by Gregg A. Masters, MPH
I proudly display the ‘MPH” (master of public health) tag awarded by the School of Public Health from UCLA (a long time ago) and have both tweeted and blogged about the ‘we need more MPH’s and less MBA’s’ to solve America’s pressing healthcare challenges (access, affordability and quality imperative or ‘triple aim’) to which we now need to apparently add more robust ‘communicable disease control’ to the ‘value prop’ calculus.
Earlier today I tweeted:
I meant it…. minimally it’s about your lens, but more importantly ‘values’ in this scramble for purposeful behavior.
It use to be career minded and service oriented professionals where drawn into clinical medicine, the allied health professions (collectively ‘the helping professions’) and healthcare administrative services (their enablers) out of a sense of mission and giving back. So when I enrolled at UCLA in the School of Public Health the ‘route’ into hospital or health services administration was principally via the ‘MHA’ (Master of Health Administration), the ‘MPH’ (Master of Public Health) or even ‘MPA’ (Master of Public Administration) graduate degree programs.
The ‘MBA psychology’ had yet to infect the career progression glidepath, albeit that fire was in part stoked by the emergence of the proprietary hospital management industry (where I spent a fair amount of my time) intent on driving both revenue and share gains, but principally by deploying ‘secret sauce’ (superior management chops) operating efficiencies in exchange for quarterly earnings growth. Yet, since those early days the MBA strain seems to have dominated the current cultural pool of professionals entering the ‘admin’ or professional manager theater. Unfortunately, and while I generalize, most MBA students/graduates are really good at the profitability thing (sometimes squeezing out the last bit of profit from failing business models or burning platforms) and usually from an investor exit frame of reference. Rarely do we see a ‘community benefit’ or ‘sustainability of the healthcare delivery ecosystem’ sit on top of the MBA cultural indoctrination.
So as we watch the systemic exposure of the operational and worse yet cultural horrific gaps on display between the acute care health system and the ‘clean up crew’ as represented by ‘public health types’ i.e., both state departments of health or public health and their federal overlords at CDC, one must wonder about the viability of these apparently ‘parallel worlds’ with different incentives, values and cheerleaders.
Perhaps via this historically rationalized ‘financial class’ disconnect we’ve reached a teachable moment? Might we actually think about how public health and acute care medicine can work together for the greater good?
I think so! Will you join me?
Originally posted at PublicHealthHQ.
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