Medical managers: Doctors with MBA

NEW DELHI: If you are a regular ER watcher, you’ll be familiar with the skirmishes that those dishy docs get into with hospital administrators and number crunchers.

Indian hospitals have found a way around the great divide triggering a trend in the process — opt for medical MBAs. As corporate hospitals go on a massive expansion drive, experienced doctors with management degrees are now hot property.

According to head hunters, doctors with management degrees can earn a hefty premium with the differential being as high as 20-40% compared to a doctor without any management skills.

Artemis Health Institute COO Somnath Chakravorty says, “With the entry of corporates in the healthcare sector, the investments in hospitals are very high. Hospitals need to be run efficiently both operationally and financially. Since the core of the business is medicine, professionals who fulfil both requirements are a golden combination.”

In a bid to make up for the talent crunch hospitals are looking for several options. Says Vipul Prakash, partner and MD of Elixir, “The talent pool of doctors with MBAs is small and hospitals are sponsoring doctors to get an MBA degree.”

Max Hospitals chief physician (HR) Shabnam Singh said, “If a doctor with substantial years of hands-on experience has a management degree, then he is like a rare gem. Additionally, if the professional is within 35-45 years and he/she will usually get a premium of about 20% over his counterparts without a management degree.”

However, fresh MBBSs or MDs with a management degree may not be the ideal choice as healthcare is a critical service industry that demands experience, she added. This has led to doctors increasingly opting for pure management courses or hospitality management courses.

Most of these doctors do their management courses from institutes like IIM-Ahmedabad (short-term course), AIIMS, FMC and Pune. Hospital sources however add that this is also because of the limited number of seats in the post-graduate courses.

“One needs the skills of a seasoned doctor as well as an experienced management executive. Many times just having a doctor to manage a hospital can back-fire completely,” Transearch International India managing partner Uday Chawla says.