How much does the pedigree of your medical school and residency/fellowship matter in private practice?

[freakonomics]

Not sure if this was discussed in the past, but I was wondering how much the name of med school, residency +/- fellowship matter if you decide to go solo practice or group private practice in terms of marketing your business. I have no doubt that every graduating board-certified ophthalmologist are qualified, but from patient's perspective, I wonder if they would look for ophthalmologists from big name places like ivy league or other big name places that are known more to general public.

What are all your experiences like?

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[MstaKing10]

Varies but I find in private practice pedigree is less important. A very small proportion of patients care about pedigree. More important to them is clinical/surgical skill and bedside manner regardless of where you trained. Pedigree matters more in terms of landing a great position with a good practice in a desirable area. Also useful for networking and landing research or consulting gigs outside of your day to day practice.

 

[Slide]

Pedigree matters in fellowship placement but afterwards, if you’re planning on doing private practice with little academic work, it doesn’t matter. Thr more prestigious fellowships don’t necessarily mean better clinical training. My anecdote is that the skill of the fellow/new attending is more based on personal drive than anything else, as long as you get good fundamentals in training.

if you want to crack into a saturated area, then yes prestige matters. Outside of that, many private practices will throw money your way to hire you.

 

[mjohnsonets]

As stated above, it doesn't matter much with private practices. I very occasionally get requests for certain fellowship or residency programs but generally find those practices to consider people who aren't from them as well. Once you have more than a year of experience I wouldn't expect many practices to care where you trained if you're a good surgeon and have a good personality. Medical school wise, I've never had any practices request a certain med school although did have one tell me they wanted someone who was AOA and they weren't willing to budge on that.

Edit: I should note on medical schools, I do occasionally find practices to not consider DO candidates no matter their experience level. Again, this is still uncommon.

As Slide said though, if you want to be in a very saturated area then the prestige might give you a leg up on other applicants. However, if you make it to an initial discussion with the practice then your personality can quickly win or lose the day.

For fellowships, it will be more important to choose based on what you want to do. Cornea fellowships for example vary greatly with some being hardcore transplant heavy fellowships with very little cataract surgery and others that focus more on refractive cataract and refractive surgery.

 

[RetinaDude]

Private practice....ZERO. I know where a few of the other ophthalmologists attended med school/college but, the majority, I really have no clue.

None of my patients care either.

 

[cubsrule4e]

Echo the above. ZERO. And honestly, the majority of our patient base doesnt even know what Bascom Palmer or [insert training program here] is. Once you start practice its all about building your reputation based on YOUR knowledge and skills, not the names behind you.