Patients Are Not a Test Environment

“Move fast and break things” became one of tech’s most famous mottos. I keep asking myself whether it belongs in healthcare. My answer is no, at least not the way it is usually meant.

In some industries, breaking things is controllable and acceptable. In a high-stakes field like healthcare, moving fast and breaking things is close to digging your own grave.

Some things cannot be rolled back

The motto works when failures are cheap and reversible. A bug in a social app gets patched next week, and the damage is some annoyed users.

In healthcare, what breaks is a person. A wrong dose or a missed diagnosis cannot be undone. The harm falls on someone who never agreed to be part of an experiment.

Theranos showed what happens when “fake it till you make it” meets blood testing. Patients received unreliable results that shaped real medical decisions. That was not a failed product. It was harm.

The line is about decisions, not industries

For me, whether breaking things is acceptable has always come down to reversibility. If this goes wrong, can we undo it, and who pays the price? That question cuts across industries, so the real line runs through decisions.

Even inside a hospital, some work is easy to undo, like scheduling or billing, and those parts can move faster. Anything that touches a patient’s body or care decisions needs to move slowly and carefully.

A good heart, and honesty

Healthcare has a very special place in my heart. It is a field that requires a good heart, not a VC dream. If someone just wants to be famous, there are other places to chase it.

Still, good intentions are not enough. Many people who caused harm in medicine believed they were helping. What protects patients is care plus humility in practice: listening to clinicians and patients, running the boring experiments, and telling the truth about results even when it hurts fundraising.

The money’s clock is part of the problem. Venture funds often expect big returns within about ten years, while a new drug can take a decade or more, and most drugs that enter clinical trials fail. When money moves faster than science, the pressure is to sell the vision before the evidence exists.

Ambition and profit are not the problem on their own. Many life-saving medicines came from companies that wanted to make money. The problem starts when the story matters more than the patient.

What lasts

Valuable things take a long time to build, and trust takes the longest. Yet some places today reward the opposite: hype, speed and a good story. That kind of success rarely lasts, and in healthcare it can hurt people, because trust is the real product.

I don’t think the answer is to stop moving fast. It is to learn quickly, ship carefully, and make sure patients are never the ones who pay for our mistakes.

Stay humble, and stay ambitious. Humility keeps us honest about what we don’t know, and ambition keeps us building what people actually need.