A new frontier

Last winter, I announced that I was going to work for a large consulting firm instead of applying to medical school, attending public health school, or working at a non-profit, as were more consistent with my apparent interests and experiences as an undergrad. When people heard this, those who didn't know me said "Good for you, you'll be making oodles of money!" Those who know me asked "Why are you selling out?" But people who really know me understood that this was a perfectly logical step in my quest to better understand the complexities that come as a consequence of the inevitable intersection of health care and business.

It's been 5 weeks since I took on my new identity as consultant-in-training. Albeit, most of it was spent in training, but so far I've learned two main lessons: 1) When it comes to technology, clinical medicine is dismally behind most other industries (including ones in the health care field, such as pharma and ) in virtually all traditional business functionalities. For example, most hospitals have little technology that is efficient and integrated across departments that would allow them to track accurately real-time clinical data such as bed occupancy and surgical supplies. 2) The up side is that for this reason, there are plenty of opportunities to apply some simple business principles to achieve high impact on the medical process, reduce costs, and ultimately improve quality.