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Week of 23 April 1999 Vol. II, No. 32 Feature Article New MBA offered for health care managers and physicians By Hope Green Increasingly, in this era of managed medical care, physicians and other health practitioners are being forced to think of their calling as a business. Preoccupied with matters of life and death, however, people in medical vocations usually are not experts in stanching the flow of red ink. "Doctors are handicapped because they don't understand the basics of finance, marketing, management, and human resources," says William Bigoness, who directs BU's executive education programs. "They find it very frustrating to see the control of the health-care field moving out of their hands." Responding to doctors' urgent need for management education, the Massachusetts Medical Society is partnering with Boston University's School of Management to offer an Executive MBA Program for Physicians and Health Care Managers. This is the first time a state medical society has collaborated with a business school to offer such a program. William Bigoness, director of BU's executive education programs. Boston University Photo Services The accelerated 17-month course of study, which starts in September, will combine attributes of SMG's health care MBA and regular executive MBA programs. "We've always had people from the health and medical professions in our executive MBA program," explains Alan Cohen, the new program's faculty director, "but we found that they would benefit from greater health-care management content. Our new program aims to help practicing physicians and health-care executives with several years of experience to regain control of their destiny in an increasingly managed care environment. By combining hard-nosed business sense and managerial competence with their clinical training and professional compassion, they will become more enlightened, effective leaders of health-care organizations. " SMG was selected from among 20 business schools that submitted proposals for the partnership. One of the deciding factors for the society was that SMG has already offered a health care MBA for 26 years. The new program will be held in a series of two-day residential weekend sessions, with classes on Friday and Saturday approximately every other week, plus four five-day residence weeks and a team project that culminates in the writing of a business plan. Case studies will relate directly to issues the executives confront in their professional life -- such as hospital mergers, third-party payers, and the acquisition of practices. In organizing the program, SMG and the medical society gathered suggestions from focus groups and surveys of prospective students. Most physicians favored having a diverse group of participants from all sectors of the health-care industry, including HMOs, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies -- precisely because it will bring them face-to-face with their adversaries in a lecture hall. "They don't want a myopic view of the world," Bigoness says. "What we've put together is a program where we provide everyone with a common level of knowledge about basic business principles, then an appreciation of the forces facing the health-care industry, and then the demands and pressures the different players in the industry are facing." A major part of this new business landscape is the proliferation of group practices, adds John Fromson, director of physician health services at the Massachusetts Medical Society. "Physicians used to work independently," he says, "but now they have to think of themselves as being part of a larger corporate mission. And they not only have to work in teams, they also must learn how to lead them."