Most physicians who feel the pull toward something beyond the clinic never act on it. The training is long, the identity runs deep, and the path out is rarely obvious. Dr. Ryan Grant, a board-certified, Yale-trained neurosurgeon, did act on it. He shut down a thriving spine surgery practice to co-found Vori Health, a nationwide, physician-led musculoskeletal practice that now reaches more than six million people across all 50 states. Before that, he co-founded Nomad Health, one of the most widely used clinician job marketplaces in the country.
In this BiteLabs LinkedIn Live, host Dr. David Jevotovsky sat down with Dr. Grant for one of the most honest conversations we have hosted about leaving the operating room without leaving medicine. They covered the evidence that made it impossible to keep operating, the financial and emotional groundwork behind the decision, whether an MBA actually matters, and where the real opportunities sit for clinicians who want to build.
"I didn’t leave medicine. I left the operating room."
Dr. Grant is careful about how he frames his exit. He does not see himself as a former physician. As he put it, he left the operating room so that he could actually start practicing health care the way he wanted to, which he no longer felt was possible inside a traditional health system. That distinction matters for anyone weighing a similar move. The choice is rarely as binary as stay or quit. For Dr. Grant, stepping away from surgery was a way of doing more medicine, not less, just at the level of the system rather than the single patient on the table.
The evidence that made it impossible to keep operating
Dr. Grant’s case begins with a sobering body of literature. Musculoskeletal conditions, particularly lower back pain, are the leading cause of disability worldwide. And by his reading of the medical evidence, the average patient with low back pain in the US receives the wrong care. He points to literature suggesting that up to half of certain back surgeries may be inappropriate, often performed on patients who never completed conservative care first. He has seen health plans where two-thirds of members had no physical therapy in the six to twelve months before being authorized for surgery. The guidelines exist. They are simply skipped.
What makes the problem structural, in his view, is the economics. Dr. Grant argues that the average US hospital, as currently designed, could not stay financially solvent if it practiced strictly evidence-based musculoskeletal surgery. He describes a classic innovator’s dilemma: systems that quietly depend on procedure volume to survive.
Fixing surgeries that should never have happened
The breaking point was not a single case. Much of Dr. Grant’s practice was revision surgery, operating to repair other surgeons’ earlier work. What bothered him most was how often the original operation should never have been done at all. He frames the stakes with a simple contrast: a bad haircut grows back, grass that dies can be replanted, but surgery offers no such reversible door. When a complication changes someone’s quality of life, there is usually no way to undo it.
The decision was emotional before it was financial
Asked how he actually made the call, Dr. Grant pushed past the practical mechanics to the part most people avoid: controlling your own emotions. Fear, regret, embarrassment, and fear of the unknown are what keep people in jobs they have outgrown. His advice is to unpack what you are actually afraid of, even if you do not like what you find, and to use a therapist or executive coach to surface the blind spots. He paired that with concrete financial discipline — living well below his means and aggressively paying down student debt. As he put it, your decision-making becomes a lot clearer when you are not married to debt.
Does the MBA matter? Not the way people think
Dr. Grant holds an MD, an MS, and an MBA, so physicians often ask him whether the business degree is necessary. His answer is candid: he did the MBA after both of his companies already existed, and mostly, he says, he just wanted the letters. The MBA can help with networking and with certain administrative career paths, but he cautions that most MBA programs do not teach you how to start anything. If you genuinely love the company you want to build, he would not delay two years to go get the degree first. Spend those two years on the company.
Which clinical skills transfer, and which get in the way
Surgical training builds real, transferable strengths. Neurosurgeons tend toward a calculated risk tolerance and a drive to fix things. But not everything carries over. The operating room is a top-down hierarchy where the surgeon is the boss, and that command-and-control instinct does not translate well to inspiring a team or building a lasting company. Knowing the difference, he says, is part of the self-reflection work every clinician-founder has to do.
The advice: just get started
For physicians sitting with the same restlessness he once felt, Dr. Grant’s most practical advice is also the simplest. People find a thousand reasons not to start, which only preserves the status quo. You cannot ride a bike unless it is moving — forward motion is what keeps you upright. Getting started rarely means quitting tomorrow. Courage is not the absence of fear, it is acting when fear is present. The people who make these moves are not fearless. They are scared, and they do it anyway.
What he is betting on next
Looking ahead, Dr. Grant is most interested in the unglamorous layers of health care. The infrastructure — billing, claims, coding, documentation, and data exchange — is broken and ripe for rebuilding. He wants tools that make clinicians’ lives easier and keep them current. AI, he believes, will reshape health care more profoundly than the internet did, with real opportunity in everything from decision support to drug repurposing.