How can a brilliant oncologist, computer scientist, and former top FDA official fix the slow, broken, and expensive system of clinical trials? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Amy Abernethy, a true physician innovator, to uncover the critical need for streamlining clinical research with real-world data. Dr. Abernethy has spent her career tackling one of healthcare’s biggest challenges: how to get effective treatments to the patients who need them, faster. From pioneering research at Duke to scaling a startup to a multi-billion dollar acquisition and modernizing the FDA’s entire data infrastructure, she reveals the playbook for building a true learning health system.
In this deep-dive conversation, Dr. Amy Abernethy shares her incredible physician innovator career path, which took her from the clinic at Duke University to executive roles at Flatiron Health, the FDA, Verily, and now as the co-founder of Highlander Health. She begins by detailing her early academic work building a "Center for Learning Healthcare," where she focused on using patient-reported outcomes and electronic data to understand what treatments truly work. However, she hit a ceiling in academia, realizing that the grant-based model couldn't scale. This led to her pivot to industry and Flatiron Health, where she shares invaluable lessons on scaling health tech companies. Dr. Abernethy discusses the importance of creating a common language ("lingua franca") between clinicians, engineers, and product teams, and establishing a North Star through shared corporate values.
This experience was crucial for her next chapter at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where she served as Principal Deputy Commissioner. Dr. Abernethy provides a rare insider's look at the immense challenges and surprising speed of government work, particularly her focus on FDA data modernization. She explains how the looming wave of cell and gene therapies and the EVALI vaping crisis created an urgent need for a cloud-forward, scalable agency capable of using real-world data for regulatory decisions. This work in advancing real-world evidence in regulatory science set the stage for her current mission. Now in "founder mode" at Highlander Health, she is building the infrastructure for the future of evidence generation by both funding non-profit research and investing in key companies like Target RWE, continuing her lifelong mission of streamlining clinical research with real-world data. This episode is a masterclass for anyone interested in health tech, public policy, and the future of medicine.
Episode Resources:
Introduction
Dr. Trevor Royce: Welcome to Health Tech Remedy. This is the next installment of our bonus series on physician innovators, where we sit down with doctors who step beyond the clinic to create new solutions, lead in biotech, health tech, the regulatory side, all across the board, and they shape the future of care delivery. I'm Trevor Royce, joined as always by my co-hosts, Tim Showalter and Paul Gerrard.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I'm Tim Showalter. In this series, we are exploring how physicians are applying their medical knowledge in unconventional ways, from building companies and products to driving change as investors, policy leaders, and health tech entrepreneurs.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And I'm Paul Gerrard. We'll be learning how these physician innovators navigated their pivots, what inspired them, and what advice they have for others thinking beyond the bedside.
Dr. Trevor Royce: Today, we're thrilled to continue the series with Dr. Amy Abernethy. She's a physician, researcher, and health tech leader whose career has spanned some of the most influential organizations in medicine and technology and played critical leading roles across these organizations.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Amy began her career as a medical oncologist at Duke, where she became a national leader in symptom management, palliative care, and the use of real-world data in oncology. She's basically the original gangster of real-world data and oncology. She then made the leap to industry. She joined Flatiron Health as chief medical officer and chief scientific officer, guiding the company's research, product, and evidence strategy through its acquisition by Roche.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: And after Flatiron, she took one of the highest roles at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Principal Deputy Commissioner, where she drove modernization of the FDA's data enterprise and advanced the use of real-world evidence in regulatory science, as well as navigated the agency through the complex policy and operational challenges of the time.
Dr. Trevor Royce: From there, she joined Verily, leading product development across precision health, clinical trial innovation, and population health, and now is co-founder of Highlander Health. She's building an infrastructure to enable a true learning health system powered by high-quality real-world data. I'm a UNC Tar Heel through and through, and I'm starting to feel like this is becoming a Duke podcast. We've had a number of incredible guests from Duke. And here we are, another one. Amy, welcome to Health Tech Remedy. We're super excited to have you.
