Sidney Kimmel Medical College: MD-MBA/MHA or MD/MPH?

[DaddyAnwar]

Hello folks,

I have recently gotten admission to my dream medical school and now upon more research, I found a few different areas of study I would like to look into as well (offered by the school).

Either I can work on an MBA/MHA or I can work on an MPH in association with my medical degree. To be clear, I do not care about the years (both are 5 years btw) and I do not care about "more degrees". I want to specialize my skills for the changing field of medicine and more knowledge/skill helps.

I was wondering what everyone's opinion on either path? Which one is more versatile and has the possibility of making more of an impact on my future as a clinical physician?

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[LizzyM]

Is your primary concern going to be people or the bottom line. Both are important. You can't care for people if the clinic goes bankrupt. Some people have to handle the management side and some people handle the population health side (what decisions are best to optimize the health of the population and to protect/care for the most vulnerable and those at high risk).

Are you interested in marketing/branding, employment law, and market share or are you interested in how to design studies to identify risk factors for bad clinical outcomes, investigate outbreaks, assess community need and evalute public health interventions?

The MD/MPH is going to say that we have a clinic population that would benefit from access to bariatric surgery based on evidence in the literature that surgery reduces the complications of diabetes and a program to promote the surgery would reduce kidney failure and diabetic retinopathy by x% within 2 years. The MD/MPH might also develop a health promotion/disease prevention campaign to promote this surgery among patients at high risk for diabetes and measure the success of the program over a few years.

The MD/MBA is going to say that we could introduce a bariatric surgery program if we expect that we will have not less than N patients per year given what it will cost to get a program up and running including hiring, space requirements and marketing budget. We know that procedures x, y and z for obesity are available at the following competitor's locations. Based on medical records data, we know that our patient populiaton includes N people for whom this might be an appropriate treatment and we can expect, based on published literature, that x% will avail themselves of the treatment within the first 2 years. Therefore, this is, or isn't, feasible given the availability of the procedure at other facilties in our area and the patient population we may be serving. Of course, some of the marshalling of facts can be farmed out to a consulting firm and the MD/MBA commissions the study and examines the results in order to bring a decision to a board of directors.