Why Business Skills Are Essential for Today’s Physicians
I was 34 when I started medical school and it made me feel insecure. My younger classmates had a 12-year headstart on a medical career.
I spent 8 years in the workplace between college graduation and the start of my pre-med program in 1999.
I worked as a Bloomberg reporter in Argentina and a bond trader on Wall Street during that time.
But, business reporting deepened my understanding of micro- and macroeconomics.
And, bond trading sharpened my risk-management and decision-making skills.
Most new doctors don’t escape the training bubble until they are in their early 30’s. They are underprepared for the reality of being a physician.
Robert Pearl, M.D. and his colleagues published “New Physicians Will Need Business School Skills” over 7 years ago in NEJM Catalyst.
The article is even more relevant today. The urgency to act on his recommendations has grown exponentially.
He calls on medical schools to require a 4-week rotation at the allied business school to teach future doctors the fundamentals of leadership, teamwork, operations, and data analytics.
Dr. Pearl highlighted the following leadership and team-building skills:
- Motivate a team to achieve goals.
- Understand one’s strengths and blind spots.
- Develop self-improvement goals.
- Align one’s leadership behavior with those goals.
- Understand team culture and learn to improve it.
- Manage performance among team members.
If we physicians aren’t prepared to lead, there are plenty of non-physicians who will happily step in.
That’s not in the best interests of our patients.
Let’s deploy this plan today.
Dr. Pearl led Kaiser Permanente as its CEO from 1999 to 2017. He teaches at the Stanford School of Medicine and the Stanford School of Business.
