Emergency medicine appears repeatedly in the Startup Physicians catalog. I notice it because it is my own clinical background, but the specialty also develops habits that transfer well to innovation: working with incomplete information, moving between very different problems, coordinating across teams, and making decisions without waiting for perfect conditions. Those habits do not automatically make someone a founder, but they help explain why several emergency physicians I have interviewed found their way into startups through very different routes.
Dr. Daniella Dennis: building during residency
Daniella Dennis started Payscope MD during her intern year of emergency medicine residency after seeing how difficult employment contracts and compensation data can be for physicians early in their careers. She used no-code and AI tools to build an early version and started gathering feedback before she had a traditional startup background.
The timing is what makes her story worth studying. Physicians can always find a future milestone after which an idea will supposedly become easier to explore: after residency, after fellowship, after boards, after the next job change. Daniella found a problem that mattered to her and used the tools available to test it at a small scale. Her MVP did not need to prove that she could build sophisticated software; it needed to help her learn whether the problem, user, and proposed solution fit together.
Listen: Physician Entrepreneurship in Residency with Dr. Daniella Dennis →
Dr. Alex Mohseni: create opportunity by solving real problems
Alex Mohseni’s path started with operational problems inside an emergency medicine group. He worked on performance data, back-office processes, and telemedicine, eventually becoming the group’s chief innovation officer before moving further into startup leadership and founding ClinX Academy.
Alex says something in the episode that I have repeated since: “you can just do stuff.” The phrase works because he did not wait until somebody formally appointed him an innovator. His boss asked him to look at a back-office problem, Alex found a practical solution, and one project led to another. He describes his core contribution as a problem-solving mentality rather than a formal qualification. For physicians who cannot see an obvious application process into health tech, that is a useful model: solve one real problem where you already have access and let the work create the next opportunity.
Listen: How to Create Opportunity in Health Tech with Dr. Alex Mohseni →
Dr. Kieran McLeod: learning product by building
Kieran McLeod trained in emergency medicine in South Africa, worked with Doctors Without Borders, and later moved into startup and product work in Australia. His first venture was a smoking cessation app. He built without a coding background and learned product development through trial, error, low-code tools, and exposure to the startup ecosystem.
His story does not pretend that clinical skill automatically makes product work intuitive. Kieran had to learn a new discipline and understand what it means to build in a crowded market, which is different from recognizing that a problem exists. Emergency physicians become good at entering an unfamiliar situation, identifying what matters first, and finding the right person or resource quickly. Kieran applied that habit to technology and product work rather than expecting himself to know everything at the start.
Listen: The Startup Leap with Dr. Kieran McLeod →
Daniella, Alex, and Kieran used different entry points and built different kinds of careers. The common thread is a willingness to work on a problem before the entire path is clear. That habit is familiar in the emergency department, and it travels surprisingly well.
