Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!
Health care executive Susannah Eastwick discusses her article, “Advancing health care through physician leadership: 5 skills for changing health care.” Susannah explores the evolving health care landscape in 2025, where physicians face growing corporate control and reduced autonomy. She identifies five critical skills for physicians to regain influence: mastering business language, understanding financial operations, improving operational efficiency, partnering and negotiating effectively, and advocating for systemic change. Through real-world examples—like a physician turning a $15 million clinic deficit into a surplus and another streamlining a hospital’s phone system—Susannah demonstrates how these skills enhance patient care and organizational performance. She offers actionable strategies for physicians to navigate the business side of medicine and lead meaningful change.
Our presenting sponsor is Microsoft Dragon Copilot.
Want to streamline your clinical documentation and take advantage of customizations that put you in control? What about the ability to surface information right at the point of care or automate tasks with just a click? Now, you can.
Microsoft Dragon Copilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow, is transforming how clinicians work. Offering an extensible AI workspace and a single, integrated platform, Dragon Copilot can help you unlock new levels of efficiency. Plus, it’s backed by a proven track record and decades of clinical expertise and it’s part of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare–and it’s built on a foundation of trust.
Ease your administrative burdens and stay focused on what matters most with Dragon Copilot, your AI assistant for clinical workflow.
VISIT SPONSOR → https://aka.ms/kevinmd
SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast
RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD → https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended
Transcript
Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Susannah Eastwick. She is the director of a physician MBA program. Today’s KevinMD article is “Advancing health care through physician leadership: 5 skills for changing health care.”
Susannah Eastwick: Thank you so much for having me. I am super excited to be here talking with you and your audience.
Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us a little bit about yourself and then the article that you wrote on KevinMD.
Susannah Eastwick: I serve as the director of the Physician MBA program at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and I bring a passion for how we leverage education to create change across whatever platform. And currently my passion, of course, is how we use education to create physician leadership that transforms the health care industry.
And the article that I wrote is really about the skills that the MBA curriculum provides to physician leaders, but it is really the inherent skills that, as physicians build them, they can use them to help transform the health care industry into ultimately not just what it could be, but what it should be in terms of an environment where patients are at the focus.
Kevin Pho: All right, so we have a lot of physicians who are interested in going into leadership. One of the common issues that we face is that physicians are losing their autonomy, right? They are getting burnt out because of that loss of autonomy, and they want to go into physician leadership and, of course, look for programs like the ones that you run.
So before talking about the article and some of the skills that physician leaders need, tell us about the physicians who apply to your program in the first place. Just tell us, what kind of attributes do they have?
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, so you said something that is incredibly passionate for us. Physicians are losing their voice, right? And that is increasing burnout rates and decreasing engagement, all of those things. So ultimately, what we try to do is not just teach physicians how to leverage their voice but also how to use the language effectively to change health care.
So the best physicians who come to our program—which is, you know, of course, the Kelley School is one of the top 20 business schools in the U.S.—are really change agents. They are emerging change agents in their own right who then want to use the knowledge, skills, and tools of a training program like ours, right? Because an MBA program is ultimately just a strategic training tool. It is never going to give you the depth and breadth of knowledge that a clinical education would give, but it is really that supplement to, “OK, you understand patient care. So how do we teach you the language of business to use those principles to transform the health care industry?” Ultimately, physicians who come to us are those emerging change agents who then graduate to become effective change agents across the industry. And after almost more than a decade of experience, we have partnered with physicians who now have gone on and created incredible change across the industry. The stories are endless that I would be happy to share.
Kevin Pho: It goes without saying that health care is more dominated by corporate entities, right? The number of private practice physicians, I think the numbers are less than 20 percent, and they are going down year after year. Now, how important is that language of business, as you said earlier—that business vernacular—how important is that for physicians to gain a step into that leadership role?
Susannah Eastwick: Right. Well, in a perfect world, we would have all of our health care leaders get clinical education, right—M.D.s. That is not efficient. So the best way for us to essentially provide that fix to the lack of voice of advocacy for patient care in there is to give physicians the degrees, education, and language that the current health care administrators have, right?
