Here's How I Found My Dream Job in Medicine After Quitting Residency

I remember the night I hit my limit: In late 2021, I was seeing patients in the ob-gyn ER at a large medical center in Israel. I had just returned from maternity leave and was working as a “PGY-1." (In Israel, there’s a mandatory post-graduate internship year before residency programs officially start.) I took basic histories, reviewed charts, and made quick decisions about who needed immediate attention.

At some point, as I tried to add lab results to a patient’s chart, the EMR crashed. Again. For some reason known only to the developer, I couldn’t copy-paste directly from the labs tab into the main chart. Instead, I had to open another program, copy them there, and then transfer them over — like some kind of digital scribe from the '90s. I kept thinking about how this one inefficiency was probably costing the hospital thousands of dollars in wasted physician time. It could have been solved with 10 lines of code.

My frustrations had been mounting for a while, and I decided I’d had enough. I quit the next month without any plan. I wanted to stay in medicine, but I needed a new path.

I didn’t throw away my future in ob-gyn just because I had to make some extra keystrokes. The need to update information technology systems in medicine is well acknowledged, but glitchy EMRs are a symptom of a more widespread disease: resistance to change throughout medicine.

In the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about what’s wrong (and right) with medicine, and where that resistance stems from. And I believe it starts long before a physician ever sees their first patient. Medical education and training are designed to produce competent clinicians, but they fall short when it comes to fostering creativity and innovation. This matters, a lot.

Practice makes perfect, but what about progress?

From the get-go, physicians are taught to focus on correct answers. Whether it’s a multiple-choice test in med school or a real patient in residency, the expectation is the same: Find the right diagnosis, treatment, approach. The best student or resident is often the one who most closely mimics their attending. The closer you are to their approach, the better you’re deemed. Rarely are we encouraged to question a process itself.

This system helps us learn technical skills. But it doesn’t set us up to be creative or innovative. A creative physician looks at a problem they’ve encountered a hundred times and still asks: Is there a better way? An innovative physician doesn’t just ask that question — they experiment, take risks, fail, adapt, and push medicine forward.

I didn’t want to change professions. I wanted to complete a formal training program in medicine and maintain my identity as a physician.

The absence of creativity and innovation has real-world consequences. Medicine is evolving rapidly — medical knowledge doubles every few months, AI is reshaping our world, and healthcare delivery is undergoing massive transformations. Yet, most of our apprentice-based training still operates as if we’re living in Socrates’ time. The disconnect between how physicians are trained and what modern medicine demands isn’t only frustrating, it’s also limiting. It’s keeping us stuck.

This issue isn’t specific to one country, healthcare system, or specialty. Rigidity is everywhere. I trained and now practice in Israel, but I hear the same frustrations echoed through my work and conversations with physicians worldwide, including in the U.S. We all complain about the same problems — unbearable workloads, low pay, outdated EMRs (of course) — and we’ve been complaining about them since I started medical school 15 years ago.

How can medicine become un-stuck? How can we "bring joy back to medicine" (as Graham Walker says each week on his How I Doctor podcast)?

An accidental founder

When I was on maternity leave (before I returned to and then quit my ob-gyn program), I stumbled into an experience that challenged me to be creative and innovative.

While scrolling Facebook, I saw a hackathon ad soliciting new ideas to combat domestic violence. I hovered over it for a minute and had a true eureka moment: I recalled an ER patient from the early months of my internship who came in late at night with stomach pain. Her tests were normal, and she was sent home. But something seemed off. In hindsight, I believe her decision to go to the ER was a missed cry for help. Unfortunately, there was no data-based way for me to figure that out.

But maybe there could be, I thought.

What if we used existing EMR data to identify healthcare utilization patterns that signal hidden risks, including domestic violence? We already track visit frequency, diagnoses, and follow-up patterns. We had this wealth of data sitting around, and I suddenly knew how to make it valuable.

I still find myself explaining my residency at least once a week. But that’s part of the excitement.

Though I had no background in tech or business, I took the plunge and signed up for the hackathon. My team and I reached the finals. That led us to an accelerator, where I got my first real exposure to entrepreneurship, tech, and venture capital. I developed an automated system called MedFlag, which analyzes patient records to identify possible victims of domestic violence, including people who seek out care for reasons not directly related to abuse.

My accidental stint as a tech founder probably gave me the push I needed to quit ob-gyn. Although I didn’t regret making that decision, I did feel slightly anxious afterwards, since I had no next step planned. But, even though my exposure to tech awakened something in me, I didn’t want to change professions. I wanted to complete a formal training program in medicine and maintain my identity as a physician.

Soon enough, I saw an invitation in an online physician group to apply for a residency in public health and digital medicine run by Clalit Health Services, Israel’s largest healthcare organization.

A job involving rabies and regression models

The integration of public health and digital medicine is a relatively new specialty; it wasn’t around when I started medical school. Introduced by Ran Balicer, a professor and the chief innovation officer at Clalit, the specialty emerged to meet the growing demand for physicians who "speak" both languages — medicine and technology. The precise way it works is unique to Israel’s healthcare system, but similar programs have developed elsewhere, such as clinical informatics fellowships in the US and the NHS Digital Academy in the UK.

To me, the combination of digital medicine and public health felt natural and necessary. In order to build AI tools for use in patient care, you need a huge amount of data — and that’s exactly what public health generates. Deploying these tools might not directly affect every single patient, but their effect at the population label will drive meaningful health improvements.

Maybe in 10 years, doctors will finally get to complain about something new.

Today, I’m in my third year of residency (out of 4.5 years total). In my daily job, I conduct research, help develop digital health solutions, and help navigate medicine’s digital transformation to ensure that it’s responsible, effective, and beneficial for all patients.

This career path involves less direct patient care than I’d envisioned, but I’m still a physician (not a researcher), and patients are still very much a part of my work. Sometimes, I see them during clinical rotations or while working in public health clinics treating rabies and other communicable diseases. And sometimes, I "see" them on my computer while I’m developing a model to help prioritize which diabetic patient needs to see their doctor first because their current treatment is no longer effective. I still find myself explaining my residency at least once a week. But that’s part of the excitement — I get to be at the forefront of shaping how public health will look in years to come.

Hackathons in med school and a future with new complaints

Changing specialties was my way of personally overcoming the problem I’ve been discussing, but it’s obviously not a solution for everyone. Medicine isn’t going to reinvent itself by adding an endless supply of new specialties and discarding the old ones. The real answer lies in shifting how we approach education and training, and making small but meaningful tweaks to how we practice.

For example: Hackathons could be incorporated into medical school — not to launch the next unicorn, but to instill a new way of thinking. And residents could be encouraged to explore fields beyond their specialty, like product management, to bring fresh perspectives. All while fostering an environment that supports new ideas, for example, by building internal innovation centers, as seen in leading institutions worldwide.

We all understand technology is here to stay. Physicians need to engage with it and drive solutions. That doesn’t mean every doctor needs a degree in computer science (I’m pretty sure we’ve spent enough years in school). It means we need to recognize what we don’t know and learn how to collaborate with those who do. One of the most crucial skills in the future of medical innovation isn’t coding — it’s knowing whom to ask.

Who knows? Maybe in 10 years, doctors will finally get to complain about something new. Imagine coffee break conversations filled with entirely fresh frustrations — ones that have nothing to do with outdated EMRs. Now that would be a transformation.