Want to push your physician career ahead? MBA needn’t be the first step

The business of medicine includes the economic and organizational aspects of health care such as the management, delivery, financing and regulation of medical services.

Knowledge of these basic business concepts is vital to running a private practice or leading a health care organization, but educational opportunities to learn about these topics during medical school and training may be limited.

“In a health care system that is rapidly changing and growing in complexity, lack of knowledge in corporate medicine can impact the physician’s ability to sustain their practice and effectively advocate for their patients, their care teams and within their organizations,” says the AMA’s CME course called “Introduction to the Business of Medicine.”

Launched earlier this year, several portions of the curriculum have been updated and three new modules have been added that cover:

• Licensure, credentials and privileges.
• Basics of medical liability insurance.
• Information and technology in health care.

Each CME module in the course is enduring material and designated by the AMA for between 0.25 and 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. A total of 11.5 credits is available for those who complete the entire course.

The modules are part of the AMA Ed Hub™, an online learning platform that brings together high-quality CME, maintenance of certification, and educational content from trusted sources, all in one place—with automated credit tracking and reporting for some states and specialty boards.

Learn about AMA CME accreditation.

Filling business knowledge gaps

In addition to private practice physicians, the course can be helpful for “emerging physician leaders in health care organizations,” said Sea Chen, MD, PhD, physician director of practice sustainability at the AMA.

“There’s kind of an archetypical path for physicians who are two, three or four years out of training, and they’ve got their clinical wits about them and are starting to feel confident,” Dr. Chen explained.

“Maybe they’ve taken their boards, and the clinical medicine brings them joy, but they want a little bit more and they want to feel like they’re making a difference in their organization,” he added. “Physicians are equipped to be leaders, but they don’t necessarily have the knowledge base in business to function well in an organization.”

Such physicians have the skills to lead a clinical team but might not have the knowledge base to lead a nonclinical team, so they seek out resources to fill those gaps.

“That’s where we want these modules to be: We want to fill that gap,” said Dr. Chen.

He added that many physicians seeking to add to their business-of-medicine knowledge base often explore pursuing an MBA, or master’s degree in business administration. But, Dr. Chen suggested, this “can be costly—both monetarily and in terms of a time commitment.”

“We want to deliver this content for our members in a way that’s tailored really well to their practicing lives,” Dr. Chen said.

Curriculum shaped by experience

A radiation oncologist, Dr. Chen started his career with a large integrated health system before going into private practice.

In discussing how much of the course content was shaped by his own experience, he said “the full entirety of the curriculum, quite frankly.”

Dr. Chen also noted that a lack of knowledge regarding topics such as revenue-cycle management can lead to friction between physicians and administrators.

“Folks early on don’t quite understand not just how physicians, but how health care organizations, get paid,” he said.

“If you’re in a health care organization and you’ve got somebody hounding you to get your charts done, you may not know exactly why and that can be very disheartening and very disempowering,” Dr. Chen explained. “But if you know the basics of the revenue cycle, it can put things into context to make changes to your workflow or at least advocate for them so that it helps both you and your organization.”

If a physician is more aware of the context, they can advocate for solutions—such as hiring a scribe or employing health AI tools—that can help their organization’s revenue cycle, improve their own workflow and provide a better experience for their patients.

“If you understand these basic principles, you can advocate for yourself and you can advocate for your team way better,” he said.

The course can also help physicians better understand “the language of finance,” according to Dr. Chen.

“We find that that’s one of the roadblocks that can hold people back is that they don’t speak the language of finance,” he said. “So it’s hard for them to interact in settings that require that—such as meetings with financially focused administrators.”

The physician licensure, credentials and privileges section includes a module featuring a discussion with Beckie Herron, director of credentials verification at Baptist Health, and Brad Housman, MD, the vice president and chief medical officer at Baptist Health Paducah. 

They outline the different purposes behind the licensure, credentials and privileges processes and what is required to complete each of them. Baptist Health Medical Group is a member of the AMA Health System Program, which provides enterprise solutions to equip leadership, physicians and care teams with resources to help drive the future of medicine.

Legal, IT also covered

The medical liability insurance module features a discussion between Dr. Chen and Chris Albano, the national account manager at the AMA Insurance Agency Inc., an AMA subsidiary.

In the module, Dr. Chen notes that “obtaining medical liability insurance can be a stressful process for physicians,” but Albano tells him that it doesn’t have to be.

“If a physician is going to be going out on their own or working for a smaller practice under another physician, they would have to get their own individual policy,” Albano says in the module.

“There’s often new doctor discounts, which are fairly robust, especially in the first year,” he adds. “That’s a significant amenity many carriers offer, so it’s really going to depend on the type of policy and their specialty.”

In choosing a reputable carrier, Albano recommends physicians looking for one with an outstanding financial rating and an outstanding reputation for handling claims in the event that they are ever brought into a lawsuit.

Dr. Chen has a discussion with Margaret Lozovatsky, MD, the vice president of digital health innovations and chief medical information officer at the AMA, in the module on information and technology in health care.

Dr. Lozovatsky shares her experience in making technology work better for physicians and the patients they care for. She also explains how traditional information technology departments differ from clinical informaticists.

Informaticists were originally focused on helping colleagues manage early EHR interfaces, but now they help shape systemwide strategies and designs. And while IT technicians fix computer hardware and software, she said informaticists are physicians who ensure new tools in development make sense in real-world clinical settings. 

Dr. Chen said he and his AMA colleagues are working to add to the curriculum with “advanced topics in the future for those folks that are more seasoned physician leaders.”