How to become a chief medical officer at a healthtech company and what to do next

Medium article by Anna Klepchukova, MD, Chief Medical Officer at Flo Health Inc.

If you’re a doctor working in a clinical practice or the pharmaceutical industry and wondering if there’s something else out there for you: Have you considered making the move to healthtech? The healthtech market is still quite young and growing rapidly, offering many new and exciting opportunities for career advancement. This is my story of how I became the chief medical officer of the most popular women’s health app worldwide. I hope it can act as a guide for all medical practitioners who aspire to enter the world of business.

Before I joined Flo, I worked as an anesthesiologist and Intensive Care Medicine (ICM) doctor. Although I loved being a clinician, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing. I longed to do something else in addition to medicine; solely focusing on clinical work became too routine for me. I wanted to have more impact.

I decided to get a degree in marketing and soon after was offered a job in the pharmaceutical industry. For the next several years, I worked two jobs: marketing manager by day and practicing doctor in an intensive care unit by night. Sometimes, I was late for my office work, and the excuse was always, “Sorry, but I was helping a person who was dying” — a rare case when an excuse like that was 100% true!

I liked aspects of both roles and couldn’t decide between the two. So, for a couple of years, I worked up to 320 hours per month, and in the end, I decided to stay in pharma, where I had the opportunity to impact health on a national level. But after two years in pharma, I realized that my desire to experiment with new approaches and my passion for digital technologies didn’t fit the traditional industry setting.

I started looking for something else and came across Flo — a small startup with an amazing mission: to become a global health partner to 1 billion women and people who menstruate. I wasn’t sure if it was the right move to leave the well-known pharmaceutical company Takeda for a startup that could fail in a month. But I decided to take a risk.

That’s how I became the chief medical officer (CMO) at Flo.

Benefits of working in healthtech

There are lots of advantages for clinicians working at healthtech startups:

1. The opportunity to make a big impact

Many people choose to become doctors because they have a passion for helping people. That’s why we spend 6 to 7 years in medical school and work night shifts at the hospital — because we know we’re making a difference. In clinical practice, doctors may see around 20 to 30 patients a day. But if you become the CMO of a big, successful company or a growing startup, you have the chance to make an impact on a much larger scale.

Working in healthtech is also a more effective, efficient way to disseminate information about health because you can write one article that gets read by millions of people instead of spending time each day repeating health basics to individual patients.

2. Each day is exciting and different

If you’re someone who craves variability in your day-to-day work and gets burned out from routine, you could be a good fit for the startup world. Each day brings its own set of challenges and opportunities for creativity and innovation. Working in traditional industries like pharma and health care can be difficult for someone who thrives on diversity. Healthtech is a good place for people who want to use their creativity to benefit society.

3. Financial advantages for young doctors

From my experience interviewing doctors from different countries, I’ve learned that startups can often offer higher salaries to young doctors than hospitals can. Of course, it’s difficult for a healthtech company to compete with the salary of a clinician in private practice or with 20 years of experience. But if you’ve recently finished medical school, coming to healthtech has financial benefits that a hospital won’t be able to offer you, like growth shares. If the company becomes successful, you can become a wealthy person in just a few years.

4. The chance to expand your expertise to a new area

Doctors have to be lifelong learners in order to stay on top of new developments in medicine and continue providing high-quality care. If you have the desire to learn something new in a field other than medicine, like design, engineering, data science, marketing, or sales, healthtech provides that opportunity. As a CMO or medical advisor, you have to wear many different hats in your daily work. Only about 60% of my work at Flo actually relates to medicine; the rest is people management, marketing, product management, and sales.

Skills you need to become a CMO and how to get them

• Evidence-based medicine

All doctors learn about evidence-based medicine in medical school, and trained clinicians use this approach for diagnostics and treatment. When you work in healthtech, you need to apply the principles of evidence-based medicine when creating new products, features, and content.

• Communication and teamwork

It doesn’t matter if you have direct reports or join a company as the first employee; you need to know how to communicate with others and work in a team. Building a product isn’t a solo effort. And sometimes, in healthtech, you’re the only person in the room with a medical background, so you need to be able to explain and convince people why something may not work from a clinical perspective.

• People management

A huge part of being a medical director/CMO is managing people. To be a good manager, you need to support the people who report to you to achieve the desired results and empower them to find solutions when problems arise.

There are a few ways to improve your communication and management skills: You can take a course in business school or hire a coach to train you on management techniques. The more you work together with people and gain experience as a manager, the better you’ll get at it.

• Marketing and business

The goal of a healthtech company is to help people take care of their well-being in return for money. Sometimes, doctors who move into healthtech forget the business aspect, but you have to remember that you’re not running a charity organization. Each idea needs to be evaluated not only based on whether it’s medically credible but also whether it brings value to the company, for instance, by generating revenue or attracting more users. So, a general understanding of business is an absolute must if you aspire to become a CMO.

There are lots of books and online courses to learn the basics of marketing, business, and finance. When you have a solid understanding of these topics, you’re more likely to propose ideas and strategies that will help you achieve company goals.

• Stress resilience

Working in a startup is unpredictable. There are constantly new questions, challenges, conflicts, and generally unexpected things that can pop up, both good and bad! You need to develop resilience to be able to weather the storm.

Luckily, doctors are already very resilient to stressful situations when coming from clinical practice. But it’s a different kind of stress that you experience in the startup world. As a CMO, a few bad decisions could lead to company bankruptcy, PR scandals, or harm to users’ health.

