Industry Voices—Doing well by doing good: Mission-driven opportunities in healthcare without compromise

There’s a misconception that when choosing our career path or even our next gig, we must choose between doing well financially or doing good for society at large.

Because of the large changes driven by digital health and the consumerization of healthcare in today’s industry, I firmly believe that you don’t have to choose. Talented people are joining the healthcare industry in droves today, where the challenges of building innovative solutions to real-world problems using cutting-edge technologies also drive meaningful contributions to society.

High wages in healthcare have historically been a direct contributor to the cost of care in the U.S., primarily due to inefficiencies in the system. Unfortunately, these inefficiencies prevent healthcare professionals from performing at the top of their craft and capabilities and force them to settle for the status quo. The revolution taking place today, both within established healthcare organizations and in many startups, is applying technology to create leverage for the care industry as a whole. The goal is that this leverage will ultimately maximize the health outcomes and experiences for patients and in turn create more value—in all meanings of the word—for everyone, especially those involved in managing, delivering and, most importantly, receiving care.

This revolution has been taking place in other industries for a long time: from managing your bank account and investments to lower consumer prices and increased selection at your favorite e-commerce business. Now, too, these technology-driven transformations are arriving in healthcare.

Historically, the healthcare market has been bogged down by the perceived notion that it was not a place where innovative technology could be built in service of scaled impact. Instead of seeing the brightest talent flock to our organizations, we’ve frustratingly watched as they join companies innovating to beat the stock market or drive people to spend more time on their screens.

We’ve watched as cream-of-the-crop talent created the multitude of ubiquitous social media products that are now a part and parcel of our daily lives. Though impacting society in their own way, these businesses have managed to attract the greatest talent across the globe by correctly marketing the problems they solve as the most interesting, their reach as the most staggering in volumes of people’s lives affected and their impact on people’s lives and financial opportunity for their businesses as the most massive. 

Unlike the days of the past, however, these dynamics are no longer limited to the purview of big tech businesses and their ilk but are now available in spades in the healthcare environment. The mix of high and increasing healthcare costs, coordination complexities and the scarcity of skilled healthcare hands-on expertise on one hand and the desire and demand of leadership within the healthcare industry to seek new innovations on the other all combine to produce a massive opportunity in the job market. Healthcare drives over $4 trillion of cost in America today and has massive opportunities for improvement if we can solve the challenges faced: challenges to access to the right care, introducing efficiencies to allow clinicians to operate at the top of their craft, and by delivering scaled impact in a mission-driven environment. Simply put, there is no other opportunity to do good and drive enormous financial savings for the industry at large, and financial gains for the businesses driving the greatest impact. 

The world and our lives in it are at a challenging point halfway through 2022. Ominous clouds are gathering with social, political and economic uncertainty contributing to the difficulties brought about by a multiyear, and still going strong, global pandemic. Markets are insulating themselves for a coming winter. Companies across sectors are implementing budget cuts, layoffs and tightening measures. Consumer sentiment is anything but positive. 

In the face of these realities, the nation and its workforce are feeling rightly fatigued, and many of us are grappling with existential questions about what we want from our lives and from our work. This collective sentiment has led to the “Great Resignation” that I believe is driven by a deep desire to impact our world in meaningfully positive ways and move away from feeling as though our work is futile, meaningless or not aimed at solving the most meaningful problems we face in our society today. Where many are leaving the workforce entirely to rethink their goals for themselves and their families, it’s worth reminding them and anyone reconsidering their career direction that the healthcare system in our country is in dire need of help, and we need the brightest minds on board to have a chance at successfully transforming our nation’s health. 

This can only be done by solving some of the most pressing problems we’ve faced as a nation. The population of people with obesity, chronic heart failure, diabetes and kidney disease is skyrocketing, and helping them improve their health provides the most challenging problems that I’ve faced in my multidecade career in technology. The questions we are asking and answering on a daily basis are easily as complex as those faced by the consumer businesses we are most familiar with and which have dominated the landscape of innovation in recent years, and, in coming years, some of the biggest and most challenging problems our society faces are found right here in healthcare.

Our task is to rise to these challenges and deploy the full weight of our ample intellectual capabilities to solve them. I invite you to join me in this journey.

Mustafa Shabib is the co-founder and CTO of Season Health.