The healthcare industry is undergoing considerable change. Today’s physicians face economic pressure to reduce costs while improving care—amidst a digital transformation that’s changing how and when patients seek treatment. Consider this: Individuals can now spot symptoms with an activity tracker and then video conference their doctor to more quickly reach a diagnosis.
“The complexities of delivering medical care are rapidly changing,” says Dr. Richard Pitts, vice president of clinically integrated networks and senior medical director at St. Joseph Heritage Healthcare, which is part of an 11-state, 50-hospital health system. “There’s a constant pressure to find more effective ways to deliver healthcare while improving quality and still holding the line on costs.”
But balancing those priorities requires more than just medical know-how. Healthcare professionals also need business skills if they want to deliver a high-quality patient experience while still meeting organizational goals.
“Paying attention to the best treatments, along with the cost of those treatments, requires both business and medical skills,” Pitts says.
It’s why Pitts enrolled in CORe, an online program featuring courses in business analytics, financial accounting, and economics. At the time, he was the chief medical officer at a large teaching hospital in Southern California and wanted to understand the business more broadly, so he could better understand the implications of his decisions and more effectively communicate with colleagues.
“CORe filled in the missing pieces with respect to my business skills,” Pitts says. “I’m now able to make meaningful business comments in meetings. Colleagues appreciate my having a basic understanding of the business world.”
Pitts uses population health—summarized by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as “the distribution of health outcomes within a population, and the range of personal, social, economic, and environmental factors that influence the distribution of health outcomes”—as an example of where business and medicine intersect. According to Pitts, there are nine major diagnoses, including diabetes and hypertension, in population health. When they are treated aggressively, it can result in a dramatic decrease in any associated complications.
“This saves unnecessary hospitalizations and billions of dollars of healthcare expense, while dramatically improving the quality of life for patients,” Pitts explains. “The professionals heading up this effort speak the language of business and medicine almost simultaneously.”
That example is just one of many ways healthcare professionals could benefit from having business skills. Here are five other competencies physicians should consider adding to their resume.
Business Skills Every Healthcare Professional Needs
1. Analytics
Analytics can help physicians identify disease outbreaks, track health epidemics in real time, and deliver more personalized care to patients. Achieving those goals requires developing a data mindset, however, and understanding how to recognize trends, analyze relationships between variables, and estimate the accuracy of statistics.
“My business analytics course covered regression analysis and, most importantly, the meaning of statistical significance and hypothesis testing,” Pitts says. “These are essentially the same tools that are used in healthcare to decide the outcomes of various treatments in medicine.”
2. Financial Accounting
Given how focused healthcare organizations are on reducing costs, it’s imperative for physicians to have a basic understanding of financial accounting. Not only can that knowledge lead to more strategic business decisions, but it can also help physicians analyze their team’s performance, measure the impact of their work in terms of revenue, and manage the department’s budget.
3. Ability to Lead Large, Diverse Teams
The health system Pitts works for is composed of 111,000 employees, 38,000 nurses, and 20,000 physicians alone—leading to large, diverse teams. And when faced with statistics like one in four Americans has multiple chronic conditions, it’s becoming more apparent that patients require care from multiple providers for optimal results.
The New England Journal of Medicine notes that physicians who want to lead effectively need to know how to “develop a team culture of feedback to improve patient care.” This includes understanding what motivates the team, regularly soliciting advice and incorporating suggestions, providing ongoing feedback, and acknowledging successes while constructively addressing the team’s weaknesses.
4. Strategic Management
As teams grow, so do departments’ needs and priorities. It’s important for leaders to set an organizational structure and strategy to not only guide their team but also help employees determine what to pursue and what not to pursue.
Physicians should start first with defining their mission—what the organization stands for—and then begin answering the tough questions. Where are revenues coming from? Is money being spent in the right places? How can the team optimize operations to improve the patient experience? With each response will come a clearer picture of where the team should focus their efforts.
5. Effective Communication Skills
Strong communication skills go far in healthcare. Physicians need to practice empathy and know how to properly speak with patients and their family members. Beyond that, they also need to communicate with key stakeholders, including other physicians. The more effective they are, the stronger their operations and more streamlined their processes will be.
The Importance of Business Skills
“It's important for physicians at all levels of leadership to have business skills, in order to be an effective member of ever-forming teams in the modern world of medicine,” Pitts says. “Having business skills helps to cross what often is a ‘chasm of understanding’ between physicians and finance members of the healthcare team.”
Do you want to take your career to the next level? Download our free Guide to Advancing Your Career with Essential Business Skills to learn how enhancing your business knowledge can help you make an impact on your organization and be competitive in the job market.
