Can Doctors Regain Authority in Corporate Medicine?

Is corporate medicine leading to an over-priced, hollowed out healthcare system characterized by dissatisfied patients and fewer healthcare providers, fed up with poor working conditions?

We spoke with Dr. Mitch Li, an emergency physician and founder of Take Medicine Back, which advocates for taking back medicine from corporate interests.

Here are some highlights:

• Corporate ownership of a health care organization implies that profit is more important to it than patient care when making strategic and operating decisions.
• The conflict between clinicians’ mission to deliver quality care and corporations’ profit motive is not as simple as good vs. evil, so understanding the nuances is important to determining how to resolve it.
• Corporate medicine creates the risk of lower-quality care and a poor patient experience, resulting in less trust of the organization, healthcare system and clinicians.
• Doctors and nurses increasingly worry about negative repercussions from their employer based on either the care decisions they make or their comments about the role of corporate interests in care. 
• There are existing ways to align the mission of healthcare practitioners and business interests the can be applied.