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When the Marshall Webster physician leadership program started in 2007 as a kind of mini-MBA for UPMC physicians, Steven D. Shapiro, who heads the Health Services Division of UPMC as an executive vice president, wasn’t sure the program was needed.

Carrie Leana, the George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management at the Katz Graduate School of Business and academic dean of the program, says she is unaware of other universities/business schools and health care providers teaming in this manner to undertake a similar effort joining management and medical education in a brief, physicians-only course.

The weekly, semester-long certificate program accepts only 30-35 physicians a year. Faculty from the Katz school and managers and executives from UPMC Physician Services Division cover such lessons as “Interpreting Financial Statements and the Budget Cycle,” “Insurance and Reimbursement” and “Effective Service Management.”

In addition, they cover such topics as leadership, strategic planning, management methods and conflict resolution.

Carrie Leana, the George H. Love Professor of Organizations and Management at the Katz Graduate School of Business and academic dean of the program, says she is unaware of other universities/business schools and health care providers teaming in this manner to undertake a similar effort joining management and medical education in a brief, physicians-only course.

The Webster program, Shapiro says, “gives an elite group of emerging leaders the skills they need.”

In earlier decades, he notes, physicians were neither required nor expected to understand subjects, such as finances, that affected the practice of medicine but weren’t directly taught in medical school. Today, he says, physicians “can’t afford not to care.”

In practices and hospitals, the emphasis today is on treating higher volumes of patients at lower costs. Thus, Shapiro says, physicians need to be cognizant not only of how the medical profession is managed but how their patients are experiencing the world of insurance payouts, in order to maximize their benefits as well.

Overall, the program aims to get physicians to concentrate on seeking better health outcomes more efficiently by improving the quality of care and eliminating wasteful practices.

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Each semester, Webster physicians undertake projects to study health care improvements. In the program’s early years, they were asked to devise their own projects; now UPMC directs the class project toward an area it’s hoping to enhance.

The curriculum they devised as a result of their project began rolling out on Jan. 9, in the first of four pilot sessions, which UPMC physicians attend voluntarily. Much of the curriculum involves role-playing to teach very basic concepts, from eye contact and appropriate body language to handling medical-record data entry during the patient’s visit.

For years, the process has been different in each hospital, Minnier says: “While morbidity review processes are very well done within hospitals, there has not been a good way to learn from these processes and to share them elsewhere.”

Webster physicians studied how this review is accomplished both at UPMC and at other hospitals across the United States, then devised a process that encompassed best practices, and that could be uniform across UPMC.

Now, she says, UPMC is taking this Webster project outcome and creating a new electronic tool for use across its system to gather answers to standardized questions, which will feed into a database to be shared confidentially across UPMC.

David G. Metro, faculty member and vice chair for education in the School of Medicine’s Department of Anesthesiology, was a Webster program physician in 2014.

Metro agrees with Boyle: One of the lasting effects of the course was the connection it facilitated across UPMC.

It helped Metro “to not only learn the concepts that were being taught but to meet the leaders within UPMC and see when they were applying these concepts within the health system. What I’m applying from the course — what I got most out of it — is knowing the key players in the right areas and knowing who to pursue to get something done.”

Seeing the business theory, through the Katz professors, and its application, through UPMC executives, also was crucial, he says: “talking about the budgeting process from the theoretical standpoint and going over an actual budget from a department and seeing how UPMC was applying those concepts.”

Metro’s Webster project studied a crucial moment for maintaining patient safety: moving patients from the operating room to an intensive care unit. His team consulted surgeons, critical care physicians, anesthesiologists and patient safety representatives from UPMC about current issues surrounding this critical time following surgery and how to fix the issues from a physician’s perspective. “That was good for me because of my specialty and my position,” he says. Their conclusion: “What only one part of the team sees as the best solution isn’t necessarily seen the same way by the other parts. Getting this transition right requires that more people have input and feel they are part of the solution,” including nurses and residents.

Shapiro says that Webster projects pay off in additional ways, including lessons UPMC executives and managers have taken from the physicians they are teaching.

“The doctors are seeing the patients and they know the problems on the ground,” he explains. “They’re really a bright group of people, thinking about this differently and coming up with new ideas, so it’s always great to get their unique perspectives.”

Marshall Webster, for whom the physician leadership program is named, was in the middle of a decade’s tenure as president of UPMC’S physician division when the idea came to fruition.

There was a collective feeling that many of our physicians would benefit from a deeper understanding of the business of medicine.

Webster recalls.

Many UPMC physicians are already in, or likely headed for, leading administrator roles in medicine, he points out, “so they are managing big businesses.” But major business training, through an MBA, would take too much time for the average physician to complete.

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The ACA was intended to accomplish two things, Shapiro notes: increase patient access to health insurance and reduce the cost of health care, which is currently at 18 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

“The problem is the same” no matter who is in the White House, he says. He hopes, for one, that people remember that the ACA is modeled after a Republican idea. “The very people who elected Trump now … are actually benefiting from it,” he says of the ACA. “They like their Medicaid and they don’t even know it is part of Obamacare.”

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If the ACA is repealed and replaced, “the road’s going to be bumpy,” he says, “but the problem isn’t going away.” America can either have new health care cost reduction methods imposed upon it by some new health care law or physicians can devise better care itself, he concludes — perhaps through such things as the Webster physician leadership program.

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