Less than 5 percent of hospital CEOs are physicians, which is just tragic, right? And the fact that 78 percent of physicians now are employed physicians, as you just said. So the only way really to bridge that gap that is in health care, right—the administrator who stands at the front of the room and puts up the big fancy spreadsheet and says, “Well, we need your dashboard and your metric to match these” without ever giving the why—
But also, we had this physician who came into the program, and she was the chief of staff when she first started the program. She confessed that she would sit at the back of the room in the meetings with her laptop open and Google the phrases and terms that the administration was using because she did not fully understand the language. By the end of the MBA program, she was in the front row, and she was asking questions that they did not appreciate because what she found out, as she learned the language and the curtain got pulled back—oh, you know, with the wizard behind the curtain—the language was just being used as a way to obfuscate the conversation, to keep people from asking the right questions because they did not understand the concepts, right?
And so by the end, she was in the front row, and they were sort of like, “You have to come to this meeting,” because she would break down the conversation: let us talk about the core. For us, our passion is really, you know, “Physicians, you best understand patient care, so why are you not the ones driving the conversation?” And the problem is there is a language gap, right? The more you learn that language, the more effective you can be in an environment where it is being run like a corporate environment, right? It is a business rather than a service.
Kevin Pho: In your KevinMD article, you talk about five skills that physician leaders need. So tell us about your article and tell us about those skills.
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, so we are really hitting quite a bit on the first one: speaking the language of business, and that can really create transformation for any physician moving into leadership. And there are a lot of ways to learn the language of business—it is not necessarily an MBA program; there is a plethora of ways, obviously.
Then, secondly, is how the money works. In fact, one of our professors teaches “rules of the language, rules of money,” and one of his first rules is, “It is always about the money,” and then rule number two is, “Follow the money,” right? If you do not know how the money works, how do you know how the decisions are being made, right? And so much of health care right now—and, you know, change is one big constant in all industries, but it is a very big constant in health care right now—so as you are looking at change, how is the money working, how do you get patient care, how do you get the quality you are looking for? That skill is absolutely necessary for navigating the current environment.
Then how to improve processes and operations for patients. You know, the Affordable Care Act was a big disruptor to the health care industry, right? And that is when we started this MBA program. But since then, all the things that keep happening, all it keeps exposing—especially COVID—is that we do not have the operations and the processes in place that allow us to be successful. And it is not just low-hanging fruit, it is sort of like watermelons on the ground of how you can use, you know, this big word we keep talking about: efficiency. But when you time and challenge all the things that challenge the process for a patient to get care, they are the same processes that frustrate physicians, right? We are talking about burnout happening with EMR processes being so onerous.
Any way you can look at creating efficiency and excellence and quality in the process, that is where you can really transform. And so that is a skill that all physicians need to gain.
Then there is that piece of emotional intelligence—really learning the skills around executive leadership, being comfortable with conflict. You know, physicians by your nature, you are not big fans of conflict, right? You are there to take care of people. And so conflict is not a place where a lot of physicians are very comfortable. But actually conflict can be incredibly productive. It is actually more of a problem-solving tool on how you get the outcomes you are looking for, rather than something to be avoided.
So learning that skill of how do you negotiate, how do you collaborate, how do you leverage relationships to drive the outcomes you are looking for systemically, right? Because every physician has an incredible impact on that one-to-one relationship, but how do you take that impact and take it a thousand to one, ten thousand to one, right? That is looking at processes, procedures, and then how you leverage people to get the outcomes that you are looking for through the relationships, which really get at that executive skill set—communication, conflict, negotiation, collaboration, et cetera—which hits at that emotional intelligence that is so hard to find.
And then, lastly, it is how you advocate for patients in the health care system. Often, when we start programs—and we do not just do an MBA program, but we do partnerships with health care systems and so forth and so on—so we educate physicians at many different levels and layers. And one of the first questions we always ask is, “What are you most frustrated about right now?” And the answer we get is, “Trying to navigate the insurance world,” right? “How do I get care for my patients to get them not just access but quality, right, and how do I get it paid for?”
And so that piece of advocacy can be at the micro level, the one-to-one level, all the way up to the national level, right? We can attest—I just said change is one big constant, but we have a course that takes physicians to Washington, D.C., for five days and immerses them in the language of health care policy. And it is really sort of how the sausage is made. And what you find out is there is very little physician voice in health care policy, right? Pharma is very organized, nurses are very organized, right? But physicians are not joined together in one voice. They are very splintered in their different health care associations, which, you know, orthopedic surgery is very effective at being a lobbyist, but is internal medicine as effective, right? You start to question how each of those is structured.