Dr. Amy Abernethy: It's a delight to be here with you. Thank you.
Dr. Trevor Royce: We're super excited for our conversation today. I think we can go ahead and start things off maybe by just hearing your origin story. How did your journey begin? How did you even get into medicine? We're excited to hear about your career, but let's start there from the very beginning.
Dr. Abernethy’s Journey: From Computer Science to Clinical Oncology
Dr. Amy Abernethy: I grew up in Orlando, Florida. There really are people who grew up in Orlando. And in fact, I'm sitting back in my hometown now, or I was back a couple of years ago. When I was a kid, I really wanted to work at NASA. I went to Kennedy Space Center, my first job, and I was a computer programmer there. And I really thought that I wanted to be a basic scientist or a computer programmer after my time at Kennedy Space Center.
I went to college, did computer science and biochemistry and math, and planned to go to graduate school. At the last minute, I decided perhaps I'll go into medicine because it is a career path that also involves science. I made this right-hand turn from graduate school to Duke Medical School. And I chose Duke at the time because there was a third year of research. I thought I can learn how to do basic science research, learn it in the context of medicine, and sort out my passion for science along the way.
What happened was that I was in the basic science lab making tumor vaccines, and several days a week in the afternoons, I would take the vaccines that we were manufacturing in the lab, and we would go to clinic, and as a part of a protocol and a study, we would inject patients with the vaccines. Meanwhile, as I was injecting a vaccine into a person's arm, I'd be chatting about what brought you from Ohio to Durham, North Carolina, and what are your hopes and fears as a person with melanoma trying to figure out how to navigate life and cancer and all the things that a person wants to do, including their family and their job, et cetera.
I realized that medicine was this place where I could combine my real interest in science and computation with the humanity of real people who had hopes and fears and passions that showed up all together in the clinic. During that third year of basic science, when I was supposed to become now an MD, PhD, focused on becoming a tumor immunologist, I instead made my next right-hand turn to become an oncologist. I've never looked back from that moment in time of wanting to be a clinician who leveraged science and data and technology to take better care of the patient sitting in front of me.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Great. Thank you. And so just for context, I practice at the University of Virginia, Trevor's a Tar Heel. We're still huge fans, even though you're so closely aligned with Duke. So we'll overlook that. I want to get to your pivot outside of academics, but just first for our listeners, for context. As a junior faculty member, I was very aware of your academic career and your contributions to research within oncology. Could you just maybe summarize a little bit about what your research portfolio looked like and what you were focused on as an academic faculty member during your career at Duke?
Building a Learning Health System at Duke
Dr. Amy Abernethy: At Duke, I ran an organization called the Center for Learning Healthcare. It went through several iterations. There was a time we called it the Duke Cancer Care Research Program. There was a time when we called it the Quality of Life and Palliative Care Research Program. In total, I have always been trying to figure out how do we continuously optimize the care of people with serious illness, in particular, the care of people with cancer.
One of the core questions that was at the basis of the Cancer Care Research Program or the Center for Learning Healthcare was how do we leverage data and technology to streamline clinical research and streamline the process of understanding what treatments work and should be used in the clinic? That meant that we had programs going on evaluating how do we take data that exists in electronic systems and curate it or clean it up so that we could use that information to run observational and randomized clinical trials.
It meant that we were looking at how could we take patient-reported data, so information about symptoms and quality of life, and collect it in systematic yet high-quality ways that allowed us to understand the patient experience and then link that to other data sets so that patient-reported data was a core data type that was included in clinical research.
Those different programs, I think, became both what the Center for Learning Healthcare was known for. We trained fellows, both oncology fellows, as well as fellows across different clinical disciplines. I remember we had orthopedic surgeons in our program, as well as biostatisticians, qualitative researchers, etc., really in this overall set of methods of using underlying electronic data to now streamline clinical research and get to research output.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Yeah, and this was a major, very productive program that was nationally and internationally recognized. And I guess that's a really important context for the next question, which is what sparked your first pivot beyond academia? What pulled you out of that space into making an impact in other areas?
