I used to work in the healthcare vertical. While there are regulatory hurdles, they are there for good reason. Move fast and break things does not work in this industry and will get you fired.
You will have better luck working with one of the larger companies who have a good history with the FDA, and more importantly, have good relationships with hospitals and physicians. They are aware of the time and resources it takes to push something out. Pay will not be FAANG level or anywhere close, but they usually have great work culture and WLB.
Thanks for the comment. Do you have any feedback for a future physician interested within the intersection of ML + medicine (does not strictly need to be "healthcare")? Would learning ML and all the other things needed to know be helpful (huge time investment needed here)? Ultimately, would be interested in leveraging medical knowledge into a startup capacity.
As a traditional physician, I imagine your value add would still be your domain expertise. The physicians I worked with were purely consumers of AI tech and had a say in the design of the software. But AI and more generally software is becoming an important part of medicine so I guess it couldn't hurt to learn some basic ML.
You will have better luck working with one of the larger companies who have a good history with the FDA, and more importantly, have good relationships with hospitals and physicians. They are aware of the time and resources it takes to push something out. Pay will not be FAANG level or anywhere close, but they usually have great work culture and WLB.