Talking HealthTech: 331 – From clinician to entrepreneur. Kevin Wernli, Roy Mariathas, Santosh Kaur – AUSCEP Participants

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Pete speaks with a lot of people who have a clinical background. They have done the hard work to be a doctor, a nurse, or an allied health provider. They go through the training, they get all the qualifications, and then they’re in the system. Clinicians, by nature, see problems firsthand with the system for themselves and their patients who are trying to navigate this complexity of healthcare.

Some clinicians look at those problems and think, “that’s not my issue.” Other clinicians want to make a more meaningful impact. But those clinicians who want to do a bit more tend to have an internal struggle, “how can I go out and do something else? I’m supposed to be a clinician. I did all that training. I don’t want it to go to waste. What will my parents think? How will I make money? 

That internal dialogue is really hard to deal with. But one good thing is you don’t have to do it alone. There are other people in a similar situation.

Today, in this episode, Pete speaks to three individuals who are participating in AUSCEP, the Australian Clinical Entrepreneurs Program. AUSCEP is powered by the REDI Initiative delivered by MTPConnect.

Pete is joined by Kevin Wernli, Roy Mariathas and Santosh Kaur. In this episode, they talk about what you do when you are supposed to be a clinician, and you want to have a more meaningful impact. We hear about these three participants’ journey and the problem they are trying to solve, and how they got to where they are right now. They also share their own experiences and some advice for others in a similar situation. Plus, they reflect on some of the learnings that they have taken from the AUSCEP program.

Meet Santosh Kaur

Santosh Kaur is a registered doctor in India. Because of her early exposure to healthcare services, she has always known that she wanted to be in healthcare. Additionally, her grandmother had dementia and had developed a huge wound on her back. When she came to Australia, Santosh started as a theatre nurse and also worked across aged care, where she saw the same gaps in wound care over and over again, and that is where her transition from clinician to entrepreneurship began. She started to explore the problem of why the gaps in wound care are so basic but weren’t being addressed using technology. 

Meet Kevin Wernli 

Kevin Wernli is a physiotherapist who completed my PhD in lower back pain and understanding how movement and posture relate to lower back pain. He loves being a clinician and finds it to be a rewarding profession, as it is satisfying to help people on their journey. But he often found there were a lot of barriers. For example, for a patient to see him, they have to travel, and it limits how many people he can help in his four clinical walls. It also means it is quite expensive to seek care, and considering that conditions like pain and endometriosis disproportionately affect people of lower socioeconomic status, to Kevin, it felt like they were cutting a lot of people that needed care out of the market. 

Kevin has always been involved in the digital space. So, seeing that the benefits of digital and technology could help make care more accessible, affordable and equitable drove him down the path of understanding how to merge these two to help more people effectively.

Currently, Kevin works for a digital startup in mental health called Oqea, and he has also completed the Perth Biodesign course. Through that, he started building a company by identifying a problem to solve and is now completing the AUSCEP program as well.

Meet Roy Mariathas

Roy Mariathas is a GP and has been in clinical medicine for around ten years but has always dabbled in things that were non-clinical. Now, he’s hit the point where he wants to make a broader impact, and after reading an article written by a cardiologist trainee, he became more resolute. He knew that decision-makers made choices based on economies and business, an area that he knew nothing about but needed to learn. So, Roy did a few months of full-time clinical medicine and then hit the reset button. Now, he works for Eucalyptus, is a part of the AUSCEP program and is also dabbling in a few things with Startmate. 

The Waterfall Analogy…

In the clinical setting, the ethos is about service; however, when clinicians are in the system and have curious minds and know there are other ways to solve problems, that’s where they keep asking themselves the question of crossing that bridge from clinician to entrepreneur. But at the same time, dabbling with another question, “am I in it for the money or, how to balance service and profit?” This is a very common thought amongst clinicians, so it’s always good to have that validation again.

The Wound Care Problem

At the moment, half a million Australians suffer from chronic wounds at any given time. Three billion dollars has been spent just on Medicare patients, and the out-of-pocket spend is twenty billion dollars. That’s a pretty big number to be treating wounds just by general practitioners, and it is going to increase by 4.5%, not just in Australia but worldwide, because of the longevity of increased diabetics and the increase in obesity. 

Santosh and her team are tackling this wound care problem by using disruptive technology, but at the same time are very mindful that they are a for-purpose company and are doing it in a sustainable, ethical, and responsible way. They leverage AI to do the image analysis to help clinicians make those assessments appropriately because, according to Wounds Australia, eighty per cent of the assessments that are done on chronic wounds are not appropriate, and dressing choices are anecdotal along with other very basic errors.

Leveraging Technology to Solve Clinical Issues

It all comes down to access and affordability. People are paying for time one-on-one, and that is beneficial, of course, but also quite expensive. However, employing that one-to-many approach or using a supportive community environment through cohorts would make it much more affordable and bring light to a condition that is traditionally a little bit invisible. 

As such, leveraging that technology can help bring people together and help them make positive behavioural changes in their lifestyle as well. So, setting reminders, using algorithms and machine learning to help understand those different behavioural patterns and lifestyle factors that are influencing a certain condition, then providing tools and strategies to try and help change those. That might involve a group and buddy mentality, or it might involve reminders, reports and insights. 

