We need interprofessional biomedical entrepreneurship education and training (iBEET)

Interprofessional education (also known as inter-professional education or “IPE”) refers to occasions when students from two or more professions in physical health, behavioral health and social care learn together during all or part of their professional training with the object of cultivating collaborative practice for providing client- or patient-centered health care.

These days there are physician entrepreneurs, entreprenurses, dental entrepreneurs, public health entrepreneurs. bioentrepreneurs, veterinary entrepreneurs, and pharmapreneurs. It's time for interprofessional entrepreneurship, where members of multiple disciplines, not just one, collaborate to pursue opportunity under conditions of uncertainty, with the goal of creating user/patient defined value through the deployment of innovation.

There are many ways that patients benefit when doctors, pharmacists, nurses, data scientists, bioengineers and others play nice together. For example, they can collaborate in:

1. research/clinical trials
2. data sharing
3. interprofessional education
4. medical and pharmacy practice entrepreneurship
5. medical therapy management
6. adherence and compliance
7. digital health, biopharma and care delivery entrepreneurship
8. education to help patients understand the byzantine drug pricing models and how to pay less for drugs.
9. how best to navigate the sick, sick care system
10. how to dispute charges and avoid damaging credit reports from hospitals and doctors.
11. informing patients about which drugs are going off patent and how to find generics at less cost
12. helping each other understand specialty pharmacists and how to collaborate with them
13. standardizing processes of care
14. customer discovery interviews
15. non-clinical careers

One recent example of the need for interprofessional entrepreneurship is is described in the recent report on Empowering 8 Billion Minds: Enabling Better Mental Health for All via the Ethical Adoption of Technologies.

As noted, the need for mental healthcare is increasing and healthcare resources are stretched. Technology is presenting solutions that could improve – and indeed save – the lives of millions of people. With that opportunity in mind, this report also calls for eight actions:

1. Create a governance structure to support the broad and ethical use of modern technology in mental healthcare (including the collection and use of big data), ensuring that innovations meet the five ethical imperatives listed above.

2. Develop regulation that is grounded in human rights law, and nimble enough to enable and encourage innovation while keeping pace with technological advances when it comes to ensuring safety and efficacy.

3. Embed responsible practice into innovative technology designs to ensure the technologies being developed for mental healthcare have people’s best interests at their core, with a primary focus on those with lived experience.

4. Adopt a “test and learn” approach in implementing technology-led mental healthcare services in ways that allow continual assessment and improvement and that flag unintended consequences quickly.

5. Exploit the advantages of scale by deploying innovations over larger communities with their consent.

6. Design in measurement and agree on unified metrics. To ensure efficacy and to inform the “test and learn” approach.

7. Build technology solutions that can be sustained (in terms of affordability and maintenance) over time.

8. Prioritize low-income communities and countries as they are the most underserved today and most likely to see tangible benefits at relatively low costs.

All these actions require interprofessional cooperation and collaboration.

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why doctors don't play nice with others. These days, you can't afford that, so here what you can do about it. Some health professionals see other health professionals as their competition. Even if you do, there are reasons why it pays to collaborate with competitors at work.

Entrepreneurial medical schools and academic medical centeres should teach interprofessional entrepreneurship. We should organize interprofessional meetings, conferences and retreats that would qualify for CME. Winning the 4th industrial sick care revolution, in part, depends on it.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is the President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs on Substack and Editor of Digital Health Entrepreneurship