When I began medical school, I thought the hardest thing I would do was learn how to treat diseases or deal with the end of life. What I didn’t realize was that understanding the biology of illness is just one part of becoming an excellent physician. There is also a system — vast, complex, and often invisible to the nerdy pre-med student — that shapes the care patients receive long before a doctor walks into the exam room. I only began to see this system clearly when I stepped outside of it for one year.
Taking a year off from medical school to work in health tech consulting and venture investing was not an easy decision. At the time, it felt like I was hitting pause on a dream I had pursued for years and delaying the end goal of becoming a physician. But what began as a professional detour quickly turned into one of the most formative experiences of my medical education. Immersing myself in the world of startups, payers, providers, and policy gave me a vantage point that few medical students or residents have the opportunity to see before they are attendings.
In clinical rotations, we’re taught to zoom in and focus on the patient in front of us, the labs, the diagnosis, and the treatment plan. But in the world of health tech, I learned to zoom out. I sat in meetings with digital health executives trying to redesign pulmonary care delivery. I assessed value-based care models built to shift incentives away from volume and toward outcomes. I watched investors place bets not just on clinical efficacy but on scalability, reimbursement, and market timing.
One of the most jarring realizations was just how many decisions affecting patient care are made far upstream of the clinical encounter. Whether it was a startup trying to prove ROI to a payer to get a pilot deal or a health system struggling to implement and integrate new technology due to outdated EHR infrastructure, it became clear to me that health care is as much a product of business models and infrastructure as it is of medicine. Physicians often find themselves reacting to a system they did not help design and have little to no say in reshaping.
Working in value-based care challenged me to think differently about what “quality” means in medicine. In training, we’re taught to think in terms of individual outcomes: Was the pneumonia treated? Was the A1C lowered? Was the patient discharged? But in the value-based care world, quality becomes something more expansive — encompassing prevention, coordination, patient satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness. I began to see that good medicine isn’t just about treating disease; it’s about designing systems that make health sustainable — for patients, clinicians, and society.
Perhaps one of the most surprising and important lessons I learned was how essential physician voices are in the business and tech spaces — precisely because they are so rare. In boardrooms filled with MBAs or product and partnership leads, simply understanding what actually happens on the hospital floor gave me a perspective that others didn’t have. I could speak to the friction points in workflows, the psychological toll of burnout, and the subtle but important differences between compliance and compassion. My clinical training gave me credibility but also responsibility — to advocate for solutions that don’t just sound good on paper but actually work in the exam room.
This year away also gave me time to reflect on what kind of physician I want to become. I realized that I’m not just drawn to patient care; I’m also deeply curious about systems, strategy, and innovation. I want to live in that in-between space where clinical expertise meets organizational impact. I want to be the kind of physician who doesn’t just treat disease but helps reimagine the structures that perpetuate disease through fast and integrated tech. That might mean working in academic medicine with a focus on quality improvement, or it might mean building or investing in companies that put patients and their caregivers at the center of the design.
Some might worry that stepping away from the wards would make me rusty or detached from the human element of medicine. In reality, it did the opposite. It reminded me of why I started this journey in the first place. Every Zoom strategy session about product or marketing strategy was ultimately about someone’s relative with a challenging chronic condition. Every demo was, at its core, trying to ease the burden of a patient or clinician. Seeing medicine from the outside looking in made me more committed to it from the inside out.
As I return to the final months of medical school and prepare for internal medicine residency, I carry with me a sense of dual vision. I can see the micro — the subtle clues in a patient’s story, the nuance of a physical exam — and the macro: the policies, technologies, and incentives that shape what care gets delivered. I know now that being a great doctor isn’t just about what you know — it’s about what you understand. And sometimes, to understand medicine better, you have to step outside of it.
Health care is changing fundamentally, as well as the role of physicians. The next generation of physicians will need to be more than just diagnosticians or proceduralists — they’ll need to be translators between the clinical and systemic structures of health care. Taking a year in health tech didn’t delay my medical education; it expanded it. It gave me a new lens through which to view the patient, the clinician, and the system that connects them. I highly encourage all medical students to keep these principles in mind from the beginning of their careers. I hope to spend my career using that lens to build a health care future that works better — with everyone and for everyone.
What is your experience with working in or around health tech, and how has it shaped your perspective in medicine? Share below!
Shreya Jain is a medical student at SUNY Downstate College of Medicine in NYC and an associate at Quintuple Aim Solutions, a value-based care advisory firm. She's a native New Yorker, amateur skier, and eternal optimist. She writes about medicine, business, tech, and education on X at @ShreyaJainNYC. Shreya Jain is a 2024–2025 Doximity Op-Med Fellow.
Illustration by Jennifer Bogartz
