Is There A Doctor In The House? Oops! I Mean In Business
Sunday, October 20, 2013, 1:00 AM | Leave Comment
You graduated from a medical school. Your intentions were quite noble when you entered the school – helping humanity. After ten or so years, you have become a millionaire or close to being one.
The two parts of the title of this post are redundant. You are a doctor as much as a businessman. Or maybe you are a businessman and just happen to be a doctor. And you are good at it I might add. Maybe more so as businessman than as doctor.
Does that make you a greedy doctor?
Many more folks of the general populace are saying greedy doctors are the problem, and a lax government that doesn’t care about the health of its citizens.
But a whole slew of events have happened the last decade or two.
The data (plural of datum) from patients, hospital and clinic are so overwhelming and have been thrust upon you that you need some kind of business education, perhaps an MBA degree.
Sooner or later, you as a senior doctor become an administrator.
You, then, get to be responsible for balance sheets, income statements, and a huge staff – all with no formal business training under your belt.
Poor baby! So what do you do?
You go to business school and learn how best to take care of the business at hand – a move many physicians are making to cope with the ever-changing pace and paperwork of modern day health care.
The same goes for nurses, private practice managers and hospital administrators.
They all seek guidance on how to analyze the slew of data now accessible to them, with the hope of making more money and then some more and because of the Hippocratic Oath, maybe improving the quality of care and lowering costs to patients.
Physicians say the effort to reach out for management training shows a recent shift in mindset.
Doctor or Businessman or Both…
The only way health-care personnel can be effective in administration of hospital and other such entities is to be familiar with the business at hand.
However, you as business administrator – no matter how good a doctor you are – cannot be an effective doctor. On the other hand, you can be an effective businessman.
There is another option and that is that a businessman gets some kind of medical education – mostly only some medical terminology for conversing with doctors.
Would you as a doctor get orders from a businessman turned “doctor” or you would prefer that from a doctor turned businessman?
Moral of the story
Hey, dottore, dottoressa! Think about your Hippocratic Oath. I would leave it at that. By the way, a new study just out is telling us women make better doctors than men. Could it be women are not into running businesses? As a result, their whole concentration is on helping their patients get better.
