More than ever before, healthcare professionals are crossing the lines between medical practice and business management. Whether it be with a new insurance company or a new biotech startup, there are skill sets that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
Some people don’t think a successful switch-over for doctors is necessarily reasonable, for a number of reasons, which we recently took note of. But others believe it’s doable as long as certain core qualities are in place.
Sachin H. Jain, MD, the CMO of the CareMore Health System and a lecturer in health care policy at Harvard Medical School, recently shared some insights one what it takes for doctors and nurses to make the transition from clinical training to successful entrepreneur or business executive.
Here are Jain’s three skills he believes are essential:
1. Operations management and execution
Jain acknowledges that this is a skill that is important for many in their clinical work, so this ability is an important one on both ends of the spectrum. But it doesn’t always come easy for some.
Still, many clinicians struggle with operations management because they fail to appropriately distinguish between urgent tasks and important, non-urgent tasks — often letting the latter fall by the wayside in favor of the former. Just as a first-year resident physician or a fresh nursing graduate must learn to manage his or her own workflows and develop a plan of attack to manage a patient’s issues, so too must a new clinician executive learn to act with urgency and ownership to build an organization’s workflows and address its problems. Clinician leaders should recognize this potential gap in perspective and work actively to make sure that tasks are appropriately triaged by priority level.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
2. People leadership
A lot of clinicians have never hired or fired anyone, Jain points out. That inexperience in combination with a natural tendency to be compassionate and caring can make management more challenging.
To accelerate the development of their people-management skills, clinicians should partner closely with fellow business leaders and HR professionals. These colleagues can be instrumental in helping them surface their needs and identify tactics to build and manage high-performance teams. These colleagues can also serve as sounding boards when they must make hard decisions and hold inevitable hard conversations.
3. Setting and defining strategy
Having an understanding of duality when it comes to strategy and planning is also important.
Many clinician leaders are drawn to roles in which they can actively work to define organizational structure and strategy. While strategy roles often tap the strengths and deep frontline knowledge of clinicians, executives with clinician backgrounds often forget that creating a strategy involves making trade-offs. The decision to pursue one set of activities is often a decision not to pursue another. Strategy guru and Michael Porter of Harvard Business School elegantly articulated this when he wrote that strategy is both what we choose to do — and what we choose not to do. Clinicians must work to develop organizational strategies with this simple and important maxim constantly in mind.
Some people naturally have abilities and tendencies on both sides of the clinician/executive scale, but others might need to pay special attention to improving their entrepreneurial and management skills with additional education and advice from others.
As Jain pointed out, wrapping up his post in the HBR:
As they transition to careers in the business of health care, clinicians must hold on to the heart and practice of medicine as they continuously develop the core executive skills required to effectively lead and shape their organizations. Health care will be markedly better for it.
[Photo from Flickr user J. Mark Bertrand]