The Pivot from Academia to Industry: Why Scale Matters
Dr. Amy Abernethy: You mentioned that this was a program that was well-recognized. One of the things that we were known for was essentially our productivity. We were very, very efficient at taking underlying data sets, curating them, and now starting to streamline the clinical research sitting right in front of us. But practically speaking, the work really didn't scale. Part of the reason it didn't scale was just the fundamentals of how academic grants are distributed. The process of NIH-driven science, which is really important to get a foothold in a scientific area, but then ultimately now needs to be replaced with different ways of doing that research.
There was a scaling problem with respect to doing work within academia, and there was a scaling problem with figuring out how do we recruit engineers and other, particularly software and hardware-based disciplines into the process of solving this question of how do you use the underlying data of healthcare to streamline the research. And so in 2014, I started scratching my head to say, okay, what are we going to do to scale beyond the boundaries of academia? And for that reason, it made sense to me to move towards the venture capital and startup world to really figure out, could we leverage those capabilities to essentially supercharge what we were doing at Duke?
Dr. Paul Gerrard: That brings us to the next episode in your career, which was at Flatiron, which was a company where you played a huge role in building the real-world evidence platform. And you just talked about some of the differences between academia and the world of industry. What advice might you have or what lessons do you think other physician leaders can take from scaling a mission-driven health tech company?
Lessons in Scaling a Mission-Driven Health Tech Company
Dr. Amy Abernethy: It's interesting. The first fundamental lesson is you go from academia to health tech or industry. But also from a physician-driven organization to an organization driven by other disciplines, including product and engineering. You need to step back and learn how to work and be effective in a completely new environment.
That's a really critical fundamental from day one. It means making sure that you're humble enough to realize that what was really successful in your prior physician life, academic life, does not always portend success in this environment. Two practical examples of that are that in my time as a clinician at Duke, it was very clear what the hierarchy was. My job as a clinician was essentially to make the final decision, and then it would be cascaded down through a system that ultimately led to an order, and for example, a medication being given to a patient in the hospital.
But in a startup company with very different disciplines responsible for moving that work forward, that system of making progress was about essentially now influencing from the side and not from a hierarchical top that cascaded down from what I had to say. So that was probably my first really big shift in thinking that was fundamental.
And then the second part of that is that if there's a difference in how you work together, there's also an update that's needed in the language that you use. One of the aspects of being in a hospital or being in clinical settings is we have developed a vernacular in healthcare that we all understand. Perhaps our families would giggle at us across the dinner table because we were using funny medical jargon. But in fact, that medical jargon meant something to everybody on the healthcare team in the hospital.
But now those words did not necessarily have the same meaning across a health tech team and product and engineering and statisticians and all the different types of team members you need to make this work happen. And so building what I called lingua franca is the second big thing that I had to learn how to do as a health-related leader in a scaling health tech company.
My core example of this fall was that the word table does not necessarily mean the same thing to every single person. The statistician thinking about the word table looks very different than the carpenter's words of what's table versus as we think about all the aspects of the table from which we work within the context of clinical settings. And so figuring out the glossary or lingua franca was the second really big aspect of scaling.
Putting those two things together, the last thing I would say is something that was striking to me in moving from academia and health care to industry was the importance of setting culture and ways of working often wrapped up in a set of principles called corporate values. And at first, when I started learning about this, I thought the whole thing was silly. When we come from healthcare, we already understand our mission is to have the patient to the center and how we work together to march towards the goal of better health for all. And we don't really spend a lot of time in healthcare saying, here's our healthcare-related values, because they are baked into the way that we think.
But in industry, it's really important to make sure that you set a North Star that everybody can understand and you set some principles and ways of working that not only you can write on paper but you can role model. And we know this for medical training; we just don't talk about it, and it turns out it's really important to put it in play as you're thinking about a mission-driven health tech company.