So really becoming a strong advocate on whatever level that means to you is one of the skills that really continues to further patient care. But also, in this environment of change, that is where the physician voice can better be inserted to create the most effective change. So those are the five things that my article walked through.
Kevin Pho: Now, you mentioned earlier that there are many, many stories of physicians who went through your program and then went back and made a huge difference. So just share a particularly poignant story about how some of these skills really influenced one of those physicians to move the needle going back.
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, someone who I am immediately thinking of is a female physician leader who is in the southern part of California. She is a CEO of an FQHC that primarily works with a low-income, very marginalized population close to the border there with Mexico. So it is a lot of people who are working in agriculture and other service-based industries.
When she took over the FQHC, it was in the red—in the red in the millions of dollars. And she actually became the CEO while she was in the MBA program and started running—we essentially became her business incubator in a lot of ways—so she started running the staffing, the process, the financials, everything through the program. And within two years, she had the FQHC in the plus in terms of financial performance, but also increased access. She has higher numbers of patients and lowered her wait times across the board, and her community relationship, which is so key, right? Because so much of what a physician does, in whatever role it is, is really the community impact—it has been embraced to where the community sees that FQHC as one of the major resources for the entire community.
So that is the one that first comes to mind, but I could probably go through, you know, we bring through a cohort of about 40 physicians every year, and in every group there is a story of inspiration. It could just be, for example, one of our graduates reorganized the urology clinic at the VA hospital where he was heading the Urology Department. He just worked on one specific procedure, and by fixing how the clinic was organized and how quickly the process moved through—cutting out things that were causing logjams or what have you and slowing people down the process—he decreased the wait time for a veteran to get this specific urology procedure by 68 percent. That now, talk about cost savings and et cetera, et cetera, right? Those impacts have that wave effect throughout the industry.
Kevin Pho: Now, whenever the topic of physician leadership comes up on this podcast, I always ask my guests: is an MBA necessary? I understand that you are looking at this through a certain perspective, so let me ask you, for physicians who, like you said, can sometimes get that business vernacular not necessarily in an MBA program, when should they consider a formal MBA program like yours?
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, so great question, and you are going to find that, of course, I am going to be biased, right, because that is my role. I am passionate about how education transforms anyone and their trajectory in the world. But I hear from our alumni that getting the training that they got through us helps them fall back in love with medicine, which is so incredibly inspiring. And then I also hear from our alumni, “I should have done this years ago.” That is the common theme, even if, you know, our average age is about 45, but we will have some people who are a few years out of residency, and they say the same thing.
But I also want to be really cognizant that some of our most successful physician leaders who are making large impacts do not necessarily have an MBA. So there is that piece of self-awareness, right, that is so key in great leaders. You could walk through Adam Grant’s latest books that he has recommended, follow your blog for so many fantastic concepts that are being discussed, so many different educators who are out there trying to create impact through their knowledge—disseminating knowledge—that you can get that information in lots of different ways.
The reason people are attracted to an MBA is not much different from how you were trained as a physician. It is a structured program with the pinnacle of knowledge of what you most need to know. So there is that organized approach, and a lot of people talk to me about that: “Sure, I could learn this on my own. I could teach this to myself. I could be in LinkedIn learning, having a great time. But the structure and the organization, and the other thing that an MBA program can give you that you can never get on your own in whatever capacity you start to learn the language of business, is the networking piece.”
Our alumni constantly learn from each other, leverage those connections to either hire one another or continue to learn in the environment. As they went through COVID, they actually turned to one another constantly to say, “OK, you GI doc in Maine, I am a plastic surgeon in California. How are we getting through this together? What processes are you using? What is working best?” So that peer learning piece is also a benefit of coming into a structured program like an MBA.
Kevin Pho: And for those physicians who may be thinking of going through a formal MBA program, just give us an idea of the time and financial commitment it may take.
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, and I am a big advocate of do the research and find a program that works best for you. Not every program is—you know, I had a boss once who joked, “You could swing a dead cat and hit an MBA program every time.” They are everywhere, right? So what I say is, when you are looking at MBA programs, there are four things to look at: who is in the classroom with you, who is teaching the courses to you, what are the classes, and then what is the modality and time commitment? That is really a big one for physicians, because your time is your most precious commodity. So find a program that makes an efficient use of time.
