Why I'd Rather My Daughter Go to Business School Than Medical School

The healthcare industry in the United States notoriously accounts for around 17% of the Gross Domestic Product — which, keep in mind is the result of being relative to lower costs of other things like energy or food (e.g., beef in Japan jacks up their GDP for food). Regardless, illness is a growth industry. Add aging baby boomers with what seems to be an obesity epidemic (along with concomitant ills of heart disease, diabetes, bum joints, etc.), and you have a double whammy of both an increased population that has an increase in physical problems — often multiple and simultaneous. And what may be worse?

 The supply to meet this demand may not be so good.

Published reports note we’re likely to have too few primary care physicians—real soon. Dr. Dennis Gottfried Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut Medical School states that “There are now about 355,000 primary care doctors in the U.S. but the Association of American Medical Colleges predict that at least 45,000 more will be needed by 2020.” Darrell G. Kirch, Mackenzie K. Henderson, and Michael J. Dill from the Association of American Medical Colleges made similar findings with “…shortages of…46,100 medical specialists…”

Registered nurses and Emergency Department staff are also running at a deficit. And while I’m a big fan of technology solutions in medicine, Dr. Watson’s not a scalable solution for many of the gaps-a-coming.

I work as a researcher in orthopedic rehabilitation and sports medicine, and a recent study on “…the proposed model for projecting [the Physical Therapist] workforce indicates that the US supply of PTs appears to be headed toward a shortfall, and this shortfall is projected to persist with or without increased demand related to the ACA.”

There is a challenge for medical schools, nursing schools, physical therapy programs, schools of dentistry, graduate doctoral programs for clinical psychologists, and other clinical degrees to be able to adequately meet this demand soon enough—it takes a chunk of time to complete the educational coursework along with the clinical aspects of training in any doctoral-level program. And such training can cost a significant amount of money. There are also complicating factors of passing licensing exams, moving to a state one is not licensed in and hoping for reciprocity, costs of doing business (malpractice liability insurance, or dental equipment), and so forth.

Practices and hospitals will be challenged to offer competitive compensation packages while being limited on what fees may be charged or collected. Such can make for a difficult pinch in profits and viability. This can have positive and negative side-effects such as facility/practice closures (negative) or increased M&A activities (generally a positive). All of this occurs not in a vacuum but in an increasingly complex marketplace of public and private payers—and hybrids via the Affordable Care Act. And all of these operations subject to change via changes in politics and law.

My opinion?

I think that those who are soon to finish their training and readying for independent practice are in the best positions to have choices in where they choose to work/practice, who they wish to work for if they do not wish to go into private practice, and they should be able to get a pretty respectable dollar for their work.

For those hiring, it may be a more difficult situation of minding the gap of what’s needed to attract and retain top talent while providing superior clinical outcomes funded on ever-evolving payment models. As is usual, innovation will most likely win on all counts—clinically (patient outcomes), professionally (development, satisfaction and retention), and economically (maintaining viability through profitability).

Personally...?

I advised my daughter to go to B-School, not Med School. Why? Because it would take her a decade before she could practice, post-fellowship, and it's just too risky to forecast what things will be like by then. Business on the other hand will give her more options to pivot and adapt in real time to what may come...

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If you'd like to learn more or connect, please do at https://DrChrisStout.com. You can follow me on LinkedIn, or find my Tweets as well. And goodies and tools are available via https://ALifeInFull.org.

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Why Medicine is Poised for a (Big) Change

Big Idea 2015: Next Year's Medical Innovation Is Already Here

Is This the Future of Medicine? (part 5)

Bringing Evidence into Practice, In a Big Way (Part 4)

Can Big Data Make Medicine Better? (Part 3)

Building Better Healthcare (Part 2)

Is Technology the Cure for Medicine’s Ills? (Part 1)

Access to Healthcare is a US Problem, Too

All opinions are my own...