And so as I think about what I learned during my time at Flatiron, it was not only the importance of setting culture and writing down values so that we could all understand them, but it was living them and having those values put into clear visibility the things that I had learned about what it was going to take for us to move forward. And my personal value that I had championed at Flatiron was something called willingness to sit on the floor. And the reason that I championed this value was because we all needed to sit on the floor and be exactly on the same level if we were going to work together to move things forward.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: So that's great advice. How do you think that shaped the narrative of real-world evidence in particular? And I guess, let me ask more broadly, what do you see as the future impact of real-world evidence?
Shaping the Narrative for Real-World Evidence
Dr. Amy Abernethy: So what does that shape, the narrative of real-world evidence? As I step back and look at the real-world evidence space, there are a lot of parallels around human. When we first started talking about real-world evidence, let's call it 2012, it had had different names up until then. We had kept changing the name. It was outcomes research, comparative effectiveness research, patient-centered outcomes research. Then we called it real-world data and real-world evidence. It was the same book of work with updating capabilities across time.
So having a common lingua franca was first a really important part. So we could understand together what this concept of real-world data and real-world evidence is. But then the second part is the humility of saying, and we don't really know fully how to get this work done or what good looks like. So we're going to need to develop the methods together. We're going to need to partner with critical stakeholders, including FDA and pharmaceutical companies and other rural data companies to start to define the boundaries of what good looks like, including the scientific boundaries, the data quality boundaries, etc.
And we're going to need to also then write down those rules of the road so that others can now understand them similarly and start to work on them. And what's interesting is those were actually almost exactly the same three principles as I mentioned that it was of what it takes to scale in a health tech mission-driven company. It's building lingua franca. It's humility that you don't know yet and you need to build together. It's writing down the rules of the road and making sure that everybody can step back and agree on common principles.
Dr. Trevor Royce: On the topic of those principles, Tim and I have joked quite a bit since our days at Flatiron about how those values have stuck with us just as North Stars when we encounter hard problems. And for whatever reason, those Flatiron values are kind of magical and serve as a guiding principle in a lot of ways as we take on new challenges.
Dr. Amy Abernethy: It's really remarkable.
Dr. Trevor Royce: I'm going to pivot just a little bit. We've heard basically an inspiring career journey with some very clear chapters, innovation and discovery in academia to true impact in industry. Obviously, there was the big acquisition of Flatiron, which I think is a good capstone or acknowledgement of that success. And then would love to hear a little bit about stepping into a senior leadership role at the FDA. Tell us about that pivot in a government service. What were some of the biggest surprises moving from industry to federal leadership? Love to hear a little bit about that.
From Industry to Government: A New Chapter at the FDA
Dr. Amy Abernethy: So in the same way, it became clear during my time at Duke that we hit a ceiling and it was going to require pivoting to a different way of solving the problem, namely pivoting to a health tech company with venture capital funding to now essentially make progress in how do we leverage data and technology to streamline clinical research.
In that same way, it became clear to me when I was at Flatiron that another core mechanism to continue to pull that story forward was going to be, from the government lens, really responsible for shepherding the development of the rules of the road. And so if you think about my career story as being a series of sequential efforts to keep solving the same set of problems, the move to FDA and government was a natural progression. Some people used to think that it seemed completely at odds with what I had been doing up until then. But, in fact, it was, I think, the natural next step.
And when I started at FDA in February of 2019, I said that the three things that I wanted to work on were putting the patient at the center of the work that we did as a nation at FDA, real-world data, real-world evidence, and personalized health care. And those are the three things that I made as my core focus.
What were the biggest surprises? Being inside government, the biggest surprise I had is how fast it moves. It looks like from the outside that government moves very slowly and is quite unwieldy. But once you're on the inside, what you see is there's a whole bunch, what feels like thousands of swim lanes all moving in parallel. And so while any one particular swim lane may be moving somewhat slowly, in aggregate, as you're working all across them, things are moving by very, very fast.
