9 Essential Skills Medical Schools Don’t Teach and How to Overcome the Knowledge Deficit

Medical schools teach medical content well, but they miss the mark when it comes to teaching the practical side of medicine. Questions like How should I manage my income? What should I look for in a contract? or What happens when I’m sued? are left unanswered. Physicians generally learn these lessons on the job and make avoidable mistakes along the way.

The following are nine skills I wish I would have learned before leaving medical school.

Mergers & Acquisitions: Blending for Success

Merger and acquisitions, in Health Care especially, are not going anywhere anytime soon. As laws and regulations continually change and strengthen within the industry, more and more companies will use this tactic to remain successful. However, a merger or acquisition cannot be successful without due diligence, open and honest communication, and the appropriate blending of the two organizations’ cultures.

Red Doctors and Blue Doctors. What about the Color Purple?

Politics is a very strange thing. It changes your friends and your enemies faster than the turnover in a schoolyard playground. It is a flawed system in which the disgruntled are tempted to think that the only people politicians represent are themselves. Like most responsible people, politicians are neither as bad as their detractors say nor as good as they themselves feel they are. A moral compass is usually there, but it is fragile because its needle is easily magnetized toward the politician him or herself.

Being a physician requires a crystal-clear moral compass because it’s too hard and too important of a job to do for just money. The labor, whether it’s cost efficient or not, is worth the satisfaction of doing one’s best while helping someone out the most. For doctors, their moral compass points to true North; for politicians, it sometimes points the way the wind is blowing.

Preparing Your Medical Practice for a Disaster

The year 2017 is remembered in infamy for its disasters: hurricanes, wildfires, blizzards, floods, heat waves, tornados, mudslides, mass shootings, school violence, terrorism, and more. What are the roles of physicians and their practices in disasters? What are their obligations? If a natural or man-made disaster shut down your office and wiped out your office records, would you know how to piece your practice back together and quickly start seeing patients again?

How the Corporatization of Medicine Saved My Life

The wake-up call came just a few years later. The stated merger with a larger national group was nothing of the sort. I soon found my pay restructured, pension wiped out, and profit sharing canceled. By then my family was firmly rooted in the community and moving was not an option. As I watched many of my colleagues and friends pack up and leave, I found myself drowning in this bleak new reality.

ACO’s and the Medscape Compensation Report

The times are a changin’, and this year’s Medscape Compensation Report proves it. The annual report crunches data from more than 24,000 physicians from 25 specialties around the country, and provides a snapshot of the state of physicians’ practices in […]

Mergers & Acquisitions in Healthcare – Who Benefits?

The healthcare landscape in the U.S. over the past several decades has fueled a wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) among hospitals, giving rise to so-called “mega” integrated healthcare systems, such as Kaiser Permanente in California. However, the main drivers […]