Physician Builder Spotlight: William Cherniak

We’re shining light on MD-entrepreneurs! Each week, we feature an entrepreneurial doctor who’s building a cool product, company, or working on a big idea that you definitely want to know about. This week, meet William Cherniak, Founder and CEO of Rocket Doctor (more on the company’s mission below!). You can connect further with William on LinkedIn.

1. William, what inspired you to become a physician entrepreneur? My first entrepreneurial pursuit happened somewhat organically after a rotation in Uganda in medical school and was actually in the global health space. In residency, I ended up co-founding and taking leadership on a pro-bono basis of a non-profit called Bridge to Health Medical and Dental. We work primarily in Sub-Saharan East Africa and ended up winning Grand Challenges grants in Yemen and Peru around point of care ultrasound and cloud-based teleradiology for a project we started in 2017/18.

At Johns Hopkins, the mantra was "saving lives, millions at a time." This got me thinking about broader systems-level changes we could make domestically, leveraging learnings from abroad. Our work overseas got some press in the New York Times for pioneering the Butterfly ultrasound in Uganda, which led to more tech-focused activities. Ultimately that, combined with getting progressively more frustrated over all the patients with out-patient primary care issues coming to the ER domestically, was the genesis of Rocket Doctor and my decision to scale back clinical work to pick this up full-time.

2. Tell us what your company does and what problem you're trying to solve. Rocket Doctor is like a Shopify for providers. Essentially, a digital health platform and marketplace empowering MDs to be independent, while in parallel, breaking down obstacles that limit access to quality, comprehensive, and cost-effective healthcare, particularly for folks on Medicaid and Medicare in the United States and in rural / remote communities across Canada.

Leveraging large language models, AI/ML and wireless medical devices, we’re pushing to bridge the healthcare divide, letting doctors take control of our lives again, while in parallel, connecting patients to equitable and accessible healthcare, regardless of age, location, or financial status.

3. What's your advice to anyone who's thinking about entrepreneurship or a non-traditional career in medicine? Clinical medicine can be very rewarding, exciting, and challenging mentally. Some folks can work full-time their entire career and love every second of it. Others may find that working full-time indefinitely can be exhausting, draining, and in many cases, lead to burnout.

Medical school and residency in my mind is a lot like bootcamp. We’re trained to think differently, and honestly, to withstand punishing time-cycles of 24-36 hours of work in a row, sleepless nights, early mornings, and to withstand intense pressure. We’re also trained to feel a lot of guilt when we aren’t being responsible for patient care and executing our responsibilities. I think a lot of this is essential for building a strong and resilient / well-trained workforce of physicians who are doing it for the right reasons, but as noted, it can (and does) also lead to burnout.

Having a wide and varied career can give you the ability to step back from time to time and breathe, as well as reflect on your clinical work, ideally making it more enjoyable when you do go back in. Entrepreneurship can also give you more of a 30,000 foot window to the problems we’re facing and the systems around us, and also let the clinical staff down in the trenches come up to help give ideas that make practical change that (hopefully!) will truly help improve the lives of clinicians and patients alike.

4. How can a physician get over the "start" problem and overcome their biggest fear to start a company/organization? I think a lot of the inertial friction to getting started stems from a few factors: 1) Fear of wasting all that clinical training: Why did I just do 10+ years of post-secondary education if I’m going to not be full-time? 2) Guilt from point 1 3) Student debt: How am I going to pay off the debt and sustain my life taking no salary / making minimal income as a start-up? 4) What am I? A business-person / entrepreneur or a clinician? How do I juggle those two things in my head? 5) Does my idea suck? Will anyone actually get value from this? Or am I just trying to make a quick buck and will it all fall apart?

None of these are easy questions to answer, but ultimately, I think that’s why you have to be absolutely passionate about the problem you’re trying to solve. If you really believe that you have an insight based on your experience to something that you can improve in the system, and ideally, if you can align that with the work you’re currently doing / your personally experiences, it will make it so much easier to dive in (and keep swimming when times get tough!).

5. What's the #1 lesson you've learned since building your company that wasn't obvious to you before? One of the most challenging parts of building a company is the thing you can’t predict is going to happen / never thought about happening. So many times, I’ve been happily going about my day when a new email comes through that brings everything crashing down to earth. Often you didn’t even have this thing on your radar, but something beyond the scope of your control suddenly happened that you now have to (usually immediately!) deal with; in some cases, in order to keep your business alive. You need to have resiliency and determination in those moments to persevere, in some cases pivot, and keep the ship steaming ahead.

6. Name the top resources you found most helpful to get going as an entrepreneur journey that others would benefit from?

1. Friends and family who had gone through entrepreneurship and could be there for advice, mentorship, and to simply complain to about all the challenging things happening.

2. Accelerators. We’ve been through I think a dozen of them at Rocket Doctor, all free programs with no cash to us and no equity given, but they've given us exposure to lecture material, mentors, coaches, non-dilutive supports, introductions for business etc. I'm very thankful for programs like D3 out of Concordia, MaRS out of Toronto, Alberta Innovates / Plug and Play out of Alberta, UCLA’s TechQuity, Google’s AI First Accelerator, AARP’s AgeTech, Afore’s 0-1, Berkeley's Health Accelerator, and Larta Institute’s Heal.LA.

3. Key Investors / Angels. I'm so grateful for the funds and angels who really care about the company, but are also themselves founders / entrepreneurs such that they understand how this all works. Some investors are really quite awful, and at any bump in the road, they panic and try to take the lifeboat for themselves, essentially shoving you as founder into the ocean to sink. Be very weary of these funds. Make sure to get founder references before accepting money.

But, I found to be the vast minority of investors. Most really just want to help and to be included on the journey, to get to speak with you as the founder to understand how the business is going, and to be able to help. I’m particularly grateful to Symphonic Capital out of San Diego, and our MD investors who have been a huge resource to us.

7. How can other physicians support you? Let others know how to get in touch. We’re truly a company by doctors for doctors, so MDs can always help us! We’re currently looking to bring docs into the system across both Canada and the U.S. to join us in launching their own practices and increasing access to care. Any specialty, and we're looking for doctors in Ontario, Alberta, BC and New Brunswick in Canada and in California, New York and Maryland in the U.S.

Now, for a few bonus questions on AI!

1. What's an actual prompt you're feeding to GPT that's been really helpful to your clinical work? I actually use GPT on shift to ask high-level questions about certain conditions. For example, “Tell me more about this condition,” “What tests would you order for this,” “What’s the latest evidence on treatment guidelines, cite the links and evidence” (to limit confabulation). I find these kinds of questions to be great for CME and to keep me sharp. Almost every time it adds something as an edge case I may have missed – super helpful.

2. What's the AI tool/use case you can't live without as a physician? To be totally honest, from an ER perspective, I can’t think of anything that’s so revolutionary in my practice that I can’t live without it. From the telemedicine side though, I never want to see a patient without having their past medical records, problem list, and medications with a generated summary and report. We have a 3rd party partner Connective Health that we work with who provides these summaries for us. It’s truly fantastic.

3. Any top resources that you've found most helpful to get going with AI as a physician that others could benefit from? I loved Eric Topol’s book "Deep Medicine." Actually, it was one of the reasons I started Rocket Doctor back in 2019. Great way to think about things at a high-level. “The AI Revolution in Medicine” by Peter Lee and others was great also to think about where we’re headed.

Resources cited in this interview:

William's set of resources for physician entrepreneurship include: