Docs Help Docs Start Businesses

Have an idea for a business? A husband and wife doctor team believes it can help entrepreneurial-minded physicians contribute to their field. Tim Gueramy and Tracey Haas, both M.D.s, have launched The Walters Physician Incubator in Austin, Texas. A non-profit that is open only to physicians who have a start-up idea, the incubator has grown in one year from 5 to 56 physicians.

Haas told CNN Money that, “Doctors come to this incubator typically because they have been batting around an idea that could help their patients or change the way medicine is currently being practiced. Very few consider leaving medicine.”

Each month the couple invites lawyers, marketing execs, venture capitalists and business school professors to meetings where the speakers coach doctors about fundamentals such as how to craft business plans, pitch ideas, draft patents and raise funds.

Gueramy told the CNN reporter that the goal of their incubator is to “help physicians polish up their ideas” or get them to the place that they could enter a more traditional startup accelerator. “It’s not always popular for doctors to pursue something that’s a little bit outside of traditional medicine, ” said Gueramy. “Our incubator creates a safe place where doctors can freely discuss their ideas and learn the basics of launching a business.”

Haas, a rural family physician, and Gueramy, an orthopedic surgeon, in 2009 founded DocbookMD which allows physicians to safely share encrypted patient information. DocbookMD includes a directory of area physicians and pharmacies and is free for doctors who are members of their state or county medical associations. The founding of DocbookMD grew out of Haas’s and Gueramy’s desire for a more efficient communication system between doctors and institutions. According to CNN Money, the book is currently being used by more than 22, 000 physicians in 39 states.