Vicki Smith-Daniels, faculty chair of graduate business programs in medicine and professor of operations and supply chain management at the Kelley School of Business, recently talked with national radio host John Loeffler for his weekly “Steel on Steel” broadcast. In the interview, which aired April 27, Smith-Daniels and Loeffler discussed the rapidly changing healthcare industry and how the new Business of Medicine MBA program at the school is designed to help physicians navigate that change.
“It’s difficult to take the healthcare industry and boil it down to a couple issues, but before we even got into the discussion of Obamacare there were things in our health system that were just unsustainable going forward,” Smith-Daniels said. “I think you would probably get many people to agree that the fee for service, volume-based care was going to be difficult to sustain without even bringing the Affordable Care Act into the process.
“Simply put, physicians are going to have to be doing things differently than they’ve done them in the past, and that’s what we’re trying to address at the Kelley School with our Business of Medicine MBA.”
Loeffler noted that he believes the current Affordable Care Act model is “doomed to failure.” He also stated that once Americans see what is going on in countries like Great Britain, and experience it for themselves, that an alternative privatized system would spring up.
“If the public system fails, the private system will have some incentive to do some good things,” Loeffler said.
Smith-Daniels agreed that it’s a complex environment, with many of the consequences of the Affordable Care Act yet to be realized. She also acknowledged that physicians are going to need a set of financial tools that may have previously been unnecessary.
“I think you’re correct that we have a big system out there to deal with, and it may be quite fragile,” Smith-Daniels said. “On the other hand, physicians cannot keep doing things the way they’ve done them before.
“That’s the point of our Business of Medicine MBA. We want physicians to have the tools necessary to address those questions. So they can take greater governance over the health system their involved in or just make better business decisions with their partners.”