Rice’s Jones School to offer physician trainees a certificate program in management essentials

A new certificate program at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business will teach management essentials designed for physician trainees at the Texas Medical Center’s teaching hospitals. The one-month rigorous program will take place in April 2017; applications are being accepted through mid-September.

“The Health Care Initiative at the Jones School aims to provide relevant business education to young physicians who can jump-start their careers with skill sets that will not only set them apart but also respond to the critical need for ‘bending the cost curve’ while improving health care outcomes,” said Binata Mukherjee, M.D., director of the initiative. “The program was designed to address the need for management education through short-term education and allows the business school to serve as a lifelong resource for the advancement of business and management skills among physicians.”

The program comes at a time when health care, the largest industry in the U.S., faces many challenges, including skyrocketing costs, increasing demand, inadequate access to care, inefficiency, inconsistent quality of services and nonuniform processes, according to the program organizers. With growing recognition that many of these challenges are truly business problems, the industry is slowly realizing the need to change the way physicians get trained, which has not changed substantially since 1910, and subsequently also how they work.

The Affordable Care Act is also inducing the need for coordination of care among multiple health care institutions by linking payment to value for the patient and creating accountable care organizations, the organizers said.

Led by a range of distinguished Jones School faculty, the Rice Education in Management for Physician Trainees program grew out of a recommendation from faculty and practitioners at academic medical centers in Houston. Those sources said that apart from clinical training, physicians need to learn interpersonal and communication skills, effective teamwork, professionalism and systems-based management practice so they are better prepared to face and address the business challenges of a career in health care.

For more information, visit the program webpage at https://business.rice.edu/executive-education/rice-education-management-physician-trainees-remp.