Looking at those four things, you will find who is in the classroom with you, what are you going to learn from them, and what is important to you. Most physicians are never leaving health care, right? So why would you go into a program with, you know, all kinds of different industries? Your faculty should be a long-term resource to you in terms of consultants whom you can call. You know, our finance professor continues to regularly get spreadsheets of different business plans and business ideas that physicians are working on, whether it be inside their organization or outside their organization, and they say, “Hey, can you check out my financials?” So your faculty should become a consultant to you.
And then, thirdly, modality—this is the big question. You know, are you looking for an online MBA, an in-person, et cetera? We are the best of both worlds: we are hybrid, so we are 70 percent online and 30 percent in person, so we keep that piece of laying of hands. Research studies have been done on how you deliver CMEs effectively for the long-term retention of knowledge in physicians, and what they have found is you have to apply what you are learning if you want to retain that long term. So our in-person component is really that laying-of-hands application moment where we ensure that you are retaining and learning that language and practicing it. But our online environment—of course, we are the number one–ranked online MBA in the country and have been for more than a decade, so you study online with us in confidence.
That length of time is really key. Some people want to go really short, which is challenging for physicians because, you know, you are scientists on a certain level. So we are a 21-month, 51-credit-hour program. It is a full MBA, but delivered in a style that works best. But again, that is not necessarily what most, you know, some people are just looking to get done quickly. So we are what we consider to be the best, right, of all the ways in which you can deliver business education to physicians. But, as you do your research, you can find a lot of different options out there.
Kevin Pho: And in terms of the physicians who may be considering a formal MBA program, tell me the types of questions they need to ask themselves to see whether that is right for them. Are they already physicians in the C-suite? Are they physicians who are purely in clinical and thinking about perhaps an executive role? Tell me the type of physician where your program may be right for them.
Susannah Eastwick: Yeah, so the answer is actually all of the above for us. We want to partner with physicians who want to be more effective in whatever way they want to be in the change that is coming across health care. So about a third of our cohort are actually full-time practicing physicians, another third are what you might say one foot practicing, one foot in some kind of administrative role, and then the final third are what you would call a full-time administrator—so in the C-suite, et cetera, or a department chair in academic medicine, or on the payer side in a VP role. We really pull from across the industry.
But what I would say is, you know, a good MBA program wants to partner with a physician. What they should know before they get started is just what do they want to do, you know—that awareness of what they do not know and how a structured educational program can help them learn more about what they do not know, which ultimately also exposes how much more you will never know, right? But it is that moment of when a physician is thinking, “OK, I am feeling burned out, I am feeling completely disempowered, disenfranchised,” and rather than trying to find the early-retirement button, “I want to be part of the change that needs to happen in health care.” So that is where looking at an MBA program and saying, “What can it help give me?”
A lot of physicians think, well, I have to know exactly what I am going to do with this, right? Because when you go to medical school, you have the immediate answer, right? I am going to pick my specialty, then I am going to go on to residency, potentially fellowship, and then I am hired straight out of it. An MBA is a lot more nebulous. So you do not actually have to know how you are going to use it. A good MBA program should help you figure that out as you get exposed to the content. It should help you see, oh my gosh—like, we have a physician graduating this year who came through the Air Force, he is an orthopedic surgeon, was working in a health care system, and he very quickly through the program realized he had a massive passion for operations and really looking at process improvement. And now he has gotten a job working in that exact area as a consultant, and he did not walk in the door assuming that was going to be his outcome. But through the program, he learned this is really where he has a skill set.
So I would caution your listeners and readers: you do not have to know the answer. A good program should help you find that. You just have to have that passion to say, I am going to use this opportunity to learn more and to help be more in the role that I am in.
Kevin Pho: We are talking to Susannah Eastwick. She is the director of a physician MBA program. Today’s KevinMD article is “Advancing health care through physician leadership: 5 skills for changing health care.” Susannah, let us end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.
Susannah Eastwick: I would say my first take-home message is that physicians are an incredibly inspiring group. I have the best job: I get to work with incredibly passionate and intelligent people. So I would say if you are thinking about how you use your voice, how you become more effective, continue this education that you do by reading KevinMD, which is full of great content. I would love to talk to anyone who is thinking about how they can use a partnership with a good educational program to help create the change that they are looking for.
Kevin Pho: Susannah, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.
Susannah Eastwick: Thanks so much for having me. This was great.
