Pivoting is so essential in entrepreneurship.

What determines whether to change direction of your sails is market feedback.

I love how entrepreneurship is very much like clinical medicine.

What separates a good doctor from a great doctor is the ability to pick up subtle signs and symptoms from your patients and make crucial treatment plans ahead of the disease progression.

And this could mean life or death for a patient.

I remember once treating a young Bangladeshi man in the ICU.

He had fallen into a drain a couple of weeks ago and suffered a deep laceration wound in his shin. The wound was not treated well and he developed an infection and eventually was in Sepsis.

My first day in that ICU, I saw him. It was already his fifth day in the ICU.

From the foot of the bed as I looked at him, though he was sitting up on the bed, responding to the staff nurse and eating by himself, I could tell he was quite ill.

Very subtle signs that he was in Sepsis and is in a compensated stage. Mild tachycardia and non-responsive to fluid challenge. Mild tachypnea even though he was on nasal prong oxygen supply.

He was on the same antibiotics for 3 days and his vitals is not improving.

The boat looks like it was just about to sail.

And we needed to take more aggressive measures and change the course of our treatment right there and then, or else, we’d lose the patient within a week.

Turns out, only I could see this. No one else that was there – 5 other doctors and the Head of the ICU department could not see what I saw.

I suggested we change his antibiotics, take over ventilation and get him into OT to debride the wound.

They disagreed with my treatment to go at it more aggressively.

They wanted to take the take the wait and see approach. Maintain status quo. Ignore the signs and continue on the same path.

True enough as I predicted, the patient collapsed in the ICU and died a week later.

All because no one else saw the subtle signs I saw. We missed the window period.

I bring this learning with me in many of the things and projects I do. Especially more so now in entrepreneurship.

In building and running a business the market will always give you feedback. Just like how the subtle signs of compensation in that patient of mine showed us that the window of opportunity to take action was slowly closing. It’s only a matter whether you are ready to receive and accept this feedback.

Building a business

The year 2023 was very pivotal for us. As we were running our business, there was a lot of signs and market feedback which we received that showed us that just focusing on doctors and how to transition out of medicine was not enough.

Dr Vivek Subramaniam and I had to go back to the drawing board. We went back, way back to why we both became doctors in the first place.

We both, and like many doctors, became doctors because we wanted to save a life, touch a life.

The question was how else can doctors continue to impact healthcare on a bigger scale.

It was 3 months before our annual Healthcare Diverse Careers Conference for doctors. If we wanted to make any change, we needed to do it now.

We had to make a tough decision. We decided just being robust was not good enough. We had to be antifragile.

We took that leap of faith to tear down everything we built over the last 3 years and rebuilt it again to cater to our bigger vision of building up doctors to disrupt healthcare.

That’s how Disruptive Doctors® came to life. To cultivate agility, innovativeness and tech-savviness in doctors across the globe so that they are better equipped to adapt to the changing landscape of healthcare and disrupt it.

Shedding the old identity and embracing the new brand, one which we can call our own and a new vision was a huge sign of growth for us.

If you are a doctor be sure to get into our Disruptive Doctors Community at www.disruptive-doctors.com . Or if you’d just like to grab a coffee and share experiences, connect with me!

Read this article on why doctors should embrace tech here.