Why More Healthcare Professionals Should Be Building Startups

The people best positioned to fix healthcare's problems are too busy to realize it.

Christina Henderson wakes up at 4 AM to work on her startup.

By 7 AM, she's in the operating room as a third-year anesthesia resident at UW-Madison. After a full day in surgery, she's back to building. Then sleep. Then 4 AM again.

When I talked with her on the Startup Wisconsin Podcast in 2025, she'd just launched Reliable Residence that same day. A midterm housing platform for healthcare travelers. Born from waking up to cockroaches crawling across her bed during a rotation at Duke.

Christina thinks the entire narrative around healthcare professionals and entrepreneurship is backwards.

"Being in healthcare is an advantage, not a disadvantage," she told me. "We are in the best spot to recognize issues in healthcare and then suggest a solution."

Most people assume the opposite. Too busy. Too much debt. Too locked into a career path. But Christina's building a case that medical professionals might be one of the most underutilized founders in the country.

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The Waiting Problem

Christina shared that most physician entrepreneurs don't start companies until their 40s or 50s.

By then, they've been practicing for decades. They've seen the same problems over and over. They've complained about broken systems in break rooms for years. But they wait until they're "settled" before doing anything about it.

Christina's argument is simple: why wait?

Medical students and residents see systemic problems every single day. They communicate with patients constantly. They understand where the friction is. They know which processes are held together by duct tape and workarounds.

That knowledge doesn't get more valuable with age. If anything, it gets stale. The longer you're in a system, the more you accept its dysfunction as normal. And not to mention, could have been fixed a lot sooner. Possibly saving more lives.

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Healthcare Professionals Have a Competitive advantage

The typical founder advice says to talk to customers, understand their problems, and build solutions based on real needs. Healthcare professionals do this automatically. It's the job.

Christina didn't need to do customer discovery interviews to understand that healthcare travelers struggle to find housing. She lived it. Multiple times. In multiple cities. The cockroach incident at Duke wasn't a one-off. It was a pattern that nobody was solving.

That's the advantage. Healthcare workers don't have to guess what the problems are. They experience them firsthand. They see the workarounds. They hear the complaints. They know which "solutions" are actually making things worse.

The challenge isn't identifying problems. It's realizing that identifying problems is valuable. Most healthcare professionals assume someone else should fix it. Someone with “business experience.” Someone with technical skills. Someone who isn't working 80-hour weeks.

But the person who sees the problem clearly is often the best person to solve it. Everything else can be learned or hired.

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What's Actually Stopping Them?

If healthcare professionals are so well-positioned, why aren't more of them building companies?

Christina has a theory: they don't know it's an option.

Medical training doesn't include entrepreneurship. The career path is clear: residency, fellowship, attending, maybe a leadership role eventually. Starting a company isn't part of the script. So even when doctors and nurses see obvious problems, they don't think "I could build something to fix that." They think "Someone should really fix that."

The infrastructure doesn't help either. Traditional startup ecosystems aren't designed for people working 80-hour clinical weeks. Accelerator programs assume you can attend daytime events. Investor meetings don't accommodate on-call schedules. Networking events happen when healthcare workers are often working.

Christina's proposed solution? Build a startup community within healthcare itself.

She wants to create programming specifically for medical students and residents. Bring in resources like technical help, fundraising guidance, and mentorship from people who understand clinical schedules. Make entrepreneurship feel possible before people get locked into the attending-physician-for-life track.

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The Systemic Problem Behind the Personal One

Here's what makes Christina's story bigger than one founder's hustle: the housing problem she's solving isn't just an inconvenience for individual travelers. It's a staffing crisis that affects entire communities.

When healthcare travelers can't find decent housing, they cancel contracts. When contracts get cancelled, hospitals stay understaffed. When hospitals stay understaffed, ER wait times get longer. Surgeries get delayed. Patient outcomes get worse.

One bad housing experience ripples through the entire system.

Christina saw this connection because she's inside the system. She knows that the nurse who can't find housing this month becomes the staffing shortage next month. That's not abstract to her. It's concrete. It's the person she was working beside yesterday.

This is exactly why healthcare professionals make such effective founders. They don't just understand the surface-level problem. They understand how it connects to everything else. They see the second and third-order effects that outsiders miss.

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Starting Before You're Ready

The conventional wisdom says medical professionals should wait. Get established first. Pay off debt. Build savings. Then maybe think about entrepreneurship.

Christina's doing the opposite. She's building during residency, when she has the least free time and the most financial pressure. And she thinks that's actually an advantage.

"You don't need to be an attending to start a company," she said. "I think we can start a lot earlier than that."

Her reasoning: the longer you wait, the more you have to lose. An attending physician with a mortgage, kids in private school, and a comfortable income has real reasons to avoid risk. A resident making $60K with nothing to lose? Different calculation entirely.

Plus, the problems are freshest when you're still in training. You haven't normalized the dysfunction yet. You still get frustrated by things that veteran clinicians have learned to ignore.

That frustration is fuel. Use it before it burns off.

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What Wisconsin Could Build

Christina's vision isn't just about her own company. She wants to build infrastructure that helps the next generation of healthcare founders.

Imagine if every major health system in Wisconsin had programming for clinical staff interested in entrepreneurship. Not as an afterthought, but as a real pathway.

Madison already has the raw materials. A world-class medical school. Major health systems. A growing startup ecosystem. What's missing is the connective tissue that helps healthcare professionals realize they're allowed to build things.

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The Real Competitive Advantage

The startup world is obsessed with competitive advantages. What makes your company defensible? What moat are you building?

For healthcare professionals turned founders, the answer is obvious: nobody else understands the problem as deeply as you do.

Outside entrepreneurs can interview customers and read industry reports. They can never live the 36-hour shift. They can never feel the frustration of a system that clearly doesn't work. They can never experience the problem the way someone inside the system does.

That lived experience isn't just an advantage. It's irreplaceable.

Christina didn't need market research to know that healthcare travelers need better housing options. She needed cockroaches crawling across her bed at 3 AM. Some lessons you can't learn from a spreadsheet.

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The 4 AM Question

Christina's schedule sounds brutal. And honestly, it is. But she framed it differently than I expected.

"Your home is your escape from work," she told me. "And for people that have never been to these cities before, the home is just all that more important."

She's not building Reliable Residence despite being a resident. She's building it because she's a resident. The timing isn't a bug. It's a feature.

Every healthcare professional reading this has seen problems that could be solved. Systems that could be improved. Frustrations that affect thousands of patients and workers. The question isn't whether those problems exist. The question is whether you're going to be the one who fixes them.

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Jacob Miller is Marketing & Brand Manager at Headway and Marketing Director for Startup Wisconsin, as well as host of their podcast. As a Yooper based in Green Bay, Wisconsin, he enjoys all the Midwest has to offer.