A psychotherapist or coach can teach you strategies to manage stress. Regular meditation and physical exercise are also a huge help. The more often you face challenges, the less sensitive you become and the better you learn to cope.

• Knowledge of regulations, scientific validation, and clinical safety

It’s often the responsibility of the CMO to oversee the scientific validation of the product, in addition to the road to regulatory approval (if you’re working with a medical device). You also need to know how to ensure that your product is clinically safe so that no harm comes to anyone from using it. There’s a good course from the UK’s National Health Service on clinical safety if you’d like to learn about this topic.

An important thing to know about the role of a CMO is that you need to be an M-shaped person, meaning that you need to have cross-discipline expertise. An additional degree in marketing, product management, clinical safety, or business is a great asset.

The specific skills and expertise that you need will also depend on the company you’re working for. For instance, if you work for a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze digital biomarkers and predict health outcomes, it’s helpful to know the basics of AI. If you’re working for a company that designs new drugs, you should have knowledge of pharmacology. This will help you contribute to product development on a more meaningful level.

The steps to become a CMO

The way I see it, there are three main pathways that you can take to become a CMO. The fast way is to finish medical school, get a few years of clinical experience, and then join a small startup as the CMO. If you are a co-founding member of the team, you can also get company shares and become successful if the startup does well. Just be prepared for a steep learning curve if you take this route.

The second way is longer, and it’s the one I took. After working for several years in clinical practice, you can join a large pharma company, telehealth firm, or private hospital to gain industry experience. There, you can learn how to help the company to generate revenue. To be successful as a CMO, it’s important to have knowledge of the industry and business. Then you can join the healthtech industry.

And there’s a third way: your way. The healthtech industry is growing. It’s new and there are likely to be many ways to get involved that I haven’t mentioned here, like joining as a consultant while you are in medical school, starting in research, or even co-founding your own company and becoming CMO. You can join a big healthtech company as a medical advisor and grow internally into the role, or gain experience at a bigger company and then move over to a smaller company in a management position. There are many potential paths, and if you work smart and hard, I am certain you can reach your goal.

Roles and responsibilities of a CMO

The smaller the startup, the more hats you get to wear. The main role of a CMO (and other management positions) is to help your team define a goal and the strategy to reach that goal, providing resources, mentorship, and motivation along the way.

My days are mostly filled with meetings. If you aspire to be a manager, you have to enjoy talking to people, a lot. If the idea of being in lots of phone calls and meetings every day sounds draining to you, management is likely not the right career choice.

On a typical day, I help strategize company goals and create plans to impact certain metrics for our app. Then, I meet with my team to discuss ways they can help with that goal.

I also run initiatives to get more resources for my team, whether it’s bringing in new people (we’re hiring — see our open positions), developing new tools, or acquiring financial resources. There’s a PR aspect for CMOs as well. You act as the medical face of the company for the public. So I communicate with the media and our commercial and noncommercial partners on a regular basis.

How to be successful as a CMO

To do well as a CMO, it’s critical to build a great team and support them so they can reach their full potential. My goal is for the people who started working with me three years ago to become better at their jobs today, feel happier at work, and learn a lot in the process.

It’s also really helpful to have an open mind and a willingness to learn new things. Be humble enough to admit that you don’t know the answer or solution to everything and ask for help. You will often be confronted with questions that you can’t answer and can’t find online. My secret weapon as a top manager is looking to experts when I feel stuck. Build up a network of trusted advisors that you can reach out to when you need guidance. Get a mentor who is already a CMO whom you can ask questions!

What’s next after being a CMO?

There are lots of career opportunities open to people who have already been a CMO.

• Become a CEO: If you’re passionate about company strategy, working with investors, or owning your own business, you can become the CEO of a commercial company. Just know that you won’t be working in medicine anymore and will be focusing all of your attention on business.
• Be a CMO co-founder: If you didn’t start as a co-founding member, you can go to another company and co-found it.
• Help with digitization in the industry: The pharma and health industries have been very slow to undergo digital transformation. Pharmaceutical companies and hospitals are looking for people with an understanding of digital products to help them move online.
• Return to clinical practice: If you’ve had enough of digital health, you can always move back to clinical practice. With business experience under your belt, you’re well equipped to found your own private practice.
• Become a consultant: Healthtech is growing fast. Hundreds of health apps are launched daily, and all of them need advice. You could join a large consultancy firm or do independent consulting work as a freelancer.
• Join an investment fund: There are investment funds that need doctors with business experience as partners or directors to help evaluate new health startups during funding rounds.
• Build your own digital product: If you’ve already worked in a startup whose product is a mobile app, you know a lot about how they are built. You could get additional training and become a product manager or venture out and work on your own product.
• Work in IT: While working in healthtech, you may actually realize you have a passion for coding, product design, or UX research. If that interests you, you could think about moving to a completely different profession within healthtech.

Final thoughts

If you’re a clinician with an entrepreneurial mindset and want to make an impact on a wide scale, a healthtech startup could be just the place for you. Our medical and scientific affairs team at Flo is growing, and we’re looking for more doctors to help us with our mission to improve the health of all women, girls, and people with a period around the world. Take a look at our current job openings and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re looking for guidance on how to make it in the startup world. We also recently hosted a webinar titled “Five ways to secure a top role in healthtech as a clinician” — click here to watch the replay.