Career options for clinicians outside the NHS — Dr Chuk Anyaegbuna

At BiteLabs, we teach healthcare professionals the skills required to build impactful careers in healthtech. We’re profiling some of the amazing clinicians who already work in the field! Today, we will learn more about Dr. Chuk Anyaegbuna’s journey, but keep engaging with our content to hear from more inspiring individuals.

Introducing Dr. Anyaegbuna

Dr. Anyaegbuna is a Product Manager and Clinical Service Lead at Koa Health. That job role is a mouthful and is fairly vague in terms of the actual job scope, so here is more from Dr. Anyaegbuna on what his role entails, and his journey!

(Note that the contents of the interview have been slightly edited)

What does your role involve?

My role is twofold - working as a clinical lead and working as a product manager. As a clinical lead, I am responsible for four things, working closely with other members at Koa Health:

Establishing robust clinical pathways for our clinical products and services, working closely with our clinical director.
Delivering these products and services when they are ready to be launched, working with the customer success team.
Instrumenting the service rollout with appropriate data capture mechanisms, with the data science and engineering teams.
Repeating the above 3 steps in a scalable manner for any organisations that we collaborate with.

As a product manager, I communicate with designers, user researchers, engineers and senior product managers to achieve the following two goals:

Prioritise and build features for live products.
Discover new avenues, features and products for the product pipeline.

In both my roles, I constantly need to have a clear idea of the problem(s) in the target consumer population I am hoping to address with the products.

How and why did you get into it?

Largely by chance. I left clinical medicine despite loving the patient-facing aspect of the job. Despite this, I felt that the system was under-optimised to generate the best outcomes for patients and clinicians. Also, as someone who had always been interested in technology, the NHS had not experienced the technological innovations seen in other industries. As a result, still obsessed with healthcare, I wondered if there was a way of using some of these burgeoning technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, data analytics etc) to impact people’s lives at scale.

This brought me to a clinical/commercial role at Healthy.io, where I helped set up a service in the UK that at last count impacted around 250,000 patients. This service helped users access care via computer vision-based algorithms on their smartphones. From there, I wanted to get more involved in neuroscience and mental health projects, especially in the context of COVID-19 and how technology could help to bridge the gap between soaring demand and limited clinical supply. This led to my current role at Koa Health, where I sit at the intersection of clinical, commercial and product.

How does your current role at Koa Health compare to your role in clinical medicine?

My career right now is way less structured. This can be a boon for people like me if you like the lack of structure and can make your own way by following your interests and aligning them with a business’s needs. Due to the lack of structure in this role, you have to push for your own training, push for your own development, push for promotions, and push for scope. This is a skill that clinical medicine has not made most people adept at, since they have structure in terms of exams, credentials and structured training programmes.

Note that there is a false dichotomy regarding what’s more stressful. I feel both paths are stressful in different types of ways. For some in clinical medicine, they might choose the stresses of the unpredictability of the rota and the stress of life and death decisions. For those outside it, they are choosing no real respite from work; if you are connected, you can contribute and there is always work to be done. They are also choosing the unpredictability and vagaries of company life including getting fired and those attendant consequences on you and your family’s futures.

How is it related to medicine?

My role is directly related to medicine as I work in mental health. My company produces apps that help people with their mental health right across the continuum of mental well-being. This includes apps that help people reduce stress, build resilience, and improve their sleep as well as making apps that help people with established clinical conditions such as depression, body dysmorphic disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder manage their condition better, with the support of a therapist.

Why were you suitable?

I am very curious, believe everything can be figured out, and know a little about a lot of things. These traits help you in the slightly unpredictable world of start-ups, where especially in the earlier stages you need to have a lot of breadth across fields such as:

Sales (doing pitches)
Marketing (writing copy)
Technology and data (using analytical tools and working with engineers)
Product (understanding and being able to translate user needs to features for your products)
Clinical (understanding clinical guidelines, best practices, and the ability to speak in the same language as other clinicians).

How could someone go about getting into your field?

Learn the basics of what hiring managers and companies are looking for and what the process is (The book Get hired now! and the resources and job boards by Doctorpreneurs are a good place to start).
Speak to lots of people and see if you can get in by The Third Door. Once you’re inside, be useful.
Do the things you’re going to say you’re going to do and keep repeating that till you’re as close to indispensable as possible.
Understand however that the company is a team, not a family and act accordingly. Try and understand what is going on in your chosen field and speak to as many people in and out of your field as possible to get a wider view of not just your company but also your industry.

Anything you’d do differently if you had the time again?

Speak to way more people, which doesn’t have to be ‘transactional' type networking. This is especially important coming from clinical Medicine due to the following reasons that puts you behind others:

Gaps in knowledge around what roles are available to you
Gaps in what those suitable role entail
Gaps in what a reasonable salary is
Gaps in identifying green and red flags in hiring companies

What can I earn?

Really varies, and also depends on how much you negotiate. The best places to get an idea about this are Glassdoor and levels.fyi in the US.

If you’re a clinician (current or former) doing something interesting outside of a traditional career — please get in touch! We’d love to feature you in our next blog article. If you’re looking to start your journey in healthtech, visit bitelabs.io to sign up to our waitlist. Meanwhile, look out for more posts on other individuals who have successfully made the switch from healthcare to other non-conventional roles outside of the NHS!