For some physicians, burnout inspires them to do something different.
Michael Kelley, MD, MBA’19, had been in the same cardiology role for 10 years when he decided he needed a change.
“I was getting pretty burned out with clinical work and not having a seat at the table,” he said. “Even though I was more tired than at any other point in my career, I decided I was going to find a way to change—rather than continuing to complain or blame other individuals.”
Dr. Kelley began due diligence to select an advanced degree that would strengthen his leadership and business capabilities. Though initially located in Tennessee, Dr. Kelley discovered the Physician MBA Program at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business offered both online and in-person learning. And most importantly, the program shared his vision for healthcare.
“The Kelley School’s Physician MBA Program had the best feel for what I was trying to accomplish, and they were excited about why I was trying to elevate physicians into leadership roles, putting healthcare in the hands of people who provide healthcare,” he said.
Dr. Kelley initially expected business concepts like finance and accounting to comprise much of his learning in the Physician MBA. While these healthcare-focused courses gave him new skill sets to apply in making business decisions, he says the interpersonal skills and change management capabilities were transformative lessons for learning how to lead.
“The softs skills you learn at Kelley are as important—if not more important—than the actual operational takeaways. You have to recognize that change management is a structured process, and you can’t just expect immediate change; you need to have a process for achieving it,” he said. “Getting people on the same page and encouraging people in the direction you want to go requires an ability to recognize other leaders and those who can help you achieve what needs to be done.”
Dr. Kelley also learned how to collaborate with hospital leadership to achieve his goals. Rather than an adversarial relationship, he says the Physician MBA taught him how to create a partnership with administration to gain buy-in for physician ideas and to better understand the health system holistically.
“One of the important skills is being able to partner with the C-suite on why a clinical decision is important for us to safely take care of patients. And then, you need to be able to share with leadership what the ROI of that decision looks like,” Dr. Kelley said. “We have to think about our proposals from the aspect of all the stakeholders involved in those decisions and be able to speak to those viewpoints with confidence and knowledge, rather than solely as a clinician. That was an important piece I learned at Kelley.”
When he graduated with his MBA in May 2019, Dr. Kelley started a new role as chief medical officer and vice president of medical affairs at Owensboro Health Regional Hospital in Owensboro, Kentucky. He says having an MBA was important in earning that position.
“I think it made a huge difference to have that type of education. It’s not just having the initials ‘MBA’ after your name, but when you’re interviewing, it’s invaluable to be able to speak from a position of knowledge and strength,” Dr. Kelley said. “My time in the program gave me a different way of thinking about things and really reinvigorated my career. I overcame burnout in a somewhat contradictory way: Although the MBA was certainly time consuming, it reinforced what was really missing in my work as a full-time clinician.”
In his new role, Dr. Kelley co-chaired the hospital’s COVID-19 steering committee and served as incident commander during the pandemic and throughout several other events. He says skills from the MBA were incredibly useful during the pandemic.
“The soft skills become important when you’re leading in an environment where you’re not the expert, you have staffing challenges, and you’re leading a team who’s feeling burned out while caring for people who are scared and sick,” he said. “I probably would’ve been able to do that without the MBA, but it gave me the skills to implement changes like proposing a new incentivization model to my CFO and helping to create a nursing stay-at-home model to keep nurses from leaving for higher wages in travel nursing. I was also able to create some transformational processes in the ED during the transition to an employed model and when there were changes to the COOs of the hospital and medical group.”
Dr. Kelley is using his combination of cardiology and MBA skills on a current project to introduce the use of high-sensitivity troponin tests to quickly diagnose heart attacks. He’s redesigning clinical workflows, gathering stakeholder input, and leading change management.
“I’m getting out to the practice executive councils to talk through their concerns, repeatedly communicating our plans, and drawing process maps to explain how this could potentially change the entire operational efficiency of the ED and acute care tower. There are lots of MBA skills at work in this,” he said.
Dr. Kelley has been promoted to Chief Physician Officer at the Owensboro Health System. In this role, he works to improve physician and advance practice provider retention, recruitment, and culture; improving access for the communities Owensboro Health serves; redesign clinical workflows to minimize clinical care variation; and mitigate the very thing that inspired his MBA journey: physician burnout. He often talks with physicians about earning an MBA or finding new ways to approach medicine.
“One of the reasons physicians are burned out is because they don’t diversify themselves enough. Not everyone can do 35 to 40 years of clinical medicine, especially today,” he said. “If you can find some alternative paths to use your voice and your intelligence to look at things from a different angle and to solve problems, it’s a real career extender and satisfier.”
Dr. Kelley believes physician MBAs should be solving the challenges in healthcare, but to do that, they need to be satisfied in their jobs. He says earning the Physician MBA equipped him with the skills to get into a position to lead change, and it also helped rediscover his passion for medicine.
“In all honestly, I think it saved my career in healthcare. It’s a better mix for me in life, and it better suits what I want to accomplish and who I am as a person,” Dr. Kelley said. “The biggest return on my investment in the Kelley School is the opportunity to change healthcare the way I see it—from a clinician’s perspective—without being an obstructionist, angry, or burning a path to early retirement. The Physician MBA gave me the opportunity to prolong my career and make a difference.”
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