And so you have to have a meta vision of what you're trying to get to. For example, responsible use of real world data and real world evidence, because all of those parallel swim lanes in themselves now need to all keep making progress into that meta vision. And I would say the speed of government and the just absolute scale and degree of impact was the most surprising thing.
It is also notable that I said I started in February of 2019. And so I was there a year later as the start of the pandemic occurred. And just watching what could happen when government needs to turn or pivot in a moment is also very awe-inspiring because we do indeed have laws in place to allow us to respond in the moment of national emergency and being able to see that was quite remarkable.
Dr. Tim Showalter: The timing of that must have been just amazing to see those programs kick in motion. While we're covering your time at the FDA, I wanted to spend a little bit more time talking about your focus there on modernizing data systems and advancing the use of real-world evidence in regulatory decision-making. Can you walk our listeners through the vision that you had for that and some of the challenges of that work as well?
Modernizing FDA Data Systems to Meet Future Challenges
Dr. Amy Abernethy: I'll never forget, it was probably April or so of 2019, and I was talking to Scott Gottlieb, and he had just announced that he was leaving FDA as commissioner. And we were discussing what I really wanted to take on after he left. And I was describing how important I thought that it would be for us to have a modern FDA with respect to data and technical infrastructure to have us be able to be more cloud forward, to be able to leverage interoperable structured data that could be analyzed in real time, and that this would be important for both scaling the agency, and I'll come back to that in a second, as well as making sure that the agency could respond efficiently at critical times.
In that brainstorming conversation, I offered to take on the role as acting chief information officer, which was largely an operational role at FDA. I thought if I can be in that operational role and then set it up as a strategic role for the FDA of the future, then that would help us have the setup for a much more modern agency. And so that's probably April of 2019. And I added the role of acting chief information officer on to my role as principal deputy commissioner.
That summer, so the summer of 2019, together with a number of individuals in the commissioner's office, we started working on a white paper of why it was going to be so important for the agency to scale. At the time, there were 1,000 INDs, so investigational new drug applications for cell and gene therapies. And you can imagine with just this volume of innovation coming down our drug development pipelines and ultimately going to be hitting the agency, you need a regulatory apparatus that can scale in line with all of these novel health innovations.
And further, with cell and gene therapies, it is also important that as a nation, as a globe, we keep check on these meaningful interventions across time to make sure that they are indeed impactful and safe for decades to come. And building an agency that could scale for that was a key task, including how could we leverage data that exists in the ecosystem? So, for example, real world data, real world evidence, electronic health records to serve as a part of that scaled infrastructure to evaluate the many innovations coming to the agency.
So that was the summer of 2019. And something important happened in September 2019. And that was EVALI. You may remember a vaping-related lung illness. There was vitamin E being cut into vapes. And we had many kids across the country in ICUs. And the then center director for the tobacco center said to me, the same concerns that you've got in scaling the infrastructure of the agency for cell and gene therapies applies to how we need to think about managing a major national challenge like EVALI.
That then led to my essentially developing the data and technology modernization action plans for a cloud-forward agency able to have APIs and mechanisms for exchange of data in and out and also not only the technical infrastructure to accomplish that but essentially the progression in the thinking of the people who are in place at the agency. And those two action plans are still in place now.
And in fact, in March of 2020, when the agency went from an on-prem, so to speak, organization to a virtual organization overnight in order to manage the pandemic, that infrastructure and that initial thinking was fundamental to moving towards a virtual agency. And now in 2025, that point of view about having a cloud-forward agency ready to exchange data is starting to show up in new work from the current administration, in FDA goals around JSON and FHIR standards, et cetera. So we're starting to see a lot of this continue to move forward. And it certainly is important for real-world data and real-world evidence.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Wow. You were commenting on how fast things move in the government. And that wasn't that long ago. And it didn't occur to me until you just went through it all, how much really has changed and how much really has happened. But I want to move forward to where you are now. You're at Highlander Health and you're in founder mode. So can you tell us a little bit about the Highlander Health Institute, Highlander Health Partners, how these two organizations are working together and what problems you're trying to solve?
