Dr. Dana argues medical school produces "robot physicians" unprepared for running practices or understanding billing and coding. She proposes adding business coursework and entrepreneurial training, and expanding the SoMeDocs platform to medical students to connect them with innovators reshaping healthcare.
The beauty of medicine is to make the individual doctor an entrepreneur. You're in charge and you are making all the rules to the benefit of the patient.
So if I were to give you a magic wand and I were to put you in charge of restructuring what goes on in med school, how would you— right? Yeah. Really, this is bred at the beginning, right? The whole medical industrial complex, as I like to call it, isn't it really about conformity, about not rocking the boat?
Right. Like, it's the opposite, right? And, and that's the problem to me. The problem is that medical school is set up in a very structured way, and it is the start of a factory where— and understandably, you're teaching humans how to heal, which is so hard. But in doing that, we form robot physicians that sort of only know how to heal the body, don't know how to run businesses, don't know the importance of autonomy, don't understand why marketing is important in 2023 and beyond. And so to me, it does start in medical school. And it's interesting that you just asked that because in SomiDocs, we have only been open to doctors that are attendings, that are finished, that are attendings and residents. So doctors that have earned their degree. But the next stage of SoMeDocs are the students, because I do believe that the students are the ones that need to be connected to changemakers of tomorrow, to the niches that will change their viewpoints and that will help them to change the future of healthcare in the proper ways.
All right. So what would you change in med school before they become What classes would you have them add in or what training would you have them add in?
I actually wrote about this for SomiDocs for our magazine. I think that business, and again, you're not going to get an MBA by going to medical school, but I think that you should have a course on the business of medicine. What are the codes? I mean, you know, you come out of residency and there's, I don't even know how many CPT codes and you don't know how to use the codes. And you also need to bill and you're billing on a level and you're like, what level? What does this mean? And what's this level and what's that level? And it's like, you need to hire coders. And so, yeah, I think there needs to be education on how we code, what codes we use. I think on developing a practice of your own, what it means. Again, the basics of being an entrepreneur, because I think that in medical school, no one touches on being an entrepreneur. Mm-hmm. And the key to medicine, I think, and to bringing back the beauty of medicine is to make the individual doctor an entrepreneur and to make them understand that when you're an entrepreneur, you're in charge and you are making all the rules to the benefit of the patient.
Yes.
And you get rid of the jerks.
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