Employed doctors have been very clear about how little they enjoy business responsibilities and how much they like a steady income. In our 2014 report on employed physicians, these two job features also were in physicians’ top three.
“That’s fairly intuitive,” says Tommy Bohannon, VP of strategy for AMN Healthcare’s physician & leadership solutions division based in Dallas. “The two reasons that most physicians decide not to go into private practice are to avoid having to be a small business owner and to have a predictable income.”
Bohannon doesn’t think most doctors focus on whether managers do their jobs well or poorly. “They think they don’t need to be managed. They want someone else to manage the payers and contracts, make sure the utilities are paid, and not a lot beyond that. They don’t really see themselves as employees, and if you don’t, does quality of management really matter?”