Is an MBA for doctors really worth it?

My wife thought I’d lost my mind.

I was already PGY-10. A cardiologist with dual fellowship training in adult and pediatric cardiology. Publications in the top percentile of my field. And there I was, signing up for business school.

“You need to stop,” she said.

She wasn’t wrong to ask the question. Because here’s what a full MBA actually means for a practicing physician: 16 - 20 hours of homework plus 2 days of in-person classes every other week. Traveling from Memphis to SF and NYC. A schedule that was already stretched thin would now be stretched even further.

You’re not just adding weight to a backpack. You’re adding weight to a backpack that’s already pulling you backward.

I’ve said this a thousand times before, but medicine doesn’t train doctors to be leaders. Not intentionally. We train them to be excellent clinicians. To memorize, to diagnose, to treat.

Nobody sits you down in residency and says: one day you’ll need to speak the language of a CFO, or understand what a margin statement actually means, or know how to make a business case for the care you believe in.

So most doctors don’t learn it. And then they wonder why they have no seat at the table.

But here’s a truth about how medicine works: only 15% of CEO’s in healthcare organizations have a clinical background. And when you consider hospital systems specifically, that number goes down to 5%.

That means 95% of CEO’s of hospital systems do not have a clinical background.

I always had the ambition to be one of the 5% of did. And that’s partly why getting the MBA was so important to me.

I want to be clear. Healthcare is complex, and running a large system requires real business expertise. We need people who can understand the business of medicine. The problem isn’t that business-trained people are in the room.

The problem is that clinicians often aren’t.

That so many decisions are being made without clinicians, purely because we don’t speak the language to get our voices heard.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

The best health systems in the world don’t work that way. Mayo Clinic. Cleveland Clinic. St. Jude. Look at their leadership structures. What do they have in common?

Those are the ones that have leadership shared between administrators and clinicians. A working partnership if you like, where the person with the clinical knowledge has a genuine voice in the decisions.

So how can physicians actually get their voice heard?

An MBA is definitely one of the ways, and it’s the path I chose (the other reasons belong in a different Substack).

But it’s not the only way. And for most physicians, it’s probably not even the right way.

If you’re in clinical practice and somebody tells you to go get an MBA, let’s do the math again:

Around two years of study. Significant tuition expense. 20 hours a week of study on top of everything else that’s consuming you. And the whole time, you’re still doing the job that doesn’t pause because you have a finance exam on Friday.

You really have to want to do this. Or you have to be satisfied with the status quo.

But most physicians are in neither of those camps. They’re somewhere in the middle. Aware that something is off. Sensing that the business side of medicine is eating their profession alive. But not sure whether a full MBA is the answer, or whether they even have the bandwidth to find out.

That middle ground is where most of us actually live.

A while back, I started thinking about what a program might look like that gave people a taste of what it means to learn the language of business without committing to a full MBA.

The result - eventually - was the Cardiovascular Business and Management Essentials Program.

It’s a partnership between Medaxiom and Wharton. An introduction to the fundamentals of the business of cardiovascular medicine, allowing you to decide if you want to pursue a full-fledged degree.

I wasn’t sure how such a program could actually be created, but I did know two very influential people who hadn’t met each other before - Dr Guy David and Dr Jerry Blackwell.

I’d met Dr. Guy David, Professor and Chair of Healthcare Management at the Wharton School, and knew Dr. Jerry Blackwell in his role as CEO of MedAxiom (and as a practicing cardiologist).

Putting these two heads together made a lot of sense to me.

Combine the world of business education with cardiovascular practice - and you can create a course squarely aimed at practicing clinicians who want to know what it feels like to start speaking the language of the other side.

871 healthcare professionals have graduated from it now. Physicians, nurses, administrators, pharmacists.

I didn’t know that number until someone showed it to me recently. Which, honestly, might be the whole point.

I often think my skill is more in the connecting of people, rather than the execution of big ideas.

Medicine trains clinicians to be excellent at one thing. The system they’re practicing in rewards something else entirely: the ability to speak a language you were never taught.

Most physicians feel that gap. Few do anything about it. The full MBA feels impossible — the time, the cost, the sheer weight of it on top of everything else.

So they stay frustrated. They stay voiceless. They keep showing up to rooms where decisions are being made without them.

It doesn’t have to work that way.

You don’t need two years and a six-figure tuition bill to start building business fluency.

You need a way that doesn’t cost you your practice, your sanity, or your family’s patience. A program that gives you the language, the network, and — maybe most importantly — an honest answer to the question: is this something I actually want more of?

That’s what this was always meant to be.

Not a golden ticket out of medicine. A ticket to a different way of practicing it.

Many of the best health systems in the world are led by physicians who understood their business limitations and did something about it. The rest are run by people who don’t have firsthand experience of managing patients.

Which room do you want to be in?

Cardiovascular Business and Management Essentials Program.