Doctors go back to school-business school

We have seen that management is a skilled combination of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling and it is used everywhere. It is needed in the military, universities, public administration, Fortune 500 companies, churches, and health care providers. A recent Wall Street Journal article discussed how business schools were beginning to offer courses to help health professionals better manage the delivery of their services.

This article reports when Christopher Barton took over as chief of emergency medicine at San Francisco General Hospital this year, he became responsible for balance sheets, income statements, and personnel, never having had any formal business education. Barton recognized that leaders in medicine and health care (including himself) had not taken the managerial side of health care as seriously as they should. Along with 67 other students, Barton enrolled in Harvard University's $22,000 non-degree program in Managing Health Care Delivery to help him think critically about ways to improve his day-to-day management of the emergency room processes.

The course has led to Dr. Barton making a number of important changes. He has established annual performance evaluations. He is examining ways to improve delegation and teamwork and examining models to improve patient flow. In January 2010 he plans to take his ER physicians and nurses on a one-day leadership retreat.

Another student at the Harvard program, Judy Smith, medical director of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York observed that "we are coming to grips now with the fact that we are much more similar to other businesses than we are different." Smith observed that cancer treatment requires careful day-to-day planning and organizing and the skill sets required are not dissimilar to those taught in busies schools.

Source: Jane Porter, "Doctors Seek Aid from Business Schools Universities, Hospitals Create Programs to Assist Medical Professionals In Need of Some Management Know-How." The Wall Street Journal, December 22, 2009

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Think about a doctors' office or hospital that you know. Identify what planning might be needed to undertaken to make the office or hospital run efficiently.

2. What organizing, leading, and control need to take place in a doctor's office or hospital?

3. If you were asked to design a corporate culture for a hospital what features would you want to build into that culture and why?