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Doctors With Mbas


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Can you clarify this a bit more? You mean they have an interest in hospital management and admin? 

Partly but on the clinical side. In theory, a MBA might help a physician become the chief of his or her department or take on management role at partner organizations concurrently with their practice. E.g. I know a few physicians who work in FM/IM and also serve as VPs and executives for government health agencies, such as the Ministry of Health.

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With that being said, unless you become a hospital VP, or management you don't really need an MBA. Its still not that common of a degree to get in Canada, but as medicine is more of a business in the states, it is more common there. 

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Academic centers are requiring new staff get masters level degrees (probably driven from the university side more so than the healthcare side). They are also requiring their physicians to pick a "career track" so they can follow them along from a university point of view and eval thier progress. I have heard of research, education and admin tracks. Even in an academic center, not everyone wants to do research so it's pointless to do an MSc. People with an interest in admin will do an MBA or a MPH. At least it's semi relevant.

 

Honestly, it's probably a good thing overall. More doctors in admin jobs means less moron beauracrats running the system.

 

One of our senior guys here in admin has an MBA and he's improved the hospital leaps and bounds since he was appointed as head of our division.

 

One issue we have encountered however is the university really doesn't respect MBAs and they tend to get looked down on during academia. The universities prefer to appoint research people to admin roles, which makes zero sense from a management point of view but is not surprising if you have spent any time dealing with universities.

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yeah I don't understand why they would appoint someone with a PhD to an admin role over someone with an MBA or MPA. 

 

Do doctors with MBAs do this degree out of their own budget or is it covered by the hospital they work at? For those doctors who are already employed, does being chief of department get them a raise? I thought doing admin results in less pay, which is why not many take the initiative to do it

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As someone coming into medical school already with an MBA, I can definitely see there being value for *some* doctors to have the degree.

 

When I finished my MBA (2008) the BC Health Care system was actively recruiting MBAs to help reduce costs and improve performance. From what I heard (now this is purely anecdotal) they were having a lot of success with this approach. Now, I would think that you would want hospital CEO to have some sort of MPH/MPA/MBA and MD in order to understand both the patient care and administrative side.

 

But as it's been said above, unless you're interested in business/administration side, there's really no point in getting an MBA. I happen to have a lot of administrative experience through my MBA and military job, so it wouldn't surprise me if I ended up in that role eventually (but hopefully not too soon).

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yeah I don't understand why they would appoint someone with a PhD to an admin role over someone with an MBA or MPA. 

 

Do doctors with MBAs do this degree out of their own budget or is it covered by the hospital they work at? For those doctors who are already employed, does being chief of department get them a raise? I thought doing admin results in less pay, which is why not many take the initiative to do it

I know at least one staff who got some funding via the division he/she was in.

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