MD/MBA for entrepreneurial aspirations, worth it? will it help?

[supastudier2000]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently enrolled in a program at my school that offers a dual MD/MBA degree. The structure involves completing 3 years of medical school, followed by one year focused on MBA studies, and concluding with the final year of medical training. Having just completed my first year, I'm exploring the potential benefits of this combined degree for my future career aspirations.

My interest lies in possibly establishing my own clinic down the line. While I understand that an MBA isn't strictly necessary for this path, conversations with MD/MBA physicians have highlighted its potential to streamline processes and enhance leadership opportunities as an attending physician. Additionally, I'm passionate about contributing to nonprofit and charity organizations. I believe a comprehensive understanding of areas like risk management, funding, project management, and team leadership would be invaluable in these pursuits.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts and experiences regarding MD/MBA joint programs. How have these programs influenced your career or those of colleagues you know? Is it worth it?

Thank you in advance for your insights!

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[Tenk]

You can easily do a side MBA as an attending. The material is not hard and I have several friends who have done so. It’s definitely not worth missing out on a year of attending salary.

 

[DarkHorizon]

No.

 

[Hollow Knight]

Look, given your listed reasons..... this is a terrible idea.

Owning a practice isn't super feasible nowadays anyway for a multitude of reasons. I guarantee you the knowledge you need to run one won't be learned in that MBA anyway. If you want to open a practice, go talk to physicians who have opened and run practices (since Obamacare was signed into law).

Now, if you just REALLY LOVE business classes, and you think getting that degree will be fun, and just doing it for kicks is worth like $300,000 to you (even more than that if you factor in loan interest and gains you would have been gaining by investing some of that attending paycheck into the stock market/retirement accounts)- OK, go get your MBA.

But don't pretend it's a smart business/career move. I'm not sure who is telling you it is, but those people are probably way too excited about credentialism.

 

[coconutlover]

Look, given your listed reasons..... this is a terrible idea.

Owning a practice isn't super feasible nowadays anyway for a multitude of reasons. I guarantee you the knowledge you need to run one won't be learned in that MBA anyway. If you want to open a practice, go talk to physicians who have opened and run practices (since Obamacare was signed into law).

Now, if you just REALLY LOVE business classes, and you think getting that degree will be fun, and just doing it for kicks is worth like $300,000 to you (even more than that if you factor in loan interest and gains you would have been gaining by investing some of that attending paycheck into the stock market/retirement accounts)- OK, go get your MBA.

But don't pretend it's a smart business/career move. I'm not sure who is telling you it is, but those people are probably way too excited about credentialism.

owning practice is quite feasible, really isn't that bad, you gotta be efficient with using tech to streamline admin part of the process and learn effective management principles/biz on the job. Most docs just are bad with that hence the "private pract

 

[coconutlover]

No, you don't learn biz with MBA its for connections. If you want to learn biz start something up once you get license you will learn infinitely more then do MBA if you want to career switch later on

 

[LucidSplash]

I completed a physician executive MBA last year. I preferred this to a non-healthcare focused MBA because instead of case examples like Nike or Apple, we looked at systems and problems specific to healthcare.

I also think there’s a lot of value in experiencing the US healthcare system from the perspective of an attending for a few years before getting an MBA because it gives you more insight than you would have had doing the MBA first.

 

[Nontrad_FL_LGBT]

I've yet to meet an MBA who knew jack ****, so I imagine you could self-teach what you need if you intend to run your own business. Only get an MBA if you want to go into admin and not do clinical medicine anymore imo.

 

[LucidSplash]

I've yet to meet an MBA who knew jack ****, so I imagine you could self-teach what you need if you intend to run your own business. Only get an MBA if you want to go into admin and not do clinical medicine anymore imo.

Counterpoint. I agree that most MBAs who don’t have a clinical background don’t have the requisite knowledge base in patient care to to effectively lead in a healthcare setting.

I did not get mine to go into admin, at least not at this point in my career, if ever. I got mine because I decided to go become bilingual in the business word salad that I was tired of getting from the C-Suite when I said I needed X for patient care. They’d tell me I didn’t need it or there wasn’t money and it was pretty much BS but I didn’t have the language skills to refute it.

I’m not suggesting everyone need to go spend money on an MBA to learn that but that was my approach. I don’t know that I would have had the same grasp on concepts trying to learn it on my own. I DO think that the more docs who have the knowledge base and/OR MBA letters after their name, the more those of us who DO have a clinical background can push back on the bad ideas of the pure number crunchers.

 

[djo208]

Owning a practice isn't super feasible nowadays anyway for a multitude of reasons. I guarantee you the knowledge you need to run one won't be learned in that MBA anyway. If you want to open a practice, go talk to physicians who have opened and run practices...

I can't speak for whether an MBA is worth it or not, nor can I speak for specialties outside of my own, but I do just want to second the poster coconutlover and say that, at least within psychiatry, owning a practice is fairly easy if you're well versed in outpatient psychiatry. The startup and overhead costs are minimal for a psychiatry practice. Hollow Knight's advice to talk to physicians who have opened or run practices is what many people do. I really did just quiz a handful of other psychiatrists about how they ran various details of their practices and I had also seen how my father ran his private psychiatric practice when I was growing up, so I modelled mine on that. I can't tell you whether an MBA would make this easier or not, but at least the way that I run mine, it really was not necessary. I just charge more than I spend, minimize costs, and provide good care. It's not rocket science. In fact, many psychiatrists keep a private practice running as a part-time side business in addition to another gig with an empoyer.

Hollow Knight's point that running a practice isn't "super feasible" likely does have some merit in some circumstances. E.g., I imagine it gets harder once you scale up to a group practice, open multiple sites, are recruiting patients in very low income areas with high numbers of disenfranchised and uninsured patients, or have such volume that you need advanced marketing strategies. Additionally, if you work in a specialty where you need a lot of equipment and employees, or if you have to make contracts with institutions (e.g., as in an emergency medicine group practice, where you're not going to be operating out of a rented or home office), it's going to get more complicated and maybe more advanced business knowledge will be helpful then? I can only speak with confidence around my own experience, though.

 

[Hollow Knight]

I can't speak for whether an MBA is worth it or not, nor can I speak for specialties outside of my own, but I do just want to second the poster coconutlover and say that, at least within psychiatry, owning a practice is fairly easy if you're well versed in outpatient psychiatry. The startup and overhead costs are minimal for a psychiatry practice. Hollow Knight's advice to talk to physicians who have opened or run practices is what many people do. I really did just quiz a handful of other psychiatrists about how they ran various details of their practices and I had also seen how my father ran his private psychiatric practice when I was growing up, so I modelled mine on that. I can't tell you whether an MBA would make this easier or not, but at least the way that I run mine, it really was not necessary. I just charge more than I spend, minimize costs, and provide good care. It's not rocket science. In fact, many psychiatrists keep a private practice running as a part-time side business in addition to another gig with an empoyer.

Hollow Knight's point that running a practice isn't "super feasible" likely does have some merit in some circumstances. E.g., I imagine it gets harder once you scale up to a group practice, open multiple sites, are recruiting patients in very low income areas with high numbers of disenfranchised and uninsured patients, or have such volume that you need advanced marketing strategies. Additionally, if you work in a specialty where you need a lot of equipment and employees, or if you have to make contracts with institutions (e.g., as in an emergency medicine group practice, where you're not going to be operating out of a rented or home office), it's going to get more complicated and maybe more advanced business knowledge will be helpful then? I can only speak with confidence around my own experience, though.

At the risk of derailing this thread-

Do you take commercial insurance?

All of the private practice docs I’ve worked with (which admittedly is a small sample size of like 15) have expressed frustration with insurance companies refusing to pay them a living wage. The docs I know who are successful either are in huge groups of physicians who negotiate with payers, or they’re in multi specialty groups. Or they opt out of the madness entirely and take cash. And admittedly I’m talking about rural FM docs, internist, and pediatricians, maybe they have it worse financially or from the reimbursement side.

Yeah, I know it’s possible to build a traditional practice (that takes insurance and Medicare patients) from the ground up, but considering I’ll owe $300,000+ coming out of residency…… I’m probably just going to go work for someone. Or worst comes to worse do DPC.

I think it’s a shame most docs are employed now, I just don’t know how to solve the problem of insurance companies refusing to negotiate well with solo doctors. When you’re by yourself, you have no leverage (or so I’m told).

Going cash only solves the issue, but unless we start massively expanding residency spots, that’s not a long-term solution. At least not for primary care.

 

[djo208]

I answered via conversation so as not to derail the thread, and I'm sure there's a thousand threads on here about how to run a private practice already.