Physicians are flocking to employed models, and some leaders feel medical education is playing a role in that migration.
Mark Thoma, MD, chair of anesthesia with San Francisco-based The Permanente Medical Group, joined Becker's to discuss how recruiting early-career anesthesiologists has changed.
Editor's note: This response was edited lightly for clarity and length.
Question: What's one thing all new anesthesiologists should know?
Dr. Mark Thoma: There's a few things that medical education does very poorly. One of them is to tell you what the real world is about. You're in this hospital or in this university environment and don't really get to know what private practices are like. You get no business skills. You get no 'how to run an office' skills. There's a lot of different types of work. I'm a salaried employee. You could work for a large HMO. It could be fee-for-service. It could be temporary work. And you have to know what these terms mean, and what the pros and the cons are for them. When I came out of residency, we were looking for jobs in 2008, and, of course, no one was hiring so a lot of us stayed on faculty. Now it's the opposite. I spend so much more energy recruiting. I'm always talking to residents asking what can get them interested and get them on the pipeline. We're looking at a year and a half out, because that's when people are going to start offering signing bonuses or forgivable loans and all of those other packages. As an anesthesiologist, I think it's great for the field. But the question is: Is this sustainable from the administrator and executive side?