Physicians pursue an MBA for several reasons, chiefly among them is to solve challenges they see regularly in healthcare.
When she enrolled in the Physician MBA Program at the Kelley School of Business, Celanie Christensen, MD, MBA’24, knew there was a shortage of physicians in her specialty in Indiana. A neurodevelopmental pediatrician at Riley Children’s Health in Indianapolis, Dr. Christensen is among eight specialists board-certified in neurodevelopmental disabilities in the entire state. When 1 in 36 kids have autism, Dr. Christensen recognized the field needed to grow, or she needed to find a way to leverage other resources and networks, to support these children.
“I wanted to better advocate for my group. I know that creating change and getting leadership support for it requires business knowledge,” Dr. Christensen said. “Medicine is a business, whether we like it or not, and understanding that language will better position me to take care of kids with developmental disabilities at Riley. Ideally, I’d like to expand throughout the state and, potentially, nationwide.”
Though she acknowledges that business isn’t taught in medical school or residency (“I’ve made it a point to ask every student and resident if they know how to place a bill for their services—and they don’t.”), Dr. Christensen is no stranger to the importance of running a profitable business that keeps the lights on. She’s the daughter of a small business owner, and she knows healthcare must run efficiently to be successful.
“My dad owned a construction company. You’ve got to pay your bills, pay your employees, and provide good service. Otherwise, you don’t stay afloat. Medicine is the same. It’s about figuring out how to work within the system to do a better job,” she said. “I fully believe we don’t need to spend one penny more than we do on healthcare in the United States. But we must organize ourselves in a different way to do a better job, especially for women and children. That doesn’t necessarily take more money; it just takes more organization.”
Dr. Christensen is gaining organizational, leadership, and strategic skills in the Kelley Physician MBA Program. As she completes her final year, Dr. Christensen has applied what she’s learning in finance, operations, process improvement, and strategy to her clinic. She’s working on a project to improve the referral process in which nurses work to connect families with supportive services, like ophthalmology, hearing tests, therapy, autism evaluations, and speech therapy close to home for patients who travel to Riley for care.
“We’re dissecting the process to figure out what must be done, what isn’t necessary, and how we can tighten up the system. In an audit of our orders, we found that we lose 15% of patients in the process of ordering additional tests. Plus, it’s time consuming for nurses to be printing, faxing, and scanning ordering information when their time is better spent with families,” Dr. Christensen said. “As a result of our work to tighten up this process, my group has been chosen for the system pilot to fix this issue with ordering. When I started this project, I thought, ‘I can fix this so we can do the best we can in the system we have.’ But because we did that work, other folks noticed, and hopefully it will become the impetus to fix the whole system.”
Having gained a better understanding of finance, Dr. Christensen realized she could use the ordering project to better calculate downstream revenue for her group. By understanding how much her team brings to the system, she’s been able to identify ways to improve efficiency to attract more patients.
“The way you attract more patients is to provide a better patient experience, to make it easier for families to receive care. The kid who needs to see five different specialists and make five different appointments and get 10 different tests might benefit from the help of a care coordinator,” Dr. Christensen said. “We have one care coordinator, and I’m building a business case to justify having more support in this area as we continue to grow.”
As a result of her hands-on, experiential learning in the Physician MBA Program, Dr. Christensen is leading initiatives to improve her clinic and her work at the IU School of Medicine, where she’s an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics and neurology.
“Faculty frequently come to my office and say, ‘I want to do this, and this is going to help kids.’ I say, ‘Great—how will we pay for it? Who’s going to do it? If we shift someone from one job to another, how does the shift affect everyone else?’” she said. “The Kelley Physician MBA has really given me a framework to think through such decisions and find practical solutions.”
Physicians in the Kelley program have access to an executive coach throughout the program to help them develop as a leader in a safe space. As the 2022 recipient of the Evans Fellowship in Health Care Leadership from the IU School of Medicine, Dr. Christensen gets to expand those leadership lessons through the fellowship’s mentoring opportunities.
“I meet regularly with [IU School of Medicine] Dean Jay Hess to discuss leadership styles and how we make changes at large intuitions, and it’s been a great experience,” she said. “I also met with Dan Evans [president emeritus of Indiana University Health], and he had a fascinating outlook on the history of the IU Health system.”
In addition to learning how the business of healthcare can—and, ideally, should—work, students in the Physician MBA Program also learn how to communicate their concerns, strategies, and solutions to clinical or academic teams and leadership. Dr. Christensen says this has been helpful in presenting business cases to her leadership and gaining buy-in from her team.
“Communicating in the business setting means learning to tell a story: hook them with your story and provide data and clear talking points to back it up. That is the main thing that I’ve learned through the program,” she said. “The other thing I’ve learned is the importance of communicating more than you think you need to when you’re changing things. I talk about our process improvement project every day to everyone I come across, asking them how they’re experiencing it, if they have any questions, reiterating why we’re doing this. I think it has helped us maintain our staff through the process.”
As she looks toward leading change to make neurodevelopmental medicine more accessible in Indiana, she is leaning into her newfound business acumen and the Physician MBA network. A hallmark of Kelley’s physician-only MBA program is peer learning and tight-knit cohorts of like-minded clinicians. Each quarter, physicians meet in Indianapolis for in-person learning and networking. As a result, each student has a personal network of physicians from various backgrounds, specialties, and organization types with whom they can brainstorm organizational change ideas.
“The major reason I chose the Kelley School was the in-person residencies. That’s how you get to know people—you eat lunch together; you talk during breaks, and you learn about experiences different than yours. My cohort includes phenomenal people who I never would’ve met otherwise. Cardiologists, ER physicians, orthopedic surgeons: These people bring a variety of backgrounds and perspectives. It’s crowdsourcing ideas with highly trained, smart people you know,” she said.
“Every last one of us wants to fix medicine, and the Kelley Physician MBA gives us the tools to actually do it.”
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