Doctors Starting Banks and Businesses: How Physician Entrepreneurs Are Reclaiming Financial Control

Medicine may be a calling, but for a growing number of physicians, it’s also a launching pad—for startups, banks, and bold ventures outside traditional clinical care. In response to burnout, broken incentives, and a healthcare system that often sidelines their voices, physician entrepreneurs are rewriting the rules. They’re not just taking back their time—they’re taking back financial control.

The Rise of the Physician Entrepreneur

Dr. Michael Jerkins co-founded Panacea Financial, a bank built by and for physicians. “There are 4,000 banks in the country,” he explains. “They all pretty much do the same thing. But we didn’t want to go wide—we wanted to go deep on a narrow segment we care about”.

Panacea's success isn’t just about offering better loan terms. It’s about recognizing that physicians face unique financial hurdles: delayed earnings, massive student debt, and erratic cash flow during training. Standard financial institutions often don’t understand that reality. Physician-led ventures do.

Why Doctors Become Entrepreneurs

Dr. Jared Dashevsky, who launched Healthcare Huddle during medical school, reflects: “Even the brightest people I knew didn’t have time to understand healthcare systems… So I created the Morning Brew for medicine”.

For Dashevsky, financial empowerment wasn’t just about money—it was about literacy. And for many physician entrepreneurs, that’s the core driver: to fix what’s broken, and to build something better.

Creating Space for Autonomy

These ventures also offer something medicine often doesn’t: agency. Dr. Phil DiGiacomo, who left emergency medicine for a leadership role in health insurance, put it clearly: “It was hard to let go of the ER... but something had to change”.

Entrepreneurship gave him a new identity outside of the ER—a way to work in healthcare without losing himself in it.

Lessons from the Field

• Start with a pain point: Whether it’s predatory loan structures or broken communication in hospitals, every business starts with a problem worth solving.
• Lean into community: Physician-specific platforms like Panacea succeed because they center the lived experience of doctors.
• Entrepreneurship is advocacy: Creating a physician-led business can be a form of systemic reform—redirecting power and profit back to those on the frontlines of care.

The traditional paths in medicine are no longer the only options. Physician entrepreneurs are proving that you can do meaningful work and maintain financial control. Whether through tech, media, finance, or policy, doctors are taking the reins—and changing the landscape of healthcare from the inside out.