Will an MBA help clinicians grow?

Adding an MBA to your professional pedigree may be something that you have been contemplating as part of the next step in your career. The intersection between healthcare and business is full of opportunities; especially as we continue to experience disruption from artificial intelligence (AI) within the healthcare industry. But the decision to get an MBA isn’t an easy one. It’s a significant investment of time and money—with no guarantees of a breakthrough at the end of the journey. Here are a couple of key benefits I found from my own experience, as well as a very real challenge to overcome.Personal & professional developmentWhen I was pursuing my combined PharmD/MBA degree at the Rotman School of Management, the MBA courses came towards the latter part of my studies. By then, I had already completed my pharmacy classes and clinical rotations, but I knew very little about business. This lack of prior knowledge made me realize that I had the most to gain from the MBA program.From finance to machine learning, the topics I studied were all new to me. The business classes I took added a great deal of professional and personal value. Through the course of study, personal finance became one of my newfound strengths. Professionally, I was able to grow and differentiate myself. I found that I was more prepared to participate in industries like banking, consulting, technology and marketing while bringing the added value of being a domain expert in healthcare. Through class projects and case competitions, I was constantly pushed to innovate. For example, in one case competition hosted by a Toronto teaching hospital, I learned about how synthetic patient data generated by AI could be used to accelerate clinical trials.Experiential learningAnother benefit of being an MBA student was that I gained from experiences I would otherwise not be able to access. One of these experiences was my time as a Board Fellow. As part of an experiential learning course, Rotman placed me onto the board of a charity organization. Some students sat on the board of food banks, orchestras, greenhouses, or even at hospitals like SickKids. My fellowship was with Hemophilia Ontario, a patient advocacy group for patients with inherited bleeding disorders. There, I was able to work on projects that had real stakes. My primary objective was the development of a three-year strategic plan. After my fellowship ended, I was formally elected to the board where I was able to continue my governance responsibilities. A core requirement of the MBA program was an internship. I was able to spend a summer at Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine for my internship working in marketing. I met many mentors and worked on meaty projects where I enjoyed putting my business skillset to use. I was one of the luckier students, especially with the economic uncertainties surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic at that time. At the end of the internship, I was also offered the opportunity to return to work full time after graduation. In retrospect, it would have been much more challenging to make a jump to marketing without the experiential opportunities offered during my MBA program. For me, these experiences were fundamental to unlocking the next steps in my career journey.Timing & opportunity costsThere are significant trade-offs to consider when deciding whether an MBA is right for you. Firstly, the timing of when you pursue the degree might be challenging depending on what stage you're at in your life and in your career. For example, if you are practicing full time as a pharmacist and you decide to pursue a full-time MBA, you’d be giving up the salary you’d otherwise be able to earn. This is the opportunity cost that you would need to consider as a clinician. Fortunately, many schools, including Rotman, also have part-time programs where you could still maintain a full-time job on top of doing an MBA. Senior clinicians, especially those with existing management experience, should consider an executive MBA instead. Either way, there is still a financial investment to consider. In this respect, it’s important to assess your anticipated output once you’ve completed the program. If you are early in your journey, does pursuing this new designation help accelerate your career? If you are trying to transition towards another industry like finance or consulting, does the degree help you get started there? These are important questions to ask, and it would be best to map out the cost of the investments relative to the benefits of your expected future output. In this respect, it’s important to ask yourself, is an MBA necessary? Do I need an MBA to get to where I want to go? Often the answer is: it depends. Sometimes getting work experience in the desired industry is enough to get started on your future career path. But in this increasingly competitive job market, getting your foot in the door may not be as easy as one would think.ConclusionThere’s no simple right or wrong answer for clinicians considering an MBA as the next step in their professional journey. There is plenty to be gained in an MBA program. While not everyone finds their way immediately after an MBA, they do come out of the program with valuable skills they can rely on for the rest of their career. If an MBA is the path of choice, with introspection and careful planning, clinicians can get the most from their experience.Peter Zhang, PharmD, MBA is a hospital pharmacist at Southlake Regional Health Centre, a Business Acceleration Partner at ODAIA, and a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy studying health entrepreneurship.Read: Hooray for the 'Type P' personality

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