The responsibilities themselves were straightforward. I needed to account for fundraiser proceeds, plan for class expenses and make sure the money existed before it was spent.
The role gave me an early opportunity to apply something I had learned in business school: organizations make decisions within constraints. Even a relatively simple class budget required balancing limited resources against competing priorities and deciding where spending would have the greatest value for the class. That experience was small compared with the financial decisions made by hospitals and health systems, but the underlying way of thinking was the same.
I saw this connection even more closely while attending a recent lecture on prior authorization. The discussion focused on the barriers that third-party entities can place between clinicians and the treatments they believe their patients need. In business school, I had studied similar incentive tradeoffs in healthcare economics case studies. Sitting in that lecture, however, the issue felt different. It was no longer a case study about competing interests, but about how quickly a patient could receive an answer.
My MBA did not tell me which side was right. It gave me a framework for understanding why the problem existed in the first place. An insurer is trying to manage risk across a population; a hospital is managing its own resources; a physician is responsible for the care of an individual patient. Those interests do not always align. Seeing the issue from those perspectives made it easier for me to understand why a clinically straightforward decision can become complicated once multiple stakeholders with different priorities become involved.
This same pattern showed up again through the Bluegrass Biodesign program at the University of Louisville, where medical and engineering students collaborate to develop solutions for unmet clinical needs. Identifying a clinical problem was often the easy part. The harder questions came afterward. Could the idea realistically reach patients? Who would pay for it? How would it navigate regulatory approval?
Those questions were familiar to me because of my business background. I had learned to think beyond whether an idea was technically possible and ask whether it was feasible to implement. A physician who understands that process can contribute not only by identifying an unmet clinical need, but also by helping determine how a solution can realistically make its way into patient care. common professional sectors other than clinical medicine included finance, healthcare administration, biotechnology and entrepreneurship. 2
At first glance, those numbers could suggest that an MBA pulls physicians away from medicine, but the authors reached a more complicated conclusion. They argued that physician-MBAs can bring valuable clinical perspective into other parts of the healthcare industry. This distinction matters to me because my goal has been to stay at the bedside and bring that additional perspective into how I practice medicine, not replace one career with another.
My business education also gave me a greater appreciation for how often there is no perfect answer. In medicine, our training often centers on finding the right diagnosis or the best treatment. In leadership and administration, decisions are frequently about choosing between imperfect options. There may be competing priorities, incomplete information and no solution that satisfies everyone. Learning to weigh those tradeoffs has been useful in medical school, where the answers to complex problems are not always as clear-cut as they were in a classroom.
None of this means business knowledge is more important than medical knowledge. Compassion, clinical judgment and technical skill remain the foundation of being a physician. But understanding the systems surrounding patient care gives physicians another way to think about the problems they encounter.
Looking back, earning an MBA before entering medicine was never about adding another credential after my name. It was about developing a different lens through which to view healthcare. Medical school has taught me how to care for patients. Business school taught me to ask why the system caring for those patients works the way it does, and how physicians can help improve it.
I still want to spend my career at the bedside. I also want to understand the system around the bedside.
References:
1
The rise in dual MBA / MD programs: 10 things to know. Becker’ s Physician Leadership, October 2025.
2
Ljuboja D, Powers BW, Robbins B, Huckman R, Yeshwant K, Jain SH. When doctors go to business school: career choices of physician-MBAs. Am J Manag
Care. 2016; 22( 6): e196-e198.
Matthew Dyer is a second-year medical student at the University of Louisville School of Medicine.
There is also an important question about what happens after physicians receive business training. A study of 206 Harvard Business School physician-MBA graduates found that 84 % entered residency, but only 49.3 % remained clinically active in some capacity and 27.7 % reported clinical medicine as their primary professional role. The most
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