JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Digital health is an expanding field and is fundamentally changing the ways healthcare can be delivered to patients. Despite this changing landscape of healthcare delivery, medical trainees are not routinely exposed to digital health during training. We believe that one currently underutilized opportunity to immerse physicians-in-training within digital health is an elective internship with healthcare start-ups during residency. In this article, we describe our experiences, lessons learned, and challenges as resident physicians working experientially as interns within a start-up navigation and virtual care company (Included Health). Through this experience, we saw how physician-leaders apply their expertise beyond the traditional clinical environment, used creativity to solve healthcare problems, and learned from different disciplines (e.g., product managers, software engineers) not typically encountered by most physicians in traditional clinical practice. Challenges included logistical barriers of setting up the elective internship within the larger residency training structure. As immersive elective internships are currently uncommon in residency training, we provide guidance to resident physicians, residency programs, and digital health companies on how to establish successful electives based on our experience. We believe that elective internships for physicians-in-training provide opportunities for immersive learning in a fast-paced environment in a field that is rapidly evolving. By creating more experiences like this for other resident physicians, residency programs and digital health companies have a key opportunity to influence physician-leaders and healthcare innovators of the future.