Navigating Your Career Path in Healthtech: Advice from Curistica Leaders
The healthtech industry is dynamic and full of opportunities, but knowing how to shape your career can be challenging. In the first of a series focusing on careers in healthtech, Curistica’s team of diverse leaders share their insights and guidance gained from their experience across various aspects of the industry: clinical, tech, product, operations, marketing, creative and more. We’d love to hear from you too so drop us a line with any topics you'd like us covered in our healthtech careers series.
In this article, we'll share valuable insights from our leaders to help you forge your own path when moving from clinical practice to industry and set yourself up for success.
1. Embracing Technology in Healthcare
When we think of creativity, we often think of exploration without boundaries. However, this is not always the case, says Curistica’s Product and Neuroscience specialist consultant Erica Warp.
‘Regulation and the need to create safe solutions can get in the way of certain “wild” ideas in healthtech (as they should!), but constraints can spark creativity, so it is important to lay safety considerations and regulatory requirements on the table from the start. A strong team will see these as creative challenges rather than roadblocks.’
The role of an aspiring healthcare tech leader, whether they are the leader of that team or a teammate, is to play their part in creating an environment where challenges are seen as opportunities to solve rather than demoralising roadblocks. Of course, this doesn’t mean finding a way around safety regulations and going outside the boundaries, it means applying creativity to develop innovative solutions that change the game whilst remaining safe and compliant. And a team that has an environment where the first response is ‘Yes, and’ rather than ‘No, because’ is much more likely to succeed.
In our Product Strategy and Visioning service, we’re ensuring that we coach our healthcare clients to develop these frameworks from the outset, as we know it is one of the fundamental springboards that allows product teams to flourish.
2. Prioritising Patient Safety in Innovation
Curistica’s Clinical Safety Officer and Digital Health Consultant Dr. Youssof Oskrochi explains how your clinical experience in navigating risk can translate to a career in healthtech.
‘Healthcare is a safety critical industry where a failure of safety can lead to the most serious harm to a patient. In healthtech, the harm has the potential to be exponentially greater, given the scalability and reach of healthtech products.
In clinical practice, you ensure that you take methodical and measured steps to identify and mitigate known risks. However, clinicians are also aware that unknown, unintended or unexpected harms can exist and remain vigilant to them. Healthtech is no different. There is no line between clinical safety and digital safety: it’s all doing the same thing, which is preventing harm, no matter what guise it takes.
In order to adopt a safety-first mindset, you need to ensure you understand the patient and the journey they take when using health-tech, not just their interaction within it, but everything around it; the holistic experience. Combining that with a robust evidence base, and monitoring metrics and evaluation frameworks provides a solid basis on which to identify where risk may come from.
User centred design is fundamental to this and is more than just putting yourself in the shoes of the patient or the clinicians using your product; it’s about letting them guide you through their journey and really seeing what they do. It’s really surprising how often people use devices well outside or beyond the scope for which they were developed or in a way which was completely unintended, so this testing is really important to identify any risks and create a solution for them.’
You may be asking yourself how to effectively balance risk and safety with the free-thinking that innovation needs. This can be a difficult question and one that Curistica has cultivated years of experience in answering and now works with clients to address through our Digital Health Governance and Due Diligence service, and one we’d be happy to discuss further.
3. Bridging Clinical Expertise and Technology
Curistica Founder Dr Keith Grimes explores the ways you can consolidate your clinical experience to help you when moving into industry.
‘Healthtech can be viewed simply as the combination of healthcare and technology, but in reality the blending of the two can be frustratingly complicated. The hard won knowledge, experience, and skills that clinicians acquire in practice can be difficult to integrate without learning new ways to communicate and unlearning some habits.
Unfortunately, undergraduate courses remain woefully light on the teaching needed to prepare medical students for this work, meaning you have to seek it out yourself. There are intercalated and postgraduate studies in Digital Health appearing, as well as fellowships in AI and Innovation such as the Topol Digital Fellowship, Clinical Entrepreneurs programme, and Clinical AI Fellowship. In this way, clinicians can maintain clinical practice while working directly in healthtech. Opportunities for working in industry are increasing, advertised through platforms like Doctorpreneurs and Linkedin. There are also blossoming informal networks on WhatsApp, Hack Events, and courses such as Bitelabs.’
At Curistica we’re leading the change with a deep knowledge of what it takes to build a successful career in industry using your clinical expertise. Through our Digital Health Education & Training, and Clinical talent consultancy, we’re training and supporting the hybrid clinicians of the future, making them effective in healthtech companies, and advocating for changes in training to ensure that the products and technologies needed to solve the biggest problems in healthcare can be delivered safely and effectively.’
4. Understanding Where You Want to Go
Our Brand and Marketing Expert, Emily Burt, explains why understanding how to communicate your values can shape your career.
‘Think about the brands you know very well: you can probably visualise their logo, the colours they use and their strapline. You know what they make and how you feel about it. These are the highlights, the bullet points, that stick in your mind. This is the unifying public face, but there's a lot more to a company than just the brand. One of the things that underpins a successful brand are the values it’s built on: these were certainly a really key component when building the Curistica brand.
