Town hall event focuses on Stanford Health Care ’ s future plans

When Milt McColl, MD, decided to finish his residency after nearly 30 years away from clinical medicine, he didn’t expect to be back at Stanford, where he played football and earned his bachelor’s and medical degrees. That, he said, was a stroke of luck, or what he said his father calls the moment “when preparation meets opportunity.” McColl, 58, admits that brand of luck determined most of his professional life after college. It was there when he was signed as a free agent by the 49ers — the same week he was accepted to Stanford’s medical school — as well as when he landed his first medical internship, and when the medical device industry captured his attention. But deciding to finish his residency was different. “Nothing I’ve done in life is because I planned it. Usually it was because the opportunity sort of arose,” McColl said recently as he grabbed a quick lunch at a bustling café at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. “This was the most thought-out, planned-out thing I’ve done in my career because it was really difficult two years ago to make the decision to do it.” It was especially tough to leave his CEO position at Gauss Surgical, which developed a real-time blood loss measuring device for operating rooms. “I think the hardest discussion was with the investors that I’ve been running a company with for five years,” McColl said. But McColl handed the CEO role to company founder Siddarth Satish, whom he met at Stanford, making a full commitment to the Stanford Health Care-O’Connor Hospital Family Medicine Residency program, where he is a second-year resident.