Biology, anatomy … and finance? More medical students are also getting business degrees

Jasen Gundersen never thought about a career in business when he entered medical school nearly three decades ago to become a rural doctor.

But today he doesn’t work in rural America and he doesn’t practice primary care. In fact, he no longer practices medicine at all.

As CEO of CardioOne, which provides back-office support to cardiologists, Gundersen is part of a growing trend: doctors and medical students earning advanced business degrees to work in the business side of the booming healthcare industry.

Just over 60 percent of medical schools now offer dual MD-MBA programs, more than double the number two decades ago, a recent survey shows. And researchers estimate that the number of dual degree graduates has nearly tripled. However, it is difficult to know exactly how many doctors have business degrees. While medical students who have earned both a medical and business degree account for almost 1 percent of the roughly 28,000 medical students who graduate each year, that does not include doctors like Gundersen who later return to school to pursue executive position MBA.

For years, some doctors have sought ancillary degrees, including master’s degrees in public health and law degrees. But more and more doctors are looking to combine their clinical experience with management skills and financial literacy as America’s health care system focuses on maximizing profits. Often, it’s so they can become business executives, especially as lucrative health-tech startups proliferate and hospital systems, pharmacy benefit managers and insurers swell into great companies.

This pursuit of advanced business degrees, however, begs the question: Who will these doctors ultimately serve more, patients or shareholders?

Long gone are the days when nuns ran many local hospitals. Many hospitals are now part of billion-dollar systems, some of which, like HCA Healthcare Inc. and Tenet Healthcare Corp., are ahead of some of America’s most recognizable brands on the Fortune 500 list.

Still, it’s one of the few sectors of the economy where the people who know the most about what’s going on in their companies aren’t the ones running them, said JB Silvers, a Case Western Reserve University management professor who teaches business. basics for medical students and doctors for decades.

In the past, doctors rarely left medicine to join management positions because they tended to earn more as medical practitioners. But that’s changing, Silvers said, especially as new career paths emerge. An MBA can serve as a gateway to these new opportunities—and the potentially lucrative ownership stakes that can come from leading successful medical technology companies.

Doctors earn an average of $350,000 a year, making them among the highest paid workers in the US. Primary care physicians tend to make less than that, while the top 1% of physicians can make more than $1.7 million a year.

“There are a lot of other ways to make more money now,” said Rich Joseph, who as an MD-MBA graduate from Stanford exemplifies the trend. Joseph, an outspoken critic of the way doctors are trained in the US, is the chief medical officer of Restore Hyper Wellness, which offers cryotherapy and IV drips at locations across the country.

Doctors are considered the face of the health care system, but many important decisions are made in the boardroom, said Folauyo Laditi, a recent graduate of Yale’s MD-MBA program and a urology resident at the University of Pittsburgh.

Laditi wants to use her business degree to address systemic problems in health care that sometimes don’t feel “fixable” as a doctor treating one patient at a time. He hopes “to make changes that can affect many patients and many people at once.”

Medical schools sell the power that comes with a dual degree. “Are you ready to combine your clinical expertise with best business practices to transform your organization? Hone your business acumen to take on a greater scope of leadership,” the University of Tennessee Medical Examiner’s Master’s Program website advertises.

Harvard University says on its website that its dual degree program aims to “develop outstanding physician leaders, experienced in both medicine and management, to occupy positions of influence through which to make significant contributions to health and well-being of people and society.”

Gundersen, CardioOne’s CEO, who attended the University of Tennessee program and now lives outside Denver, found it useful to practice medicine for years after earning his business degree, juggling executive and clinical work. He stopped treating patients nearly four years ago.

It helps to speak the doctors’ language, Gundersen said while in Florida on a summer business trip to sell cardiologists on using his company’s platform. It offers relief from a pain point for most doctors – non-medical work – so they can focus on patient care. This is something he feels as a medical practitioner.

Gundersen said the nation needs more doctors, especially those who remain independent from growing health care companies. As he promotes this message to future cardiologists, Gundersen realizes the irony. “We need more doctors and here I am the doctor who no longer treats,” he said.

Samantha Lees writes for KFF Health News, formerly known as Kaiser Health News, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism on health issues. Contact her at [email protected]; follow her on X at @samanthann.