👨‍💻 Doctors That Code: Aidan Cousins⚕️

Okay so we bent the rules ever so slight on this one.

Our next "Doctor That Codes" Doctor in the making but a talented one at that.

Aidan Cousins, step right up.

Medical Specialty (or intended one):

I am currently a Medical Student working towards a career in Neurosurgery.

Current Job(s):

Junior Software Engineer at MedicRelief.

Why do you think Doctors make good coders/developers/programmers?:

Like with all occupations, there are transferable skills that can be used in other vocations. The transferable skills that allow doctors to be good coders are:

1) Medicine is inherently a problem-solving exercise. As such, doctors develop techniques to solve diagnostic challenges in similar ways that programmers develop ways in which to solve bugs in their code.

2) Medicine is another area that is developing rapidly. As such, doctors have to keep up-to-date with the newest recommendations for the safety of their patients in a similar way to how programmers need to stay up to date with changes to the architectures and languages they use.

3) An aspect of medicine is finding and distilling information in a way that will help a doctor’s practice. This skill can be used to great effect in coding as well since there is always a feature of the project one needs to research how to complete.

What interests you about tech?:

Tech is interesting to me because there are uses for it in whatever niche/pastime/occupation a person has. It is also rapidly evolving which I find really awesome.

Which parts of healthcare do you think will be the most impacted by healthtech post 2020?:

Interestingly, I think the advances and ideas developed while in search for vaccines (for example vaccines that encode mRNA) have potentially great impacts in the development of new treatments in oncology and immunology.

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