One of the most dangerous mentalities that we need to move away from as physicians “I just want to take care of patients”. When we just want to take care of patients and do the best possible job for them, everyone loses.

How does everyone lose?

When we just want to take care of patients, what we are also saying is that we don’t want to do all of the other business aspects of well, running a business. This leads to other people coming in to “help us run the business”. This sounds like a good thing, and it can be, but it depends on how you handle it.

There is a major difference between delegation and abdication.

Hire a business person who works for you to run your business and delegate the responsibilities (this means you need to check their work). This is OK.

What is unacceptable is to hire the business person and then abdicate all business responsibilities to them. This will cause them to take over your practice and start changing the way you do things. In essence they are taking your autonomy and you will be effectively working for them.

Over time, too many physicians have abdicated the business aspect of their practices. The result is that now about 70% of us are employees for large conglomerates. The autonomy is gone.

The way for us to get our autonomy back is to stop throwing instruments and stomping our feet. It’s to start removing those who don’t have any clinical experience who are making clinical decisions. Hospital administration and insurance companies.

We won’t be able to brute force remove them, they are resource rich and have huge lobbying arms. We can’t play their game, we will lose.

The way is to disrupt them by removing them from the practice of medicine. This means not associating with hospital systems or contracting with insurance.

It sounds impossible, it isn’t. It is being done right now.

It’s your choice as to whether you want to find happiness as early adopter, or keep suffering as the laggard.