Under heavy pressure from government regulators and insurance companies, more and more physicians across the country are learning to think like entrepreneurs. As recently as the late 1990s, there were only five or six joint MD/MBA degree programmes at the nation?s universities, said Dr Maria
Y Chandler, a pediatrician with an MBA who is an associate clinical professor in the medical and business schools at the University of California, Irvine. ?Now there are 65,? she said.
Mark V Pauly, a longtime leader of the health care management programme at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said, ?A light bulb went off and they realise that health care is a business.?
Dr James S Kuo, 47, said he was a third-year medical student at Penn when he decided to go to business school, too. After receiving his MD and master of business administration degrees, he jumped to a Wall Street job with a large health care venture capital firm.
Dr Kuo went on to manage several heath care funds and later led several small health care companies. Now he is chief executive of Adeona Pharmaceuticals, a company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that is developing innovative medicines for the treatment of serious diseases of the central nervous system.
He is also nonexecutive chairman of MSK Pharma, a private company in La Jolla, California, that is led by his wife, Dr Geraldine P Kuo.
She is a specialist in muscular-skeletal medicine at the Veterans Affairs health care system in San Diego. ?In her work, she came across a medical need and an innovation to solve that need,? he said.
One of the latest universities to consider a combined programme is Creighton, a Jesuit university in Omaha, which plans to begin offering a joint degree next summer.
Anthony R Hendrickson, dean of Creighton?s school of business, said the programme would be flexible, based on each student?s academic and business experience and personal goals.
He said total tuition would be $191,688, including four years of medical school and a year of business studies. At Duke, the total cost of tuition for medical school and a
year and a half of business studies is $235,244. Creighton, like many universities with business schools, also offers part-time courses for physicians alongside its classic short courses for executives of all types. Statistics about the joint programmes are sparse, said Dr Chandler, who is president of the Association of MD/MBA Programmes. But she estimated there were as many as 500 students total in the programmes.
Some, like Tufts and Texas Tech, offer the combined programme in four years, she said, and many programmes offer special aid packages.
?All physicians need some kind of business training,? she said. ?For example, some physicians with large research grants don?t know how to manage the money.?
As for the nation?s troubled health system, ?we are not running the business side very well,? Dr Chandler said.
?Part of the problem is that we don?t have physicians sufficiently involved. They have a fuller insight about what is needed.?