Dr. Josh Case is a doctor and software developer from Brisbane, Australia. He is passionate about innovation, global health and very interestingly, teaching doctors to code. He sees huge opportunities for medics in the tech industry, and has made it his mission to empower other clinicians to embrace technology.
Summary
In this podcast episode, he explains why his decision to leave full-time medicine to work at the intersection of healthcare and technology is a low risk, high rewards play. Dr. Case makes the case for why medics should have a keen appetite for technology and make use of the myriad opportunities that are opening up. He talks about his book “Code Blue” and how it is empowering a community of doctor coders.
In true maker spirit, he then walks us through an example of a recent project that he is working on, shedding light on what it takes to do what he does.
Key Questions
4:32.01: …you announced on Twitter and also on your website and that – you’re leaving full-time medicine and going part-time because you would like to focus on opportunities in improving healthcare with technology…you said that you see this as a low risk, high reward play. Could you please share with us why you think so?
12:57.46: …you’ve been in conversation with other young doctors from the world and they seem to be interested (in healthcare + technology)? How do you see this? Do you see this as a shift that maybe a lot of young doctors are now thinking about?
27:24.91: So, as you talk about the opportunities for medics in the health technology industry and this whole change that is happening and probably going to explode, you wrote this book called “Code Blue”, which you call it an introduction to programming for doctors and medical students. Tell us what made you write this is?
34:08.51: How was it for you, especially Gumroad, which allows creators to sort of sell their digital products, be it a book or even art or anything like that. How was that for you? How satisfied are you? How easy or difficult it is to use this platform?
37:57.82: …Could you possibly pick one of those (your projects), which is perhaps more in the realm of data science, machine learning and walk us through or give us a pipeline of how you think through that? How would you take it from idea to production?
Quotable Quotes
7:13.89: That means that there’s an enormous amount of opportunity for clinicians who have some level of technical skill or some level of technical experience to bridge this gap between widely available commercial technologies and their application in healthcare.
13:41.65: This is I guess a new generation of clinicians that are looking to technology to solve some of the problems that are system-wide rather than at the individual level.
22:57.27: …there’s all sorts of technologies that are coming out that are basically knocking on the door of clinical practice and we don’t really have a clear pipeline for how these models are going to be evaluated and maintained and implemented and monitored for compliance to various things.
26:12.94: They (technologists) kind of feel that they have some intuition about what is going to be good for patients, but they don’t necessarily have the same insight or same knowledge that clinicians would have when they’re trying to solve these problems.
30:21.06: I understood that there was a strong desire for clinicians, people with insight into clinical problems who want just a bit of technical understanding to help them get some of the way down the road to building these things and so what I did is I put together an in-principle guide to programming.
31:53.68: If we have a movement towards clinicians getting technically literate, we’ll have more willingness and more motivation for these people to implement new technical systems, to persevere with them when they’re not going well and to contribute directly to the feedback or to the development process, by feeding back their opinions to the people who matter.
45:46.42: The message I want to send is just because you work in health, just because you don’t necessarily have a strong tech background doesn’t mean you can’t get involved in these things.
Someone wise once told me that – “the world is the way it is because someone made it that way.”
Notable Mentions
3:13.98: Toowoomba, Australia
14:59.07: Dr. Eric Topol – doctor, influencer, author of the book, Deep Medicine.
36:35.29: Sahil Lavingia, @shl – Founder of Gumroad
Pointers to past You+AI Podcast episodes
11:52.68: S2-E3 Entrepreneurial lessons in Digital Health, with Sven Jungmann
12.16.29: S2-E5 Navigating AI in Medical Research, with Chris Lovejoy
Connect
Website: joshcase.dev
Twitter: @_JoshCase
LinkedIn: Josh Case
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