After carefully surveying the shifting American healthcare landscape for the past decade, I retired from my increasingly headache filled private practice and said to myself, “Self, you can’t beat ‘em, so join ‘em.”
No longer do I spend countless hours after the last whiny patient has been seen trying to figure out how I was going to pay my nurses and support staff, after eeking out just enough profit to afford my student loan payments. Hell, now I have a secretary do most my “work” and I still get to wear a white coat from time to time.
What really gets my goat is that no one ever told me in medical school that being a soul-less hospital administrator was so easy or so lucrative. I have a few unproductive meetings per day, usually deciding what to talk about next meeting. Then no earlier than ten o’clock, I try to slide out about two so I can pick my kids up from school. What could be simpler?
It took years before I was frustrated enough to consider changing careers at this stage in life, but years of residency and fellowship training failed to prepare me for how sweet it is to get paid to tell other doctors how to treat their patients.
I know what you’re thinking. Don’t you miss the patient contact or the satisfaction of helping others? he answer is right here on the face of my Rolex. It says “hell no.” Or outside on the license plate frame on my Porsche, that says, “my other car is also a Porsche.”
I don’t have time to tell you how awesome it is being a hospital administrator. Just trust me, I’m sort of a doctor still. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with some Chinese gentlemen that are working on robots that should, shall we say, improve medical efficiency. Ciao, losers, get back to charting on that EHR and seeing complex medical patients in 5-minute blocks.
Oh, and don’t forget to code appropriately on those TPS reports. That would be great.
Anthony Handwerger received his Doctor of Medicine and Juris Doctor degrees online and was at one time considering becoming eligible for board certification.
