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Dr. David Canes is a urologist and the CEO of Wellprept. He was born in South Africa to a foreign-language teacher and an actuary, moved to Canada and then New York while he was still very young, and was fascinated by doctors from the time he was a kid. Medical school settled it: he fell in love with anatomy, and from the first day of the course it was obvious he was going to be a surgeon. Eight years into practice he hit a wall, and the way he describes recognizing it is the most useful thing in this episode.

He does not forget a face. He remembers his surgical patients. So when he started opening the drape in the pre-op holding area and not recognizing the person underneath it, that registered as alien. Not a failure of memory so much as evidence that something had gone wrong. The second signal was the sensation of giving a cancer diagnosis while standing slightly outside himself. He had delivered the prostate cancer talk so many times that he was running it the way you drive to work without remembering the drive. He also noticed he had started to resent the moment a patient pulled out a list of questions. He was still fully present in the OR. It was clinic he had come to dread, which he found genuinely shameful in a job he knew he was fortunate to have.

He names the taboo directly: it feels forbidden for a physician to admit they're tired of explaining things from scratch. His position is that there's no shame in knowing which conversations you enjoy and which you don't, and that what makes a conversation enjoyable is unpredictable anyway. That unpredictability is not a defect in the doctor. It's evidence of being a human being rather than a delivery mechanism.

The fix he reached for was simple. The NCCN publishes patient guides in five languages. He asked his staff to email the relevant one ahead of the visit and made a short bit.ly link for it. Among the patients who actually read it, everything changed. Instead of starting at zero, he could pull up the MRI and show someone exactly where the tumor was bulging and why nerve-sparing wasn't on the table. Patients began opening with thank you. He compares it to university prerequisites — the work you finish before the seminar so the seminar can be the seminar. That workaround is how he became, in his words, an accidental entrepreneur: he was trying to fix a broken way of seeing patients, not start a company.

Wellprept grew out of it. The target is the administrative load that encroaches on the minutes between a physician and a patient — digital journeys that drip the right amount of content at the right time, and a single source of truth a team can answer from. For example: "can I swim after ear tubes?" is now a question a staff member can resolve without interrupting the doctor. It gives answers a permanent shelf life. They're in hundreds of practices across the US and Canada.

Learn more about Well Prept here.

Follow Dr. David Canes on Instagram here.