11 lessons for health tech startups from one of UpToDate’s creators

My journey into health tech began while I was dictating a colonoscopy report. I was just beginning my academic career at Yale Medical School after more than a decade of training: medical school, residency, a gastroenterology and hepatology fellowship, and then a health services research fellowship. I intended to be a “triple threat” — teacher, researcher-clinician, maybe a department chair one day.

But then I got an initially unwelcome phone call that changed everything.

Burton “Bud” Rose, the eminent Harvard nephrologist, was on the other end of the line. Bud, along with his wife, Gloria Rose, and informaticist Joe Rush, had recently founded UpToDate, which would eventually grow to become the leading evidence-based knowledge resource used by health professionals around the world.