By JESSICA DREBEN
Staff Reporter
With more and more health maintenance organizations calling the shots over patient care, doctors and medical students say they are being left in the dust. But no more many physicians are planning to come up to speed.
Next fall, the Anderson School at UCLA will become one of four schools nationwide to offer a joint MBA/MD program. A pilot program was launched this year.
“I think you hear a lot of doctors saying they have no control over their patients’ destiny, and that is very frustrating,” said Michael Douek, a third-year medical student at UCLA who will be one of the first students to enter the joint degree program in the fall. “There are huge changes going on in medicine and doctors have to be a little bit more business savvy.”
Anderson administrators say they also have seen a huge increase in practicing physicians wanting to receive management training. In fact, 14 percent of the school’s part-time executive MBA class for 1999 is made up of physicians. There also has been an increase in the number of medical students wanting to join the business school.
At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which ran one of the first joint programs in the country, applications from medical students seeking MBAs have gone from just 100 a decade ago to more than 1,000, according to school officials.
“From my perspective, this is only a good thing,” said Bruce Chernoff, director of UCLA’s MBA/MD program. “The more physicians have knowledge about how businesses work, the more they are in a position to manage HMOs and meet their patients’ concerns.”
Five new students will be entering UCLA’s program in the fall, and two graduated this year from the pilot program. Both students who graduated this year say the joint degree gives them a leg up before they enter the HMO environment.
“As I went though medical school, the more clinical work I did, the more I saw that management is a big part of what we do,” said Dr. Adrian Correa, one of the first students to graduate with the joint degree. “To survive in the medical industry, you now need to know the management principles.”
The MBA/MD program is designed to allow students to complete both degrees in five years, including summers. However, medical students are not allowed to apply to the MBA program until they have finished their third year.
