No one knows for sure what’s coming in health care in the months ahead, but one thing is clear: The landscape in 2025 will undoubtedly be changing—and challenging. For physicians and others working in such fields, this is not new but an acceleration of recent trends. External factors, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and internal, more systemic ones have increasingly taken power away from doctors—impacting everything from patient care to physician burnout in the process. Fortunately, it’s never too late to take steps to regain some power and have a bigger voice in decisions that benefit patients.
Today, the vast majority (77.6 percent) of physicians no longer work in private practice but at large corporations where businesspeople, not doctors, run the show. Reportedly, only about 5 percent of hospital leaders are physicians. Even the most brilliant doctor can feel powerless in a system that’s too bureaucratic, inefficient, and focused on the bottom line. They can be as frustrated as their patients when those patients can’t get the care they need, when they need it, and at a cost they can afford.
But physicians can break through the red tape—and that starts with better understanding the way health care functions as a business. As the founding director of the first physician-only MBA program at a top-ranked business school, I’ve worked with hundreds of doctors from diverse roles and specialties, areas of the country, and backgrounds. One thing I consistently hear from our physician MBAs is their desire to gain skills that will help them improve health care and ultimately help them better serve their patients. I’ve identified five such skills that physicians should acquire to excel in their roles today and in the future.
1. How to speak the language of business
The corporate world has its own language for framing issues that physicians must learn. Otherwise, you won’t gain a real understanding of those issues—or be able to communicate with the administrators who usually make the final decisions about them. For example, one of our former students gave a presentation in which she recommended that health care services be expanded to ensure that poor inner-city children had access to adequate treatment and medication. But she spoke solely from a clinical perspective and ultimately discovered that she couldn’t convince her audience of businesspeople to make the changes she wanted to see.
All too often, such language barriers occur. Yet if physicians can learn to translate their patients’ clinical needs in ways that show how meeting those needs can also increase efficiencies and save money—by, say, diminishing hospital stays—it can benefit both the patient and the medical system in general.
2. How the money works
In a similar vein, it’s crucial to understand the financial aspects of the medical field in general and your organization in particular. Where do your organization’s financial resources come from—patient fees, government programs, donor contributions—and each to what degree? Where do they go? How do they impact the organization’s various operations, especially patient care? Without an understanding of the financials, it’s nearly impossible to ensure resources are being used wisely or to have a say in crucial decisions, including those that concern the physical health of your patients and the financial health of your organization.
One of our graduates, for instance, became the head of a clinic that treats low-income patients and was $15 million in the red, but by gaining more skills about the financial aspects of medicine, she identified new funding opportunities and efficiencies. Today, the clinic has a significant financial surplus and is thriving.
3. How to improve operations and processes for patients
Most complaints that patients make about health care concern the amount of money and time it requires—the bills they pay, the hours they spend waiting to see a doctor, and so on. So whenever possible, try to make the ways your organization serves patients more efficient and cost-effective.
For example, after patients complained about the confusing and time-consuming phone-tree process at a Michigan hospital, its chief medical officer, Sumner Liston Crandall (another one of our graduates), applied process-improvement tools that significantly shortened the time and improved the path it took to get to the people they needed to speak with, improving both their and the hospital staff’s satisfaction.
4. How to partner with others, negotiate, and gain other executive skills
Often, physicians feel they are sidelined in decision-making and operating at cross purposes with their organization’s administrators. Yet it’s important to sit around the table with them and other doctors to determine the problem everyone wants to solve and to work together to solve it—even when dealing with people who may hold conflicting opinions.
Dr. Crandall’s experience is a case in point: When she first became CMO at her hospital, she had to lead many specialists with different experiences. She felt unsure of “how to handle people who didn’t seem to respect her decisions, had an aversion to any kind of conflict, and felt like an imposter.” But since then, she’s learned and grown. “I had to work my way through the idea that conflict is OK, and it’s really a method of problem-solving,” she recalls. “I always envisioned negotiations as loud and threatening, but I discovered you can navigate a compassionate and savvy path toward a mutually agreeable solution.””
5. How to advocate for your patients and the health care system
When we ask the doctors whom we train what they’d most like to change about the current system, most say it would be to more easily convince insurance companies to pay for the care their patients need. But making that change, as well as others that could improve patients’ experiences, may require you to go beyond an individual organization and advocate at the state or national level to improve how health care in America operates. One of our graduates, Sonal Desai, an independent contractor in pediatric gastroenterology, obtained a two-year, full-time fellowship through the Presidential Management Fellows Program of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. The program offers opportunities to work at various federal agencies and improve how government operates in key areas like health care.
When physicians learn the business of medicine, they can shape better policies and drive positive change. As a doctor, you want to provide the most personalized and high-quality health care possible, and your patients want to receive it. By following these recommendations, you can progress a long way toward making that happen—whatever this coming year brings.
Susannah Eastwick is a health care executive.
