Recently the MedApps team attended the Creative Careers in Medicine conference. 

For those who don’t know, Creative Careers in Medicine (CCIM) are advocates for professional freedom, igniting your imagination and guiding clinicians toward their passions. CCIM was born out of this spark of inspiration and has grown into a supportive community of doctors and healthcare professionals. They provide inspiration, support, resources, and access to experts who’ve been there and done it, to help clinicians re-design the system and create a career that they can love.

Med Apps Founder and Co-CEO, Dr. Rob Pearlman, is a great example of using your Medical Degree and using it in creative ways to improve the healthcare system. 

At MedApps we’ve been fortunate enough to have many fantastic clinicians work with us over the years. At this year’s conference, two Med App Alums’, Dr Steve Gluckman and Dr Anni Mekhail, were speakers. They shared their personal experiences, insights and knowledge on navigating medical training, care delivery and career change. 

We’re grateful for the opportunity to work with Steve and Anni and play a small part in their CCIM journey. Their contribution to improving the working lives of healthcare professionals continues today. 

Below is an extract from Dr Steve Gluckman’s journey:

“I went into medicine because I wanted to help people, and the more people I met in different communities broader the impact I wanted to have.

During my second year of my residency, when you’re meant to choose which specialty to focus on, I was frustrated. I wanted to do it all, and I wasn’t done yet. I loved moving between rural and the city, pediatric to geriatric, surgical and non-surgical. There was one problem, this idea of becoming an expert of 10,000 didn’t resonate with me. While the education given to me during medical school was excellent, I have since realized that for me, there was something missing in my medical school training.

During my medical training, I had two competing pathways that I felt I was running – my clinical work, and my community work. Clinically, I had fallen in love with pediatric surgery. I thought I was a clown at heart, and I loved solving problems with my hands. And most cases are really complex – they require big multi-disciplinary teams, and a system where almost everyone is giving their all, all of the time. It seemed as if burnout and cynicism was significantly  less present than other areas I had seen in healthcare. Immersing myself in the lives of patients, their families and communities was inspiring but as I learned about the complexities of their patient journeys, I felt that there was a skillset missing for me to affect the kind of change I wanted to have – I just didn’t know what that skillset was yet.

The second pathway that I was running at the time was my community service. In high school, I started a respite camp for children with special needs called Camp Sababa, and over a twelve year period, that camp grew into several camps, and as we learned more about the community, we’ve been able to deliver a broader range of services in this space. I now sit on the board of the Choice Foundation, an endowment fund and incubator. This exercise in solving system level problems from a grassroots perspective allowed me to see that the barriers to a meaningful life for those with complex needs are surmountable.

Searching for an intersection between these two seemingly distinct paths, I came across the incredible team at Medapps. Medapps is an incredible company, founded by Dr Rob Perlman. MedApps gave me the opportunity to work there part time in 2020. Working at Medapps was the first time that I saw a novel technology solution that empowered care providers to deliver better patient outcomes, and I was living that at the time working in the hospital using the policies and frameworks found in the app that we were building. Here I just want to shout-out to another Medapps alumni, Dr Anni Mekhail, who’s speaking today – testament to the amazing team at Medapps and awesome platform to launch a creative career in medicine.

Wanting to think outside the box when it came to patient care, wasn’t my own ego wanting that Jeff Bezos glory, rather it was the inspiration from the special needs community, the complex care patients in Paediatric surgery and the wonderful multidisciplinary teams caring for them. It was their resilience, their trust in the process that gave me the confidence to think that I could help in another way“.

For more information on CCIM, reach out to Dr. Amandeep Hansra or Dr. Elise Putt.

We are always on the lookout for great clinicians to be a part of our team – if you’re a clinician and looking for creative ways to use your clinical skills in a health tech, check out the work with us page or reach out to one of the MedApps team on LinkedIn.