"I thought, 'What can I do if this job really stinks?'" Bost recalls. His answer was to gain enough business expertise to work as a physician executive or a practice management consultant. But as it turned out, Bost would soon merge his practice with several others, and he no longer is the managing partner. Meanwhile, managed care didn't stick in rural Beaumont. In retrospect, while Bost doesn't regret getting his business degree, he admits its uses for his training are limited.

Timothy Bricker, MD, director of the Heart Center at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, is grateful for his business training at the University of Chicago, but the experience did not much change his management of the Center. "I can't say there were areas that made clear how wrong we'd been," he says. "Much of what I learned was affirming."

On the other hand, some physicians credit their business training with helping them turn their practices into more important players in their markets. Diamond, who is president of Suburban Lung Associates, a Chicago-area practice specializing in pulmonary medicine, says he's a better manager of people and a more capable evaluator of new initiatives because of the program.

For example, when a nearby hospital was engaged in a campus renovation, "I convinced it to divest itself of its own pulmonary function lab, and let me develop a much more advanced lab that would be under our ownership," Diamond says. He could not have written the 100-page business plan needed to persuade the hospital without his business training, he says.

The practice also is engaged in an effort to redesign the healthcare delivery processes that affect patient satisfaction and the perception of quality. It was his PEMBA experience that helped Diamond realize the importance of understanding process.

Knowledge is power

Business school is helpful to the professional who wants to learn how to evaluate business plans, devise a marketing strategy, negotiate contracts with payers, or reshape relationships with hospitals. And if you've set your sights on an executive career with a hospital, insurance company, or pharmaceutical firm, a business degree may be a prerequisite.

But you may be disappointed if you believe healthcare is so unique it has little to learn from other professions. Even in the healthcare-oriented business programs, students spend much of their time analyzing other industries.

"The mission ... of the program is to develop leaders who can face the challenges of the future of medicine, so they're using standard business theory and relating it to healthcare," Diamond says. "For example, in the course on information technology, we studied cases from nonmedical industries, like Mrs. Field's Cookies or the airline industry, and the professor discussed how information technology was used in each of those, then relates those back to medicine."

Moreover, acquiring a business degree is a grueling experience even for someone without a full-time job. Even programs that make efforts to accommodate the busy lives of professionals demand a lot of time, so consider carefully whether you are able or willing to make the commitment.

You should also think carefully about whether the information you hope to extract from the program is worth the effort you'd put in. If you're just looking for some pointers on practice efficiency, you probably don't need a full-fledged degree.

"Those were two of the best-spent years of my life, and they were also two of the most difficult years," says Teitelbaum. "These are intensive programs. They're nothing to be entered into lightly. ... There's a tremendous amount of work to be done outside class, a lot of getting together with classmates, a lot of number crunching. Meanwhile, I was practicing medicine full-time, and I have a family and was trying to have a life."

Bob Keaveney, editor for Physicians Practice, can be reached at bkeaveney@physicianspractice.com.

This article originally appeared in the March 2003 issue of Physicians Practice.