The importance of healthcare innovation: Reflections from MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership students – solving healthcare’s financial barriers
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In this blog, MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership (MGHL) student Didier Chaukron introduces our new bi-monthly blog series on ‘The Importance of Healthcare Innovation: Reflections from MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership Students'. In this series, 5 current students from the MGHL programme will share how they have translated their learnings from Module 5 into practical solutions addressing real-world healthcare challenges. Didier talks about how he has applied insights from Module 5 to address important challenges within healthcare fintech and how finding ways to solve these problems can have a huge impact on communities and hopefully the world.
About the author: Didier Choukroun is a member of Cohort 3 of the MSc in Global Health Leadership programme, run jointly by the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and Saïd Business School. He is also co-founder of FinMD, a healthcare fintech company based in Miami.
SOLVING HEALTHCARE’S FINANCIAL BARRIERS
For me, healthcare innovation is about finding ways to tackle important challenges. Wherever you come from, and whatever sector you work in, the most important thing is finding ways to solve problems that have a huge impact on communities and hopefully the world. That’s how I’ve always approached my work, both at SPHERE Investments and at FinMD, the healthcare credit platform I co-founded with my son, David Egozi Choukroun in Miami.
The MSc in Global Healthcare Leadership has been a chance for me to step back and look at what innovation really means in a broader sense. The frameworks and theories presented by the faculty were extremely rich. Like all the modules at Oxford, it’s not just about learning theories, but understanding how we can practically apply them in real life. The faculty have this incredible ability to make complicated ideas very simple, and that’s really what stands out to me.
“Every module adds knowledge that certainly impacted me, and hopefully I’m able to implement that knowledge in real life.”
Module 5 of MGHL has pushed me to think differently about what healthcare innovation actually means in practice, not just clinical breakthroughs, but the systemic, structural changes. For me, that thinking has found a direct outlet in FinMD, a company I co-founded, that is attempting to solve one of those under-discussed structural problems in the US healthcare market.
The module's exploration of innovation ecosystems made me reflect on where the real friction points lie. In the US, one of the most persistent is access to credit for physicians. Doctors who are early in their careers frequently cannot access capital, to repay student loans or open their own practices, because they fall outside traditional credit models, despite their long-term earning potential. It is exactly the kind of inefficiency that Module 5 has framed so well: a problem hiding in plain sight, not because solutions are impossible, but because the right analytical frameworks have not been applied.
That is the gap FinMD is designed to close. By integrating healthcare-native analytics and risk modelling directly into the lending lifecycle, we help financial institutions evaluate physician borrowers far more accurately than conventional methods allow. The innovation is not simply technological, it is conceptual, which is a distinction the module has helped me articulate more clearly.
What Module 5 has also reinforced is that innovation always encounters resistance. On the physician side, the challenge is trust, helping practitioners understand that a new model genuinely serves their interests. On the institutional side, there is significant AI fatigue; demonstrating analytical rigour in a market saturated with overpromised fintech solutions is an ongoing process. These are not just business problems. They are the adoption and diffusion challenges that any healthcare innovation faces, and studying them in an academic context has given me sharper tools to navigate them in practice.
Three months into offering direct loans, we have deployed more than $12 million and secured a major institutional partnership. But the more lasting insight; one I will carry well beyond FinMD, is the one Module 5 keeps returning to: that transformative healthcare innovation is rarely about the technology alone. It is about understanding systems, identifying where they fail people, and having the rigour and persistence to do something about it.
Through the MGHL, I’ve been able to reflect more deeply on leadership and innovation together. The leadership modules (personal, systems, organisational) have all built on each other, helping me to think about how to digest and implement new knowledge. Leadership isn’t just about having a vision; it’s about building an environment where ideas can be tested, improved, and brought to life. I’ve learned that innovation depends as much on clarity and communication as it does on creativity.
One of the great privileges of being at Oxford is learning from such diverse faculty and peers. Every conversation brings a new perspective. It’s fascinating to see how people from different health systems and industries think about innovation. Some focus on technology, others on process, others on community. Together, you start to see how these approaches can overlap and reinforce each other. That’s the kind of collaboration Oxford encourages – one that’s open, curious, and constructive.
“The faculty have incredible ability to make complicated things very simple. So I'm very impressed with the quality of the faculty at Oxford.”
For me, innovation is not a destination, it’s an ongoing mindset. The MGHL programme has helped me strengthen that mindset. Whether in fintech, healthcare, or leadership, the goal is the same: to create solutions that make a real difference in people’s lives.