Founder Mode: The Launch of Highlander Health
Dr. Amy Abernethy: Ah, founder mode. My colleague Brad Hirsch and I stepped back about a year and a half ago and said, really, what's the problem we intend to work on for the next chapter? We're very focused on how do we dramatically accelerate the timelines of getting treatments that worked to patients who need them. And that's really why we started Highlander Health. We had both stepped out of Verily, really focused on this singular mission, and set up Highlander Health as an organization in two parts.
The first part of Highlander Health is Highlander Health Institute, and we call this a public interest platform. We give grants, these are nonprofit grants, to health systems and others to work on the operational details and test capabilities with respect to how do you modernize clinical research and clinical research infrastructure. And I can give you two examples in just a second. But the goal of Highlander Health Institute is to do work where the results are transparently available to anybody across the ecosystem so that companies, academics, health systems, government, et cetera, can now take lessons learned and move the whole ecosystem forward.
The second part of Highlander Health is Highlander Health Partners, and there it looks more like a growth equity investment firm, growth equity, private equity, where we make investments in companies that we think are a part of the modern clinical research infrastructure of the future. That investing thesis looks more like full acquisition or controlling stake in companies to make sure that the direction of the companies that we invest in will be in line with new solutions for clinical research infrastructure. And we made our first investment, and it was announced in January of this year, where we acquired a company called Target RWE in Durham, North Carolina.
Dr. Trevor Royce: That's great. I guess when you take the leap and found something and make that transition, a lot of it comes down to timing. Why was now the right time to start Highlander Health?
Dr. Amy Abernethy: It's funny. A lot of people said to Brad and I as we were stepping out to do this, that, oh, my goodness, this was the beginning of 2024. The election was coming. We should wait until there's some sense of certainty of what the future looks like. And we felt that there is certainty that the need to solve for clinical research capacity is going to be critical no matter what.
What we could see, similar to the story that I described for you at FDA, is that the investment we have had as a nation, as a globe in biology at the end of the last century and the first two decades of this century really has given us a plethora. It's exciting. The pipeline of novel innovations potentially eligible to make a difference in patients' lives, but we need to be able to responsibly understand safety and effectiveness and get those treatments to patients.
And so, essentially, the ability to do that work needs to be accelerated, revved up. And the core duty of Highlander Health in helping to solve for that was front and center no matter what was going on with respect to the external investing environment or government environment. And so we decided to get going because it was very clear that the demands around evidence generation and streamlining it was going to be the case no matter what.
Dr. Tim Showalter: I'm curious, could you give us a couple of examples of some of the projects you're working on at the health system level to help move forward some of this work?
Inside Highlander Health: Streamlining Clinical Research in Practice
Dr. Amy Abernethy: Absolutely. Two examples. One is a grant to Baylor Scott White, a project led by Mike Mack and Javed Butler and the Baylor Scott White Research Institute. And the core question is, what's it going to take to be able to leverage data that sits in electronic systems at health systems and populate federally mandated registries? Health systems have many electronic systems, so the EHR as one's electronic health record, echocardiography databases, databases that represent the information coming out of a cath lab, et cetera.
Those data sets reside in the health system, and right now in 2025, when a health system needs to populate a federally mandated registry, for the most part, nurses review the medical record, review the electronic databases, and then enter into a case report form by hand or typing in the information after reading one and moving it to the next. Why can't we move the information from one system to the next?
An example, federally mandated registry, is the TAVR or the valvular device programs and the CMS mandated coverage with evidence development program. So, both FDA and CMS require longitudinal data related to valvular devices in order for those devices to be used in the United States. And right now, the TAVR registry is just one example. It's called the TVT Registry. It's currently populated by health systems all across the country as a mandate in order to get reimbursed for these valvular device procedures.
