Sachin Jain: Rethinking the MD/MBA Pathway
Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“When I was a medical student, I was one of a handful of graduates who completed my MD and MBA degrees together.
Today, there’s a growing number of joint MD/MBA programs and and the number of enrollees in each of these programs has grown considerably.
At my alma mater, Harvard Medical School, more than a dozen students annually graduate every year.
While I am the first to recommend business training to anyone who seeks it – we need clinically-trained leaders fixing our broken healthcare system – I believe the sequence of training, incorporating business school into medical school, is a mistake.
A business education is most rich when:
- one brings real world life work experience to the classroom; most medical students have very little such experience during the MD/MBA training program.
- one can leave business school and apply the training to real-world contexts; there are few such opportunities for MD-MBAs unless they forgo residency training (something I strongly recommend against)
MD-MBAs have the added disadvantage of suspending clinical training when they are performing their MBAs.
An alternate pathway to consider along these lines – is a residency-MBA program. When I was a resident at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, I worked with my program director Joel Katz, to build a joint residency-MBA program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The program extended the length of clinical training by a year and integrated MBA coursework at Harvard Business School into the final two years of residency. Residents were able to maintain clinical continuity by still doing some clinical work during their MBA semesters. Graduating residents can then enter the world of management and medicine with the benefit of fresh clinical an management training.
MD/MBA may still make sense for a handful of students with lots of pre-medical school business experience. And there may be financial considerations (such as aid and scholarships) that make the MD/MBA an easier degree sequence.
However, for most, a residency-MBA is a superior pathway and medical educators and medical students should strongly consider rethinking the optimal training sequence.
What do you think? Are MD/MBA programs the way to go? Or is there a better sequence?”
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