Doctor with software development experience – careers combining both?

Question

I&rsquo;m a trained medical doctor currently working in clinical genetics.At the same time, I&rsquo;ve been programming on and off for about five years and spent over two years working full-time in an IT company as a front-end developer.Despite being back in medicine, I constantly feel drawn back to programming. I enjoy building things, solving technical problems, and working with code.I&rsquo;m trying to figure out what the best direction forward might be. One option is to leave medicine and go fully into software again. But it feels like a waste not to somehow combine my medical background with my technical skills.I&rsquo;m not primarily interested in going down the data analyst route &mdash; I&rsquo;d rather leverage my frontend/full-stack development skills if possible.Are there career paths where medicine and software development meaningfully intersect? Has anyone here taken a similar path?

apothegm · Accepted Answer

There are lots of companies building medical devices, software for clinicians or researchers, or other med tech. I imagine many would be thrilled to have someone with your background. Find a dozen that look interesting to you, and send a message explaining your background and asking how you might be able to get involved.

msmitha · Answer

I did some contract work a few years ago here in the UK for a doctor who wanted to build out a system he had created to manage the subtleties of on-call staff scheduling. He went on to turn it into a very successful business. I think the key for him was knowing the domain and being able to articulate it effectively as well as being very business-minded. Also having excellent contacts within the the business helped.

zora_goron · Answer

I'm currently an Internal Medicine resident physician; I studied computer science before medicine and worked in Natural Language Processing, and currently working on clinical LLM research, deployment, and evals alongside my clinical training.
Many of the academic medical institutions (at least here in the US) have very interesting roles that balance both clinical practice and software engineering/research. If that sounds interesting, I would definitely recommend reaching out to clinicians running those labs!
Happy to chat more if I can be of help - my contacts (twitter/email) are on my website in my HN profile!

ghostlyInc · Answer

I've seen a few startups doing exactly this in health tech.
Doctors who can code have a huge advantage because they understand the real workflow problems in hospitals and clinics.
Some of the best medical software I've seen was built by people who first experienced the pain themselves.
If you enjoy building products, health tech startups or medical tooling could be a very natural path.