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Medical Specialty: Undifferentiated Junior Medical Officer.
Current Job(s): General Surgery Resident at Toowoomba Base Hospital (recently resigned to concentrate on entrepreneurial endeavours).
Why do you think Doctors make good coders/developers/programmers?:
Doctors are troubleshooters, problem-solvers and diagnosticians. It just so happens that developing software requires many of the same skills.
When I first started writing software many years ago, I had this assumption that most of my time would be spent writing new code. But in fact, most of the time spent developing new tools is used for reading code that is already written and finding and fixing problems.
This is not that far from the type of thinking that a doctor employs when trying to troubleshoot a new symptom or disease a patient is experiencing. Being (a) systematic and (b) logical are highly valuable in both pursuits.
This might seem like a stretch from the outside, but I assure you that in principle, the diagnostic frameworks are intimately linked.
What interests you about tech?:
At its core, the thing that interests me about tech is the potential to increase the bang for our buck (so to speak) with automation.
If we can automate the tedious and trivial parts of our jobs and systems away, we can deliver higher quality health services to more people. Additionally, each of us can work more patient-centred and fulfilling careers with things like administrative paperwork minimised.
After all, this is why most people chose a career in a health field (I note none of this mandates AI or VR!).
Which parts of healthcare do you think will be the most impacted by healthtech in 2021?: Just as for 2020, I predict telehealth will have another big year, regardless of what happens with covid.
I would personally also like to see a greater emphasis on tools that simplify hospital and healthcare service logistics, rather than just those that are useful in a strictly clinical context.
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