It’s helpful to think about your career move in the same way. What is it that you're really passionate about and what values propel you forward? Many people in tech have had varied careers and are in possession of a multitude of non-traditional skills that have led them to where they are now. But in order for others to understand this and see where you fit, it’s important to find what’s the common thread that pulls this all together. Without a common thread, it can be difficult for others to understand where to place you.
You can do this in a multitude of ways
Get clear on your personal values and the value that your skills bring. You know what some of them are but I’m sure there are many things that are important to you and skills you have that you haven’t considered in ages. Write them down in the notes app on your phone, in some nifty new stationery, or in a Google Doc. This is just for you so use whatever method works for you.
Create your own professional personal mission statement that encompasses all these things and where you want to aim. This can form the intro to cover notes or CV intros, and can also be memorised to create your own ‘elevator pitch’ at networking events, such as the ones mentioned by Keith above. You can also consider joining a community that supports other parts of your working life, for example Doing It For The Kids which brings together a community of freelance parents making flexible working work. Communities of people from all types of backgrounds, disciplines and industries united with a similar supportive goal can provide lots of helpful perspectives, and will set you up well for working amongst non-clinical teams from a variety of professional backgrounds.
Now that you’re clear on your personal values, you can feel more confident in bringing your niche interests or passions into your work. It might inform the specific organisations you want to join. For example, perhaps you’re a travel lover who can use your personal experience of travelling or working abroad to develop healthcare solutions that improve patient outcomes in areas with healthcare inequality. Or perhaps you are passionate about improving equitable access for diverse groups in the workplace, and can set up a support network within your organisation.’
All of these things make you unique and by becoming clear on how you can vocalise this to others, you will be able to find opportunities that are mutually beneficial for you and a new organisation. If you’d like to find out more on this topic, be sure to sign up to our newsletter where we’ll be sharing more insights on shaping your healthtech career.
5. Mastering Operations in a Fast-Paced Environment
Below Curistica’s Operations Consultant Chloe Le Baigue explains how combining operational fundamentals and an open mindset can set you up for success on your new career journey.
‘As a clinician, you are likely used to working in a fast-paced environment. Although healthtech is also a fast-paced environment, it is also a very different beast. It’s a constantly moving environment and, depending on the stage of maturity of the organisation you join, those operational frameworks you operate within may need to be built from scratch, or at the very least shaped into place to meet the evolving needs of the organisation. This can be a lot to get your head around, but having coached many clinicians through this transition, I have some tips to help you succeed.
Establish strong foundations
In healthtech, companies change and grow at a lightning fast pace, so having solid operational foundations in place is key to your success. Establishing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) from the outset is a simple yet incredibly effective starting point, especially when working with remote and cross-functional teams. Initially, this can be as simple as a Google Doc created in agreement with your team that lists out the processes and frameworks you will all follow. As well as thinking of sign-off processes and meeting cadences, this can also cover things like processes around saving work and file naming conventions. Although this may seem like granular detail, setting this at the outset prevents confusion and team members working from out of date files, which can cause huge problems later down the line, so spending this time to remove the bumps from the road is well worth doing.
Adopt a change positive attitude
Now that you have yourself organised and your foundations in place, it’s time to focus on ensuring that you are keeping pace with the ever-evolving industry around you. It is here that having a willingness to embrace new changes becomes paramount. New products, new services, the introduction of AI and other novel technologies; the Health Tech sector is blowing up in such a big way at the moment and it’s exciting. Seeing the ways that operational change can lighten the administrative load can be one way to allow you to have the capacity to see the positives that change can bring.
New tools that support everyday tasks are really useful for remote working models, such as Fireflies.ai that we use at Curistica. It helps your team by transcribing, searching, summarising and analysing voice conversations over voice and video calls, which eliminates the need for clogging up diaries with meeting notes, allows all participants to contribute without being distracted by note-taking, and allows team members that weren’t needed for the entire call to benefit by searching for snippets relevant to them in the transcribed meeting notes.’
We have seen through our wide-ranging careers in healthtech and our work in establishing Curistica that focusing on these key elements do really set you up for success. Coupled with surrounding yourself with good people, a passion to help others and a determination to succeed together, you will go far in your new career. If you’d like to learn more, sign-up to our newsletter to be the first to hear about our new healthtech education and training courses that cover topics like these, and more, in greater depth.
Bringing It All Together: Interdisciplinary Success in Healthtech
As you can see from the advice shared by the Curistica experts, there are many elements that will contribute to your success in your healthtech career but fundamentally, it all starts in one place: creating a mindset that encourages you to be curious, open and willing to learn. Whilst you need to be resilient to work in an industry with such fast-paced change, you have to be willing to leave your ego at the door and get stuck in. Remember, it’s a marathon not a sprint with many exciting twists and turns along the way.
Key Strategies for Healthtech Career Success:
Continuous learning and adaptability
Developing a strong ethical foundation
Cultivating both technical and soft skills
Understanding the healthcare ecosystem
Building a professional network
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