He’s part of Wharton’s Executive MBA program, and he joined the “Becker’s Spine and Orthopedic Podcast” to talk about the move, along with an area all spine surgeons can grow in when it comes to business.
Note: This is an edited excerpt. Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: You announced on LinkedIn that you’re joining Wharton’s Executive MBA Program. Can you talk about why you decided to invest in this now, and what you hope to get out of this as a physician?
Dr. Philip Louie: I’m really excited for this, and everyone has a different reason to get an MBA. I think there’s a couple big areas that spurred me, and one is that I’ve always been interested in how we define value in patient care. The term “value-based care” is thrown around quite a bit, but I think that no one really understands it from a broad and holistic standpoint.
And that’s one of my goals on a broad level. How we determine value is going to determine how we get compensated in the future, and it’s going to guide how we even care for our patients. We’re always trying to better understand all these new enabling technologies that are coming in, and we have to figure out the value of this technology or the return on investment, and being able to sort of start patching the micro-value systems to the macro value systems that guide what we do.
The second area that really intrigues me is that healthcare seems to lag behind in a lot of different areas, and we can learn a lot from the other fields that are a bit more nimble. In musculoskeletal and spine care it’s really important to understand how we can continue to do things better. And what technology can help us be more safe and effective on what we do, and just to sort of grow in the network and learning from others, to think outside the box a bit better, and hopefully drive the field forward a bit more
Q: What are some of the top business challenges that you’re seeing in your work?
PL: One of the biggest ones we deal with on a day-to-day basis is how to do more with less. Essentially staffing is more difficult. It’s more expensive than what it used to be and what we’re asked to do is growing and growing and growing. So, you know, how can we be a better steward of our resources and be more effective with what we have, and even diminishing to do more and do better than how we did before? I think that’s a challenge that we’re all facing.
I think a second challenge that we face is, as you know, in healthcare, there’s just a lot of different stakeholders, and I think we find ourselves arguing with each other all the time, trying to get on the same page. And so whether it’s the insurance companies and hospital leadership and the physicians and other providers or the patients themselves, industry we all want to do the right thing, and we just have to do a better job of communicating with each other and finding, again, where do we find the greatest value and drives our work, and where can we find overlap to move things forward.
Q: Regardless if a physician has business training or not, what’s a business skill that all spine surgeons should know?
PL: Spine surgeons are really good at identifying problems and making that known. It’s in our nature, and we think we’re really good at identifying a whole series of possible solutions. I think where we struggle is taking our identification of problems and then getting to solutions.
I think there’s a set of administrative skills that we as surgeons tend to lack in that area, and it makes us seem like we are just loud and complain and don’t understand the process. Part of that is true, and so I think we just need to do a better job of learning to take a step back and figuring out how to get from point A to point B, C and D, and who needs to be involved and use all these different skill sets that we need to learn as far as part of the journey from the start to the finish.