$
Getting My
GLMS Return on
Brad S. Sutton, MD, MBA
T
oward the end of 2011 my wife, Erica,
and I moved to Louisville to join the
faculty at the School of Medicine; Erica
in Surgery and myself in Medicine. We’ve since
found Louisville to be a wonderful place to
raise our two children and have enjoyed a great
network of friends and colleagues. As part of
the credentialing process, we became members of the Greater Louisville Medical Society
(GLMS). With our membership, a number
of benefits, including CAPS processing and an annual pictorial
were immediately apparent. But to be frank, membership was a
prerequisite to faculty credentialing. I had little insight or interest
into the broader organization. Not until an MBA student of mine,
Brian Thornton, invited me to participate on the Emerging Medical
Concepts Committee did I see a greater value.
The health care politics in the greater Louisville area can be
difficult to get one’s hands around. In fact, practice politics, both
within and between various health systems in town, have been the
greatest challenge of my transition to Louisville. I’m not alone in
this – I’d wager most providers in every specialty have been affected
by escalating competition between health systems and practices.
This has been spurred in large part by a complicated roll-out of
the Affordable Care Act, increasing regulatory pressures and decreasing margins in nearly every service line. In short, all of us are
being asked to do more with less, and the pressure has manifested
in some very unflattering ways. And yet, amidst all this fluidity
and competition, I sat down at that first meeting of the Emerging
Medical Concepts Committee and saw my senior colleagues take
off their health systems hats and engage in frank conversation. As
it turns out, we all face the same challenges and could learn a great
deal from one another about how to navigate these turbulent times.
When I speak nationally on health reform and the business of
medicine, two themes clearly emerge: 1) Providers feel like commodities and feel a general loss of control and 2) We’re not trained
to adequately articulate our value. We’ve tried to address this concern at the School of Medicine in several ways. First, we’ve created
a dedicated course of study called the Distinction in Business and
Leadership Track. This longitudinal curriculum is designed to
equip undergraduate medical students with key business principles.
Second, we offer a combined MD/MBA degree program, designed
to position providers as physician executives. Recently, I was approached by GLMS leadership with a simple question: “What is
membership worth to you?” The impact of many GLMS initiatives,
such as global health programs and public policy advocacy, is hard to
quantify. However, we sought to answer this question by financially
GLMS Membership
Dues
$340
6
LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
$