctor-led ventures remain in service delivery and do not produce new treatment methods or technologies.
• Limited Exposure to Commercialisation Processes: Doctors lack understanding of finance, regulation, and intellectual property necessary for healthcare startups.
  Eg: Absence of training in commercialisation and regulatory navigation hinders entrepreneurial transition.

Institutional barrier  keeping doctors out of innovation

• Rigid Medical Education System: Traditional curricula offer little flexibility or scope for experimentation with innovation-focused learning.
• Lack of Incentives in Healthcare Institutions: Hospitals and medical systems typically reward service delivery, not entrepreneurial efforts or problem-solving initiatives.
• Scarcity of Innovation Infrastructure: Few institutions provide access to innovation labs, incubators, or funding schemes to support doctor-led ventures.
• Limited Mentorship Opportunities: Doctors have minimal access to mentorship from experts in entrepreneurship, finance, or product development.
• Cumbersome Regulatory Environment: Complex bureaucratic procedures, licensing, and approval systems discourage clinicians from developing and launching new solutions.

Way forward for more collaborative ecosystem

• Interdisciplinary Collaboration with Engineering Institutes: Foster joint projects and problem-solving between medical and engineering students.
  Eg: Partnerships with IITs and IISc promote integration between clinical insight and tech innovation.
• Establishing Hospital-Based Innovation Hubs: Hospitals should provide platforms to test prototypes and support idea development.
  Eg: Doctors can pilot medical innovations within hospital-based incubators to solve real clinical challenges.
• Mentorship and Access to Startup Networks: Link doctors with mentors, investors, and industry experts to guide development and regulatory approval.
  
• Internships in Biotech Incubators: Embed exposure to med-tech environments during medical education.
  Eg: Suggested integration of internships in biotech incubators to build entrepreneurial capacity.
• Government Support and Innovation Grants: Provide funding, regulatory ease, and manufacturing incentives to med-tech entrepreneurs.
  Eg: BIRAC, Startup India, and India Health Fund offer grants, while Make in India promotes local device manufacturing.
• Promoting Risk Acceptance and Innovation Culture: Encourage experimentation by normalising failure as part of innovation.
  Eg: Failure in startups is to be viewed like failed scientific experiments essential for long-term progress.
  

Conclusion

Doctors must shift from users to co-creators of health tech to address India’s challenges of scale, access, and quality. With strong med-tech support systems already in place, the key is to reform curricula, foster interdisciplinary teams, fund hospital-based innovation, ease regulations, and embrace risk bringing clinicians to the core of innovation.

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