Why Your Doctor Is Thinking About Getting an MBA

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD To understand why so many medical students (and pre-meds) (and doctors) contemplate business training, let’s consider two real-life examples: Dr. Bob Kocher and Dr. Bijan Salehizadeh. Both trained as physicians, both are currently healthcare investors, and both shared their stories with Lisa Suennen and me on our Tech Tonics podcast. (Kocher’s interview can be found here; Salehizadeh’s will available at the end of the month.) (My usual disclosure: I work at a cloud genomics company in Silicon Valley; neither my company nor I have a financial relationship with Kocher, Salehizadeh, or their firms.) Bob Kocher: The Hospital Consultant Kocher is currently a partner at Venrock’s Palo Alto office, and is perhaps best known for his previous role working in the White House developing the Affordable Care Act in collaboration with Zeke Emanuel and others. When he was growing up Seattle, Kocher says, his “dream was to be a leukemia and lymphoma doctor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.” He went to medical school, trained in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, and was accepted into a prized oncology fellowship at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. However, Kocher explained, “as I watched how we took care of the patients, I was just astonished by the fact that we didn’t always do it right, and that the system wasn’t working as hard as I was to improve.” In particular, Kocher was appalled by the amount of influence ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs