Category: Medical Education

It is that time of the year when department chairs and division directors come to the hospital administration asking for financial support for the upcoming year. Few specialties can be self-sufficient in an academic medical center so the hospital has to provide some amount of money to ensure that there is adequate physician staffing. Inherent in being an academic physician is the premise that you are not going to be seeing as many patients or doing as many surgeries as your colleagues in private practice because you are going to be spending part of your time doing academic activities: teaching, writing papers, developing a focused area of clinical expertise, and doing research. You also commit to directing part of your income to the college of medicine (“dean’s tax”) and the department/division (“academic expense”). For this, you are willing to make a little less than your private practice counterpart, but not too much less. Thus, the need for the subsidies from the hospital.

But the hospital wants to know that there is some value in the these subsidies. By and large, the funds are ultimately used for “academic release time”, that is the time that the physician spends doing those activities that are important to the academic mission of the medical center but are otherwise unfunded. Back in the 1980’s, unfunded academic release time was typically about 40% for a newly hired physician: the physician would do 6 months of inpatient service and see patients for a half-day in the clinic. By the 2000’s, that had dropped to about 20% and now 10-15% is more common for new physicians.

The problem with academic release time, is that if everyone gets it, it can become an entitlement and then it becomes next to impossible to take away without organizational disruption. So, our challenge is to find a way to ensure that physicians are accountable for that otherwise unfunded academic time that they have. In order to figure out how we can do that, lets start with a look at how several specialties in our medical center deal with unfunded academic time. For the purposes of simplicity, I am going to use “department” to mean either department or division.

Department #1. All physicians start at 100% clinical full time and then after they are practicing for months or years, they come up with specific proposals to acquire academic release time. These could include doing a hospital quality project, chairing a hospital/college committee, doing a clinical research study, taking on an administrative position, etc. The physician continues to get that academic release time as long as he/she continues to perform that particular non-clinical activity.

• The problem: many of these physicians never have the initial time investment to get any kind of academic activities off the ground and so after several years, they often move to private practice jobs since there is nothing tethering them to the university.

Department #2. All physicians get some percentage of academic release time that is negotiated individually at the time of their initial appointment. The percentage varies from 10% to 20%. The purpose is to teach and obtain research funding. At this time, however, none of the physicians except the chair have research grants.

• The problem: there is a lot of “release time envy” by those physicians who only negotiated 10% release time versus those with 15% or 20% release time since those with more release time are seen as having to work less but getting paid the same as those who have less release time.

Department #3. All physicians get 20% academic release time and that is maintained in perpetuity, regardless of what they do during that time. There is an annual review process with the chair and those physicians who lack any academic productivity are directed by the chair to do more.

• The problem: in theory, this academic productivity would be tied to physician bonuses but the department has not had any money to give bonuses for 15 years. Therefore, there is little incentive for the physicians to do anything productive for 20% of their time.

Department #4. All physicians get 10% academic release time at the time of their initial appointment. If they don’t have any academic output to show for after 3-4 years, then their release time is eliminated and they become 100% clinical.

• The problem: once you go 100% clinical, you can never go back. Eventually, a private practice job across town that will pay you more for the same amount of work looks pretty inviting.

Department #5. All physicians get 20% academic release time but they are expected to produce work RVUs at the 75th percentile of national benchmark during the 80% of their time that they are doing clinical activities. In this way, the physicians self-fund their own 20% academic release time.

• The problem: you are really deceiving yourself by making yourself be way more productive than the average physician 4 days of the week so that you can have the 5th day to do academic stuff. The reality is that most physicians work at a pace of average productivity so inevitably, they end up doing clinical work on that 5th day to catch up. In other words, the physicians coast for 1 day to make up for sprinting the other 4 days. What you are in reality doing is asking the physicians to have average productivity 100% of the time; you are just wrapping it up differently.

Department #6. All physicians get 20% academic time. If a physician gets a paid administrative or teaching position, that 20% of time is eliminated.

• The problem: you reward those physicians who do not take on administrative or teaching roles. Those physicians who do take on a paid administrative role have to do more work than everyone else and get paid the same. You discourage anyone from volunteering to take on paid teaching and administrative roles and you encourage your doctors to not do anything that might ultimately improve care within the hospital or bring academic notoriety to the college of medicine.

So what is the answer? Ultimately, what the academic medical center wants are those activities that bring research grant dollars, result in journal articles with the institution’s name on them, create teachers who attract the best medical students & residents, generate clinical expertise that attracts patient referrals, create an environment of high-quality clinical care, and result in efficient clinical care with a positive financial margin. What the doctors want is enough time to do academically creative things that will help them achieve whatever they define as an academically success for themselves. Here are two proposals:

Model #1:

This is essentially what department #1 does above. Namely, all new physicians start out at 100% clinical and then submit specific proposals to “buy down” academic release time. The goal would be for most physicians to buy down 15% academic release time by their 4th year of practice. Because there is not enough money in the system to pay for every single physician to have 15% non-clinical time, there would have to be some way of adjudicating the proposals to cull out those that do not provide institutional value or that have a low chance of success. This model works best for physicians who do shift work where it is relatively easy for them to flex up or down in the number of shifts that they do since they are relatively interchangeable with one another. Examples include hospitalists, anesthesiologists, and emergency medicine physicians.

Model #2:

This is a variation on the “ramp up” period that many surgeons have in their initial contract with the assumption that as they build experience and a build a referral base in their first 5 years of practice, they are more able to support their own salary so that they need a lot of hospital support their first year in practice but need progressively less each subsequent year. So, in model #2, a typical clinical-track physician faculty member would get 20% unfunded academic time in their first 2 years, 15% unfunded academic time in their third and fourth years, and then 10% unfunded academic time in their fifth and sixth year. The physician could maintain their 20% unfunded academic time after their second year by demonstrating that they have been good steward of that time by producing publications, obtaining grants, doing a lot of unpaid teaching activities, etc. After year six, a physician who has no academic output would be moved to a 100% clinical role. This model works best for physicians who are office-based or who rely on an individual referral base since increasing non-clinical release time after they have become established can be disruptive to patients by transferring his/her patients to other physicians in order to reduce the physician’s outpatient patient panel or by refusing some patients referred specifically to that physician. Examples include primary care physicians, surgical sub-specialists, and outpatient consultative specialists.

Ultimately, unfunded academic time should be used as an investment in junior physicians with the potential to become academically productive and to support those physicians who are doing academic or clinically unique activities that are vital to the success of the institution but that are otherwise unfunded. It is up to us to ensure that this unfunded time does not simply become an entitlement that allows the physicians to leave work at 2:00 on Friday afternoons or do fewer surgeries per week, just because they have an academic title in front of their name.

April 9, 2017

I am on a committee to provide recommendations to our Dean on how to compensate physicians for teaching. This turns out to be a lot more complicated than it might first appear. One way of approaching it is to calculate the cost to a physician for teaching – from there you can work back to what the physician should be paid for teaching.

Where does the money come from for medical education?

Medical students. Money to teach students comes from the College of Medicine that in turn gets money from several sources: tuition, endowments, “Dean’s tax” on clinical revenues, and government subsidies. In nearly all medical schools, the money from all of these sources is insufficient to pay for all of the hours of teaching by the attending physicians, at least compared to what those physicians could make in their clinical practice for those same hours. Fortunately, the intangible rewards of teaching plus the prestige of being a professor are great enough for many physicians to accept a lower income in order to be a medical school educator… up to a point.

Residents. Money to pay residents’ salaries comes from the hospitals that in turn gets money from federal funds to support GME (graduate medical education) as well as from hospital clinical income and endowments. There are additionally funds from the federal government that come in to support the teaching of residents and these funds can be used to support the teaching efforts of the attending physicians.

Fellows. There is not enough federal GME money to pay the salaries for fellows nor to pay attending physicians to teach fellows. There are 2 types of fellowships: ACGME accredited and non-ACGME accredited. The ACGME accredited fellowships are the standard specialty fellowships, for example, pulmonary fellowship. The non-ACGME accredited fellowships are in highly specialized areas, for example, an interventional pulmonary fellowship (done after a physician has already completed a basic pulmonary fellowship). The funding for ACGME accredited fellowships varies from hospital to hospital – at our medical center, half of the fellows’ salaries for ACGME-accredited fellowships are paid by the hospital and half is paid by the attending physicians in that particular specialty. In turn, the attending physicians get their funding from their own clinical income. Fellows in non-ACGME accredited fellowships are paid entirely by the attending physicians’ clinical income. Fellows in ACGME accredited fellowships cannot bill patients but fellows in non-ACGME accredited fellowships can bill patients and generate at least some clinical income on their own to help support their salaries.

Continuing medical education (CME). This is education for attending physicians who have completed their training but need to stay current in their field. In the past, this was supported by grants and sponsorships from pharmaceutical companies, medical supply companies, and medical device companies. Conflict of interest regulations now limit how much these entities pay for CME. Now, CME is paid for primarily by the individual attending physician being educated or by the hospital. Most of the time, physicians do not get paid to be a CME educator except in situations when they are getting paid an honorarium to give a talk; even then the amount of the honorarium rarely covers all of the teaching physician’s time involved in preparation, travel, etc. The intangible reward for being a CME educator is prestige and local/regional recognition as well as building a referral base.

What is the cost of teaching?

There are 3 major costs to consider in medical education: salary costs of the trainee (for residents and fellows), time costs of the attending physician teaching those trainees, and infrastructure costs for the space and other hospital resources required for teaching trainees. Lets examine each of these further:

1. Salary costs. Medical students do not cost anything since they are taking out loans in order to pay to be there. Residents make about $52,000 their first year and this increases by about $2,000 for each additional year of training. So if we assume a 3 year residency for salary plus 25% benefits, an average cost of a resident is about $67,500 per year. However, the resident’s salary is going to ultimately be supported by federal GME funds so the attending physicians do not have to cover it. The average ACGME fellow salary + benefits in a 3-year fellowship will be about $75,000 and half of that ($37,500) is paid by the attending physicians, at least at most academic medical centers. The average non-ACGME fellow salary + benefits will be about $80,000 and this will be paid entirely by the attending physicians (plus whatever the non-ACGME fellow can bill for independently).
2. Time costs. To determine time costs, you have to look at what the physician could have done from a clinical billing standpoint if they were providing patient care by themselves rather than engaging in a particular teaching activity. The most expensive education time cost is in classroom teaching (e.g., pre-clinical medical student classes or resident didactic lectures) because the attending physician is removed entirely from billable patient care during the time that they are lecturing or preparing a lecture. CME education also falls into this category. For attending physicians who are doing clinical education (in the office, hospital, or OR), the time cost varies depending on the level of the trainee. A third year medical student will slow you down the most since the student will need to see the patient independently and then present his/her findings to you before you see the patient. The attending physician will then need to take some time to teach the student about the patient’s disease. Because of Medicare rules on what students are not allowed to document (for billing purposes), the attending physician must then see the patient and re-do most of the history, all of the physical exam, and most of the progress note documentation. Although Medicare does permit a medical student to document the past medical/social/family history, in an era of electronic medical records, this is usually already in the electronic note. A junior resident is generally a break-even as far as the attending physician’s time – they have more experience than a medical student and Medicare permits the attending physician to use most of their progress note documentation for billing purposes. A senior resident or fellow generally adds billing productivity to the attending physician since these trainees can function more independently and at the attending physician has to spend less time with the patient and preparing the progress note on a per billable patient standpoint.
3. Infrastructure costs. There are two general types of infrastructure costs: office practice costs and hospital costs.
   1. In the office, a typical allocation of examination rooms per doctor is 2 per attending physician/provider. This allows the doctor to be seeing one patient while the nursing staff is rooming the next patient. In certain types of practice, this may increase to 3 or even 4 exam rooms per physician but for the purpose of this analysis, lets assume it is 2 rooms per physician. To maintain clinic efficiency, you have to have additional rooms for trainees since the patients will need to spend more time in each exam room so that the trainee can see the patient first, before the attending physician. Medical students increase the infrastructure cost since they are less efficient in history taking and spend more time with the patient; however, they see relatively few patients so the number of exam rooms taken out of commission by the medical student is relatively few – usually 1. A senior resident or fellow is more efficient but also sees more patients per day and so they may need 2 additional exam rooms. If the physician owns or leases the office, this infrastructure cost goes to the physician; if the hospital owns and operates the office, then the hospital bears the infrastructure cost.
   2. In the hospital, you don’t need to have extra exam rooms or nurses for trainees since each inpatient already has their own room. However, trainees can have addition infrastructure costs in certain areas, particularly the operating room and to a lesser extent, the emergency department. In these areas, trainees add extra time to patient encounters and that extra time adds additional costs. For example, in the operating room, an experienced surgeon may be able to do a cholecystectomy in 30 minutes if he/she is doing it solo with an experienced surgical assistant. But if that surgeon is teaching a resident to do the same procedure, it might take 40 minutes. This adds 10 minutes to the surgeon’s per case time and 10 minutes to the operating room cost (including the cost of the nursing and OR personnel plus the cost of not being able to start another case in that operating room earlier). The surgeon may be able to make that time up by stepping out of the OR while the resident closes the wound and does the operative note dictation but the cost to the hospital of having a teaching OR (as opposed to a non-teaching OR) remains. ACGME fellows are a break-even for the hospital because they have less effect on operative time and permit the attending surgeon to start a second case in a second room sooner. Non-ACGME fellows may actually improve the hospital margin by permitting the attending surgeon to operate in 2 rooms simultaneously, thus increasing the surgical volume.

So, lets put all of this together to see what the net cost of various trainees is to the physician and to the hospital. In the table below, attending physician productivity (RVUs per hour) are reduced with classroom teaching and medical students but increased with residents and fellows. On the other hand, fellows have a cost to the attending physician since the attending physician has to pay part or all of the fellow’s salary. All trainees add additional outpatient infrastructure cost and the more experienced the trainee, the greater the cost because of the number of exam rooms they can cover (thus requiring both more rooms and more office staff). For hospitalized patients, there is no significant infrastructure cost except in the operating room, where these costs are largely borne by the hospital and not the physician.

 

 

 

So, if we look at the net costs of being an educator, we see that it varies depending on whether the trainees are in the physician’s office or in the hospital. Classroom teaching and medical student clinical teaching are the most expensive overall with resident and fellow clinical teaching being close to break-even in the outpatient setting but a net benefit to the attending physician in the inpatient setting.

Obviously, these are generalities and each specialty and each clinical setting will be a little different. Nevertheless, this analysis does demonstrate that there are both productivity costs and productivity gains in medical education.

March 9, 2017

 

It takes a lot of time to become a doctor. And once you become a doctor it takes a lot of time to keep being a doctor. The amount of regulatory requirements per year are staggering. These add up to time costs and every doctor has to pay these time costs, regardless of the number of patients that you see. As you will see in this post, these costs add up quickly and result in those doctors who do a lot of teaching, research, or administration spending a disproportionate amount of their time meeting these requirements.

Protected time (for research, administration, or teaching) is highly sought and highly prized in academic medicine. It has to be – the only way to get promoted and get a salary increase is to do something other than clinical care of patients. There is the obvious cost of these activities: they don’t pay very well so if a physician is going to make anywhere close to a full-time clinician’s salary, then someone else has to contribute money. But there are hidden costs – those that no one ever talks about but that can eat away at your physicians’ productivity and suck the life out of an academic department.

They’re the fixed time costs that we all pay in order to do our regular jobs. Whether you are a 100% clinical FTE (i.e., a physician who only takes care of patients) or a 25% clinical FTE (i.e., someone who only spends 1 out of 4 working hours taking care of patients), you have to do these regular activities in order to maintain licensure and medical staff privileges. And they can add up… a lot. Let’s take a look at some of the more common of these:

1. Continuing medical education. In Ohio, we have to do 50 hours per year of CME to maintain our medical license.
2. ACLS (Advanced Cardiac Life Support). Required for many specialties; for others, ATLS (Advanced Trauma Life Support), or PALS (Pediatric Advanced Life Support) may be required. Preparation and classwork is about 10 hours every 2 years.
3. CITI (Collaborative Institutional Training initiative). This is required for any physician who is involved in human subject research. Because this includes enrollment in trials and not just being a funded researcher, many/most academic physicians have to keep their CITI certificate up to date just to be able to assist clinical researchers by referring patients into clinical trials. It takes about 12 hours to do the program and it has to be renewed every 3 years.
4. Department faculty meetings. At our University, these are mandatory and held quarterly – 4 hours per year.
5. Division faculty meetings. In our division, these are mandatory and held monthly – 12 hours per year.
6. Electronic medical record training. Initially, this takes about 10-20 hours. However, once you are facile with it, you just need to get trained on the periodic software updates – about 1 hour per year.
7. Compliance training. At our hospital, we have a mandatory 2 hours per year for billing/coding compliance training to ensure that we are documenting our services and billing correctly.
8. Hospital training. At Ohio State, these fall under “CBL” (Computer Based Learning) modules. These cover everything from what to do in a fire, to how to read a hazardous materials label, to the hospital’s sexual harassment policy. They vary from year to year but typically, it is about 10 hours per year.
9. Hospital committees. I attend an enormous number of committee meetings but I get paid to attend them as a medical director. However, no one fully escapes committees and most physicians find themselves on a couple. I’ll estimate 15 hours a year.
10. “Justify your existence forms”. These are part of the annual review that every academic physician has to fill out to document their annual clinical/research/publication/teaching/administrative productivity and describe how they have spent all of their time over the past year. Included in this category is the “promotion and tenure dossier” that all academic physicians have to complete periodically as they move toward promotion to associate professor to full professor. In our institution, if a physician is in the so-called clinical track, even full professors have to fill these out every 2-5 years in order to have their university contracts renewed. If you include the required face-to-face meeting with the division director or department chairman, the process requires about 6 hours per year.
11. Emails. I get 50-100 a day – most physicians don’t get quite this many. Many of these are mass emails to all physicians. Some are worthy of reading (like weekly hospital news briefs) but a lot are garbage (like people who hit the “respond to all” button on every congratulatory email sent by a chairman to recognize a notable achievement by one of the faculty members). You have to at least open all of them and skim the first few sentences to see if you need to read the rest or if you can just click the delete button on your email program. Probably about 50 hours per year on average.
12. Licensure forms. Medical license, DEA license, etc. Plan on 1 hour a year on average to fill these out.
13. Surveys. We get surveyed constantly – from the College, from the hospital, from the department, from outside agencies. Most physicians don’t answer most of them because there are just too many. But some are inescapable – figure 2 hours per year.
14. Board certification maintenance of certification. This includes required “MOC modules” that some boards require physicians to do every year and also includes the renewal board examination test (every 8-10 years depending on the specific board) as well as studying in order to pass the board exam. Although some of these activities can double for continuing medical education requirements, some can’t so figure an overall average is about 5 hours per year that can’t be included in CME.
15. Employee health. This includes the time it takes to get your annual flu shot and the time it takes to do the annual infection control learning module, among other employee health & epidemiology requirements. Overall, 2 hours per year.

So, add all of this up and you get approximately 169 hours per year that every physician has to spend doing required activities just to be able to see a single patient or to see a thousand patients. Given that most physicians work about 56 hours per week, this equates to 3 weeks of time over the course of a year. Let’s assume a physician works 48 weeks a year (off 3 weeks for vacation and 1 week for the sum of all holidays for a year). A 100% clinical FTE would need to spend 3 weeks doing all of their required activities resulting in 45 weeks of patient care per year. A 25% clinical FTE (for example, someone who spends 75% of their time doing research or administration) would have 36 weeks per year doing research/administration leaving 12 weeks per year left over to do clinical activities. However, because that physician would need to spend 3 weeks of time on all of the above activities, they would only really be seeing patients for 9 weeks per year.

The reality is that most of us end up doing most of these activities during the evening or on weekends. But they still represent a huge fixed time cost to any academic physician. As a result, you can potentially get more clinical work from one 100% clinical FTE than you do from four 25% clinical FTEs.

February 1, 2017

Tenure [ten-yer] noun:  Guaranteed permanent employment, especially as a teacher or lecturer, after a probationary period.

In academic medicine, the ultimate professional achievement is tenure. But what, exactly, is tenure? Historically, it meant that if you proved yourself, you got tenured and you were given academic freedom to do whatever research you wanted and the freedom to express your own opinions as an educator. And then, you would be protected from being fired.

The history of tenure in the United States.

In the 1800’s, professors served at the discretion of university’s boards of trustees who hired and fired them. But by the turn of the century, there was concern that this system led to influential donors dictating what professors could and could not research and teach. In 1915, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) created a declaration of principles for academic freedom and tenure:

• Trustees raise faculty salaries, but not bind faculty with restrictions.
• Only committees of other faculty members can judge a member of the faculty.
• Faculty appointments be made by other faculty and chairpersons, with three elements:
  1. Clear employment contracts
  2. Formal academic tenure, and
  3. Clearly stated grounds for dismissal.

In 1940, the AAUP recommended that the probationary period before granting tenure should be 7 years. But the AAUP’s declarations did not provide academic freedom protection. In the McCarthy era, professors suspected of being communists could be fired and in the 1960’s, twenty states passed laws that professors who voiced anti-war sentiments could be fired from public colleges. Legal cases in the 1970’s helped to create protection from dismissal of tenured professors leading to the system that we have today, where tenured faculty are insulated (although not completely immune) from job termination and censorship.

Tenure track versus clinical track.

The problem with this is that it has created a caste system in academic medicine where physicians are either in the “tenure track” or the “clinical track”. If you are in the tenure track, you are promoted from “Assistant Professor” to “Associate Professor” and ultimately to “Professor”. When you are promoted to Associate Professor, you become “tenured”. However, if you are in the clinical track, you are promoted from “Assistant Professor, Clinical” to “Associate Professor, Clinical” and ultimately to “Professor, Clinical”. The clinical track faculty do not have the same rights as the tenure track faculty. You cannot be tenured in the clinical track and your contract is year-to-year rather than an indefinite duration.

Each department has a promotions and tenure committee that then reports to the college promotion and tenure committee that then reports to the university board of trustees. At each level, a faculty member who is up for promotion is voted on whether or not to be promoted.

But there is a problem with two academic tracks.

At the promotion and tenure committee levels, committee members who are in the tenure track vote on whether or not to promote both tenure track candidates and clinical track candidates. However, committee members who are in the clinical track can only vote on clinical track candidates. Inherent in this system is the assumption that tenure track faculty can judge the qualifications of clinical track faculty but clinical track faculty are incapable of judging whether tenure track faculty are qualified.

As a result, the criteria for promotion in the clinical track ends up looking a lot like the criteria for promotion in the tenure track. Being the best diagnostician or surgeon in the university does not get you promoted. Similarly, being the best teacher in the university won’t get you promoted. Even in the clinical track, you have to write articles about diagnoses and surgeries or write articles about teaching to get promoted. The clinical track in academic medicine has become in essence, the junior varsity track with the tenure track becoming the varsity track.

Last year, my son was doing campus visits as a high school senior when deciding where to go for college. At one university, which by all of the college ranking lists was among the top universities in the country for chemistry, the upper classmen that we met with told him that he should take his freshman chemistry courses at the 2-year community college on the other side of town and then transfer the credit because the professors that taught freshman chemistry were not as good of educators and were largely unavailable since their primary focus was their research rather than teaching undergraduates.

Our academic promotion values are out of synch with the needs of academic medicine.

The only way to get grants and write manuscripts is to have time during the week to do it. This has resulted in the concept of “protected time”, that is, time that you are not required to be seeing patients. The more protected time you are able to negotiate in your employment contract, the better your chances of being promoted, either in the tenure track or in the clinical track. One of the problems is that someone else has to pay for the cost of your salary during that protected time and that someone is often the physicians seeing patients full-time.

But to survive in the future, academic medical centers will not maintain financial viability purely by populating themselves with as many famous physicians as possible. Academic medical centers are increasingly in a vicious competition with private hospital systems for their very survival. If the academic medical center is not seeing enough patients, then it doesn’t have enough clinical income. And if it doesn’t have enough clinical income, it goes broke. So we are now in the difficult position of rewarding our academic physicians to to see fewer patients while we need our academic physicians to see more patients to stay in business. Our need priorities and our reward priorities are out of alignment.

So what do we do with tenure?

1. Promote academic physicians for excellence in teaching. This seems so intuitive, so why don’t we do it? As an analogy, if you were hiring a contractor to remodel your kitchen, would you want the contractor who has the reputation as the best remodeler in the community or the contractor who writes a lot of articles in The Journal of Home Remodeling but had all negative reviews on Angie’s List? If our business is teaching medical students, why wouldn’t we value the best teachers?
2. Promote academic physicians for excellence in clinical care. One of the best clinicians I have ever known spent 33 years as an Assistant Professor before retiring (as an Assistant Professor). He was known at Ohio State as “the doctor’s doctor” because all of the doctors who knew him wanted him as their doctor. If our business is taking care of patients, why wouldn’t we value the doctors who do the best job taking care of patients?
3. Eliminate the caste system of tenure versus clinical tracks for promotion. Promotion and tenure committees should either be comprised of both tenure track and clinical track faculty who all vote on all candidates who are up for promotion or we need to have two entirely separate promotion systems: one comprised only of tenure track faculty who vote on exclusively tenure track promotion candidates and one comprised only of clinical track faculty who vote exclusively on clinical track promotion candidates.
4. Eliminate the word “Professor” for academic physicians who are not in a tenure track. In some health systems, the physicians have other titles that better reflect their commitment and achievement in patient care. So maybe we’d be better off using consultant: “Assistant Consultant”, Associate Consultant”, and “Senior Consultant”. Or maybe clinician: “Associate Clinician”, “Senior Clinician”, and “Master Clinician”.

What did I do?

In 1997, I became tenured when I was promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor in the tenure track. However, rather than feeling like I had academic freedom to do what I was passionate about, I felt constrained because in this track, I would not be able to do what I really enjoyed: teaching medicine, taking care of patients, and taking on administrative leadership roles in the hospital. Instead, the tenure track had me locked into a future of submitting research grants and writing journal articles. Don’t get me wrong, these are noble and valued activities and I had a lot of passion for them. Its just that I had even more passion about teaching and patient care. So in 2002, I resigned my tenure which meant that I actually had to resign from my job at Ohio State, and then was immediately re-hired as a “Professor – Clinical”, no tenure. And now, I have the best job in the medical center.

The whole idea of tenure was to protect university faculty from being fired because of their opinions and to give them the freedom to study the things that they were passionate about. But the unintended consequence of tenure is that in today’s academic medicine environment, the tenure process discriminates against those academic physicians whose passions are teaching and clinical care.

December 31, 2016

The Ohio State University has new Dean of the College of Medicine, Dr. Craig Kent. We are very excited to have someone as esteemed to lead our college. But the occasion has caused me to look back on the medical school leaders at our university over my own career. I have had 8 deans or interim deans in the past 36 years since starting medical school. Each time there was a change, it seemed like it might be the end of the world as I knew it. But deans have a relatively short half-life as it turns out.

The median length of tenure of a medical school dean is 6 years nationwide. There an average of 12 new deans appointed each year in the U.S.  A key question to ask when a new dean starts is how will he or she define success during their tenure at your medical school. Some deans define success in terms of longevity: whoever lasts the longest wins. Other deans define success in terms of specific objectives that they have when taking the job.

Department chairs have a slightly shorter tenure. Their average time on the job was 5.7 years for a full chair and 1.3 years for an interim chair. At Ohio State, we’ve definitely been the exception: in the 32 years since I started residency, I’ve only had 2 chairmen (and one interim for a brief few months). The first, Dr. Ernie Mazzaferri, was on the job for 15 years and the second, Dr. Mike Grever, is now going on 17 years.

To put that in comparison, the average duration of office for the 44 U.S. president is 5.1 years.

One of the reasons that deans and department chairs hold their jobs for a relatively short time is that we hire them based on their past scholarly performance but then we fire them based on their business performance. Large numbers of grants and publications can make a search committee swoon but if it turns out that the new dean or chair can’t read a profit and loss statement or has no concept of strategic planning in a competitive clinical market, then he or she is not going to keep their job very long.

One of the perpetual challenges that we have in academic medicine is that when you distill what we do, we basically have 3 missions: research, teaching, and clinical care. For tenure, research is king – historically, a medical faculty member could not get promoted simply by being the best teacher or the best clinician – they had to write about teaching and write about clinical medicine. But regardless, given their 3-part mission, colleges of medicine that are doing well with 1 of those 3 missions always look to hire a new dean or chair who has the promise of elevating one of the other 2 missions. If your college of medicine is doing great as a teaching institution, you don’t hire your next leader to elevate your already thriving educational mission, you hire the leader who you think can elevate your lagging research or clinical mission. If the college of medicine is not careful, this can result in perpetually changing sense of institutional self-identity and priorities.

I’ve heard some chairs lament that their job is no longer fun because of a perceived shift from the job being one of promoting scholarship to being one of running a business. And it is true that colleges of medicine and departments of medicine rely more and more on clinicians and the clinical income that they generate in order to fund the colleges’ operations. But I think that as we have changed how we define success for a dean or department chair over the years that we have simply changed the job requirements for a dean or department chair.

October 4, 2016

Recently, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) released a report on how American colleges of medicine are funded and how this funding has changed over the past several decades.

As a hospital medical director, this has enormous implications for hospitals associated with medical schools and the report is pretty sobering. Let’s take a look at 2 years: 1980 (the year I started medical school) and 2015, thirty-five years later.

In 1980, the biggest source of income for colleges of medicine was state governments which accounted for 29% of the total funding. Support from federal research was next at 22%. Income from clinical practice (both from physicians and hospitals) was also 22%. Tuition accounted for 6%.

Jump ahead to 2015 and there has been a huge shift in where the money comes from. Now state governments dropped to 6% of medical school funding. Federal research dropped to 14% of medical school funding. But clinical practice income now accounts for 60% of medical school funding. Of that 60%, 18% comes from hospital revenue and the other 42% comes from physician revenue. Tuition accounts for 4%.

It is not that the state governments are paying less. Indeed, in 1980, the states contributed $1,639,000 to medical colleges whereas in 2015, the states’ contributions rose to $6,990,000. The problem is that the total cost of colleges of medicine has exploded, rising from $5,645,000 in 1980 to $112,978,000 in 2015. In order to support this exponential increase in costs, medical schools have had to depend more and more on clinical practice income, from both physicians and hospitals.

On the surface, this might seem that the colleges of medicine are like giant parasites feeding off of the toil of physicians and hospitals but the reality is more complex. In 1980, most academic physicians were in private practices, with a rather small portion of their income coming from colleges of medicine; the physician practice income went to the physicians and not to the colleges. By 2015, most academic physicians were no longer in private practice but rather were employed by either the teaching hospitals or by the college of medicine (and sometimes the hospital and the college are essentially the same thing). Therefore, with the changes in physician employment, the total cost of a college of medicine has had to go up since the college now has to pay physician salaries but the amount that the colleges receive from clinical practice income has also gone up since the college-employed physicians clinical practice income is now credited to the college instead of a private medical practice.

So what is the implication of all of this to the hospital medical director? First, if you are a medical director of an academic teaching hospital, you will have an increasing percentage of your physicians employed by the colleges and universities rather than being in separate private clinical practices. Second, with 15% of college of medicine revenues coming from the academic teaching hospitals, these teaching hospitals will have additional expenses not borne by non-teaching hospitals. Although academic teaching hospitals do have additional federal income that non-teaching hospitals do not have in the form of federal direct graduate medical education and indirect graduate medical education funding, these funding sources alone will not sustainably cover the hospitals’ contribution to colleges of medicine in the future.

So what can we do as hospital medical directors? We are and for the foreseeable future will be inextricably intertwined in a symbiotic relationship with our colleges of medicine and academic physicians. We will need to recognize that our hospitals will be obligated to help support activities that are not historically part of the hospital mission, such as pre-clinical medical education and medical research. We also need to be stewards of the hospital’s resources since the hospital administrative leaders will rely on our expertise to advise them on where money should appropriately be allocated. And as part of being stewards of those hospital resources, we will need to hold the colleges and the physicians accountable to ensure that hospital funding is being used wisely and for the purposes that it was intended.

I still firmly believe that being an academic physician is one of the highest career callings in healthcare. And being a medical director of an academic teaching hospital is for me the culmination of that career. As medical directors, we face the controversies, conflicts, and challenges posed by the dynamic relationships between the hospitals and the colleges but in the end, there is no better job on the planet.

July 27, 2016