Reasons Why It Is Worth Learning to Code as a Physician or Medical Student
You probably don't plan to build neural networks from scratch for an AI research project or to quit residency to start a tech company. However, learning to code can still be a rewarding endeavour for physicians. Here is why:
Enhancing your research
Many physicians have an interest in research and many medical students in countries where the job market for physicians is more competitive, such as the US, have to at least pretend that they do.
Since most residents or medical students won't have the opportunity to become the principal investigator of a large prospective trial, a retrospective chart review is the first step into the research world for many (in addition to reviews, case reports or — if you are very tolerant to frustration — wet lab research).
Chart reviews often involve hours of rather dull clicking and excel files. While some of the information you collect will require your critical thinking and medical expertise, a lot of standardized information could also be collected automatically. This was what got me into programming as a medical student. I wrote a simple python (a popular and beginner friendly programming language) script using PyAutoGUI and a few other packages that was able to export documents from the electronic medical record, search them for certain keywords and fill an excel file with the information that I was supposed to look for. Using programming to make your research more efficient is in my opinion a very good starting point for your coding journey. Even one of the most successful resources for people trying to learn python is called 'Automate the boring stuff with python'!
Becoming computer literate
Most of us probably know how to use a computer, do so every day and have a decent understanding of how computers work. However, when you start using code to communicate with your computer, your understanding becomes much deeper. This is especially true when you are trying to fix bugs in your code. With sufficient practice you become much more efficient and start knowing what to google to find the answers to your questions. While the process can be pretty frustrating, these skills transfer really well to the computer problems you encounter as a casual user. Your external hard drive does not work? Somebody else has likely had this problem before and smart people on the internet have probably solved it. When you have learned how to search the solutions to technical problems, you are well-equipped to find the answers.
Understanding trends and developments
Augmented reality to train surgeons, deep learning to replace radiologists and pathologists, big data for clinical decision making and personalized medicine — most of the things that some people claim to be the 'next big thing' are somehow based on code.
Once you start to become more technical, it becomes easier to not buy into the hype surrounding new things and understand the actual potential of the underlying technology. Of course you don't understand everything about neural networks just because you can write a few lines of code, but the knowledge that you acquire along the way will help you to do your own research on the topics that interest you. And once you have learned how neural networks are trained to make predictions, you realize that it's quite a big step from 'taking over parts of the radiology workflow' to 'replacing radiologists'.
Expanding your options
While some doctors thrive as clinicians and like seeing patients every day, others will eventually become tired of hospitals, academia and the clinical routine.
If you know how to code, you have an additional skill that is extremely valuable in today's society and even more so in combination with your domain knowledge in medicine and some statistical skills. Whether you want to do consulting, join a start up, a pharmaceutical company or something completely different, with a skill set that combines medical and technical knowledge, you have a lot of options. If you study in the US and have significant medical school debt, the competitive salaries of jobs in the (tech or pharmaceutical) industry are probably the safest way out in addition to becoming an attending.
If you found this article helpful, let me know! If you disagree with some of the things I said, let me know as well! In one of the next articles, we will discuss how to learn to code as a physician/medical student.