And the question in this project is, what's it going to take for the data that exists in electronic systems at Baylor, Scott & White to be able to be ported into the TAVR registry? Including data that sits in structured fields, unstructured fields, and also how can lessons learned at Baylor, Scott, and White now be transferred to other health systems so that the steps that Baylor, Scott, and White learns can also now be taken up at the next health system down the street.
The other project to describe at Highlander Health Institute is a grant to Memorial Sloan Kettering. And there the question is, what's it going to take in order to operationalize the FDA decentralized clinical trial guidance, including aspects related to the role of healthcare providers. These are local clinicians in collecting clinical trial-related data in this decentralized clinical trial model. And for the Memorial Sloan Kettering program, a number of health systems participating in the Memorial Sloan Kettering network are now participating also in investigator-initiated trials where different steps of the decentralized clinical trial guidance are being tested out to understand what does it take to operationalize that guidance, what does data quality and efficiency and clinical trial quality look like, and how can you do that work at scale.
Dr. Paul Gerrard: Well, thanks for giving us all that insight on what's happening at Highlander Health. As we draw to a close here, I wanted to ask, you have obviously done a lot in your career as a physician, and some of our listeners are physicians early in their careers who are curious about innovation and leadership roles outside of the hospital. What advice would you give to them to help steer their careers so that they can make an impact?
Advice for Aspiring Physician Innovators
Dr. Amy Abernethy: First of all, for those physicians looking to make an impact in an enlarging number of ways, thank you. And also for those physicians that are focused on taking care of patients, thank you as well, because we need both. If you're looking to potentially add new endeavors to your career, a couple of thoughts. The first is that physicians are inherently concerned about taking too much unnecessary risk. So therefore, the question becomes, how do you de-risk the addition of a new role or taking a completely different tact with respect to your job?
And that might mean a part-time role for a little while to understand what's it going to look like to work in a non-clinical setting and how does it settle for you. It may mean taking more cash compensation than equity compensation compared to other people working at the company. It may mean trying to learn as much as you can about the industry beyond the boundaries of current clinical practice before you actually start to take a jump. But my first piece of advice is to recognize your risk tolerance and to think through what are the critical steps to de-risk the decision if your risk tolerance is not very high.
The second piece of advice that I have for physicians looking to take on new roles is to recognize that there are a number of ways that physicians show up in industry and companies beyond the traditional clinical setting. Sometimes it is around being a part of the commercial or sales team and being a part of helping a company bring on new business. Sometimes it's being a part of the product team and being a part of developing the product suites. Sometimes it's part of coaching and mentoring and leadership. Sometimes it's being responsible for clinical details and setting a patient-centric vision of the company.
It's often one or two of these swim lanes, but it's really hard to show up in a company and be responsible for working across all of these different swim lanes. And so my piece of advice is to understand the setting where you're thinking about working and what they're looking for in their clinical leaders and their clinicians coming on the team and making sure that their expectations matches what you expect to be doing in that company. And then you can start to think through how to do that work well. I wrote a piece at Russell Reynolds about the chief medical officer role and what physician leaders look like, especially in health tech companies, and set out these different archetypes that might be helpful if you're looking for a thought piece that gives you some ideas about how you might consider this for yourself.
Dr. Tim Showalter: Well, Dr. Amy Abernethy, thank you so much for spending time and sharing your wisdom. It's really inspiring to see the impact that you've made and continue to make on the U.S. Healthcare system through your thought leadership and work to champion improvements in the system.
Dr. Amy Abernethy: It was a delight to join you. Thank you very much for having me.
Dr. Tim Showalter: That's it for this episode of Health Tech Remedy's special series on physician innovators. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. And if you know a physician innovator we should feature, or a company for that matter, reach out. We'd hope to hear their story.
