Doctor Double - doctors with second careers, such as Dr. Hilton M. Hudson's Hilton Publishing company - other examples are presented

Black Enterprise, May, 2001 by Mark Richard Moss

Some black physicians do double time managing their practices as well as other entrepreneurial ventures

THE PROGNOSIS FOR HILTON PUBLISHING INC. IS A LONG, healthy life. But such a sanguine future didn't appear to be in the cards for the Roscoe, Illinois-based company after it was launched in 1997. Growth didn't come as expected, and that was attributed to a steady diet of manuscripts by Waiting to Exhale Part II wanna be authors, fast-food fare for a young company that needed serious sustenance.

When a patient's life is in jeopardy, the doctor is usually called; in this case, Dr. Hilton M. Hudson II, a cardiac surgeon, was already on the scene--Hilton Publishing is his creation. He diagnosed his company's condition and discovered that the problem was, indeed, its diet. He prescribed large doses of nonfiction in the form of health-related books for African Americans, and it worked. Hilton Publishing's sales were $225,000 in 1999, exceeded $350,000 in 2000, and are expected to hit more than $500,000 this year.

A busy African American physician with a business on the side? It's not all that unusual. In fact, considering the low regard that some physicians have for managed care, the probability is high that more doctors will test the entrepreneurial waters in the future. The physicians' main gripe is that the system has too much control over their earning power.

Dr. Darryl Wayne Peterson, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, orthopedic surgeon, says that his profession is one of the few that "every year, in spite of inflation, what we get paid goes down. Every time you enter into a contractual agreement to work with a healthcare provider, they're constantly trying to negotiate you down." His assertion is supported by statistics from the American Medical Association: Median physician net income (after expenses and before taxes) was $160,000 in 1998, down from $164,000 in 1997. That's a 2.4% decrease that becomes a 4% drop when adjusted for inflation.

In order for a physician to maintain current income levels, Peterson says: "You have to work harder--more hours, more encounters; work smarter--improve efficiency, automation, consider partnerships; or you have to have outside interests." Some doctors are teaming up with others to start or acquire ownership in diagnostic centers, which offer, for example, MRI scans and other services unavailable in the physician's office.

Lorraine Cole, Ph.D., the former executive director of the National Medical Association in Washington, D.C., an organization that represents 26,000 African American physicians, echoes Peterson's sentiments that the overriding concern among black physicians is the impact that managed care is having on their practices. To offset any income loss, some doctors, Cole says, have started doing "practice-based research" by getting involved in more clinical trials in partnership with pharmaceutical companies. Such involvement suggests that doctors naturally have, or have acquired through experience, a taste for entrepreneurial challenges. It also suggests that we're likely to see more physicians making their mark in the world of business outside of medicine.

"Medicine in itself is a business," explains Dr. Gilbert R. Parks, a psychiatrist in Topeka, Kansas, who has transformed a passion for astronomy into what he hopes will be a profitable venture. "One of the things that many physicians struggle with is that when the business part of medicine came to be more demanding in the last 10 to 15 years, it put doctors at a disadvantage because they were not as business savvy.... Other people stepped in, and said, `We'll do that piece,' and they took over medicine by taking over the business piece of it."

Whatever their motivation for getting involved in entrepreneurial activities, doctors are returning to school to get M.B.A.'s--increasingly more aware of what they don't know about business. Susan Stevens, director of the M.B.A. program for physicians at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, Florida, the first school to offer such a program, says that the number of medical professionals pursuing M.B.A.'s is rising. "Managed-care organizations want physicians in management-level positions, and doctors realize that in order to compete for those jobs, they must have some business skills," she says, citing one reason for the program's popularity. Since the program started in 1991, it has graduated 250 physicians.

Dr. Randall C. Morgan Jr., an orthopedic surgeon who practices in Merrillville, Indiana, is expected to complete his M.B.A. requirements in May 2001 at USF. He is president of The Orthopedic Centers, a practice he started in the mid-'70s. "The degree will allow me to have a place in the practice when I begin to slow down in terms of actually doing orthopedic surgery, which is pretty strenuous," says Morgan, who at 57 is preparing himself for the day when he will stop seeing patients and start doing more of what he enjoys--strategic planning and consulting.