Upstarts: M.D. Entrepreneurs

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Physicians' Net gain

"If I get pains in my feet when I jog, should I see a doctor or just keep running?"

That's a question that Inc. recently submitted to a Web site, AmericasDoctor.com. Within minutes, a doctor identified only as AmDoc19 began a response this way: "There are several possible causes: out of shape, bad shoes, or a medical problem."

AmericasDoctor.com, based in Owings Mills, Md., started dispensing its free round-the-clock medical advice early last year. The site isn't a Samaritan's good-hearted service but rather a for-profit venture. It earns revenues through hospital sponsorships, health-care-product sales, and advertisements. CEO and cofounder Scott Rifkin, an internist who has his own private practice, says he's planning an initial public offering this summer.

Rifkin is hardly the only M.D. who's using the Web to cash in on medically related services. Another is Stuart Weisman, a former gastroenterologist in Mountain View, Calif., who created ePhysician, a company that enables doctors, among other things, to order prescription drugs for their patients more easily over the Internet.

Even former U.S. surgeon general C. Everett Koop has his own for-profit Web-based business--a health-information emporium known as Drkoop.com.

Physicians Inc.--a sampler

What if you're in Tokyo and urgently need a doctor? Eliot Heher, a 36-year-old former internist, has an answer: turn to Highway to Health, his health service for travelers that's based in Radnor, Pa. He quit his job as a medical director at Aetna U.S. Healthcare, a health-maintenance organization, to start Highway to Health in 1997. "I'm not the type of guy who sold toasters in high school," says Heher, who started Highway to Health in the belief that he could influence health-care delivery more as an entrepreneur than as a doctor.

Heher's company offers TravelGap, a form of supplemental insurance for people who need medical care when they travel outside the geographical boundary of their primary health-insurance coverage. For $199 a year, a traveler under age 51 can obtain $100,000 in coverage abroad (or $25,000 worth in the United States) and access to Highway to Health's Web site to find a doctor and schedule an appointment in 50 countries.

Another doctor-turned-entrepreneur is Gigi Hirsch, 43, founder and CEO of MD CareerNet, in Brookline, Mass. Her Internet-based head-hunting and medical-information service draws on a database of more than 8,000 physicians, many of whom are "intensely interested in new kinds of nonclinical careers," says the former emergency-room doctor.

Two other doctors, Andrew Firlik and David Lowry, both 30 and still in their neurosurgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, have already started a company, Cortex. It screens health-related start-ups for venture-capital companies like the Mayfield Fund, based in Menlo Park, Calif., and projects 1999 revenues of $300,000.

M.D.'S DOUBLING AS M.B.A.'S

Number of graduates of three business schools who also have M.D. degrees (compared with four years ago)

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