The Importance of Community in Pain Management

Pain is kind of an invisible condition, and people with endometriosis face these long invalidating, confusing, convoluted journeys being sent from one health practitioner to the next, saying that it’s just normal period pain, or it’s in your head, not even knowing what endometriosis is or that the potential might be there. Kevin and his team interviewed close to a hundred people with endometriosis as part of the Perth Biodesign program, and their stories were common around it being so isolating. There are a lot of great community support groups out there, which clearly shows that it is useful for people. Plus, there are even stories of people who say they have learnt more from their communities than they have from their health practitioners.

Innovating in the GP Market 

The problem space that Roy was looking at was how to provide the best quality outcomes in time-pressure environments while increasing revenue for care providers but also providing cost savings to Medicare or the payer. He thought of starting within the general practice landscape, dealing with chronic disease management. However, he soon realised that there were a lot of politics and regulatory issues. Plus, the landscape was changing, which brought about a lot of uncertainty in general practice.

Consequently, he decided to pivot because the problem space of best quality outcomes, minimal time, cost savings or vice versa and increasing revenue doesn’t have to be localised to general practice. So, thinking more globally, he might start locally within emergency departments.

Pivoting when Necessary 

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution,” is a saying and a lesson being taught to upcoming entrepreneurs in the AUSCEP course and also generally in the entrepreneurial space. As such, there have been a few different organisations, groups and people that have pivoted quite significantly. 

Solving the Problem with Like-minded People

Being around people who get you is really helpful because running a startup is one thing; running it in the Australian healthcare space and running a healthcare startup is another thing. So all clinicians can resonate with each other. You resonate on that human level, then you resonate on that clinician level and with the problems that they are solving. 

The Stages of the Entrepreneurial Journey

Roy went into the AUSCEP program, not knowing what he didn’t know. What he found is that he was able to take some form of gut feeling and then start to put some language and frameworks around that in order to become really cognizant of his plans or purposes, or desires. But then more than that, which is take it from being language to papering it and then turning it into action. In essence, it’s starting with a thought or feeling, and it slowly starts to become a reality. 

Roy went into the program looking to sort out what he wanted to do personally and professionally, but also build a business. The assumed gold standard is to have a VC-backed venture, but it does not necessarily have to be that path. 

Matilda, the endometriosis platform, was born out of the Perth Biodesign digital health course that was also facilitated by lots of the common facilitators of the AUSCEP program. As part of that, the Matilda team had a small MVP and got some good early feedback, indicating that they were changing important metrics. Now, they’ve started to build out a second MVP and received their first customers over the last few weeks, which shows people are finding value in their solution. Nonetheless, Kevin and his team are still quite early in their journey.

The wound care problem that Santosh is trying to solve really started as a bubbling feeling, and they worked on turning it into reality. They used a tested clickable prototype and then released an MVP, which is where they currently are in their journey. 

For 2023, they will be very strategic, focusing on three key areas:

1. AI and product development

2. research

3. capital.

For product development, they need capital, a data scientist, clinicians and a wound consultant. AUSCEP has opened a lot of doors for them, and as such, they are working on another project with The University of Melbourne. 

The Value of AUSCEP Pit Stops

The learnings from AUSCEP and its principles are applicable to everyday life, and the program has also provided immeasurable opportunities for many. The program uses the MOM test for communicating or asking questions in a way that will draw out meaningful and actionable information. It’s called the MOM test because if you were to ask your mom about an app that you are building, she is always going to support you and say, yes, that’s great. But she might not actually buy that. So, it’s a principle of what the customer is actually saying, and it is quite helpful because, at the end of the day, people will be verbally supportive but not support the solution when it truly matters. 

Final Thoughts and Advice

For clinicians looking to become entrepreneurs, start as early as possible and put yourself out there. Figure out LinkedIn, upskill on that social media aspect and network. Personally and professionally, when thinking about a career move, consider these three factors desirability, viability and feasibility. Those factors will be quite helpful in framing your decision. 

Clinicians are busy people, so making that decision or understanding that it is normal is okay and trying to carve out time for yourself to tinker or to have learning-by-experience is useful. Also, most organisations, hospitals and universities have innovation or commercialisation teams, so make contact with them. There are also lots of accelerators and boot camps that you can also look into.  

Health tech is a long game. There are regulatory processes, you have to build evidence, get TGA approval and a variety of other things, so be ready for that journey. Additionally, one has to consider funding because while a lot of people have great ideas, if there is no funding model around that, they can’t create a sustainable business to solve any particular problem. 

If you are a clinician wondering if you should give your idea a try, go for it! Accelerators are the quickest way because they will force you to think outside the box then you know that you have to create a viable business out of it. It might be that you have to kill it, so start with the view that 98% of startups fail, but in those failures are lessons to be learnt. Those skills that you’ll develop are invaluable if you have to go back to being a clinician. 

Whatever you’ll build as a clinician, because you’ve lived and breathed the problem, makes a world of difference when your expertise is combined with that of the tech expert. Also, don’t let that clinician aspect of the ethos around serving the patients stop you from trying because you will get to serve a lot more people. 

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}