A century-old tidbit of wisdom from the Book on the Physician Himself by DW Cathell MD (published way back in 1902, so ignore the pronouns):

EVERY Medical Man discovers sooner or later that The Practice of Medicine has two sides: A Greater Scientific Side, and a Lesser, but important, Personal Side, and that to fight the battles of life successfully it is as necessary for even the most scientific physician to possess a certain amount of professional tact and business sagacity as it is for a ship to have a rudder.

Only one of these sides is meaningfully taught or modeled in school, and I think we’ve all met physicians who do not seem to possess “professional tact” or “business sagacity” and been worse for it. Cathell was writing during a time when most physicians literally were one-man shops, but if anything the “lesser” side of the Practice of Medicine is more important than ever.

Discussing the ancient pro/cons of specialization that led to ever-increasing specialization over the next 120 years:

You may also ask the question: Shall I adopt a specialty? Would it pay me to do so? The adoption of a specialty, to the exclusion of other varieties of practice, is successful with but a few of those who attempt it. It should never be undertaken without first studying the whole profession and attaining a few years’ experience among the people as a general practitioner.

A successful specialist has many advantages over the hurly-burly life of the general practitioner: He is independent of general practice. He has short hours and is seldom or never called out at night. He can escape the expenses of horses, carriages, stables, and drivers. His Sundays are his own if he chooses. His fees are always good, sometimes fat. He can tell his terms and arrange about the payment of his fees at the beginning of each case, and usually gets them cash, and after a much easier life he generally dies a great deal better off pecuniarily than the general practitioner.

On the other hand, the specialist must be better equipped in instruments, etc., and more dextrous and masterful in their use and also more concise in the details of treatment; should possess a faultless manner and must foster his practice more carefully; in other words, if you put all your eggs in one special basket you must watch that basket much more closely.

So much energy has been spent fighting in the turf wars of watching and growing those special baskets that doctors dropped the ball on the broader healthcare basket entirely.

Dying rich after an easy life sounds nice, but he did miss the part where the physician became an employee and stopped being able to choose those short hours and Sundays “as his own.”

(Hat tip @archives_Rx.)

After reading stories of match success and failure on social media this spring, I’m already thinking about another set of virtual interviews this fall and contemplating how applicants can shine.

Here are some takeaways from Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You. While this book and its many examples mostly center on entrepreneurship and how startups can get money from investors, there are some nuggets that cross domains nicely. The interview is in some ways a pitch meeting where you’re selling yourself.

The power of unique perspectives and experience

[Investor Ben] Horowitz responded that great ideas typically stem from an “earned secret”—discovered by going out into the world and “learning something that not a lot of other people know.”

Everyone says the same things in personal statements, is drawn to their chosen fields for the same reasons, and has largely similar clinical experiences. When you have rare real-world experience—frankly in any context or domain—that makes you different.

Share how those insights have changed you and inform your approach to medicine.

Earned insights are rare

What’s the single best piece of advice that would help them succeed?” [Oscar-winning producer Brian] Grazer paused for a moment, then said, “Give me something that isn’t google-able. I want an idea that is based on a surprise insight. Not something I could find through a Google search.”

An idea that stems from hands-on experience is way more backable than the same exact idea if it simply originated sitting behind a desk. But the catch is, without being boastful, you have to make that effort shine through your pitch. It can’t be hidden.

Here’s an open secret: a few months of clinical experience don’t make you an expert in your chosen field just as even less time in other specialties doesn’t make you an expert in those either. Bringing fourth-year swagger to interviews often isn’t a great idea.

That said, real insights—whether about your specialty, health care, or even just being a human being and having a good attitude about showing up to work every day for your patients—are a breath of fresh air. I love when I can tell an applicant has an active mind and thoughtful approach, when I can really see their gears turning.

Why should someone be scared to miss out on you?

As creators, our job isn’t to use FOMO to manipulate backers, but rather to neutralize their fear of taking a bad bet. Though it may sound strange, FOMO can make a risky bet feel safe because it shields us from the risk of being left behind. This feeling of inevitability rarely comes from the argument that we should change the world, but rather from the argument that the world is already changing—with or without us.

If there’s a knock on your record and you’re scared people are going to pass you over, own it. The typical advice is to talk about what you learned after your failure, how you’ve changed, and other such bland platitudes, but the fact is that I expect anyone who has messed up to tell me they’ve grown.

That’s all fine. Go ahead and do that.

But…don’t just approach your candidacy from a position of weakness. What about you is unique or special? Why should a program director be scared to lose you? Why are you backable despite (or because of) that setback?

Connections are powerful

Salman Rushdie once wrote, “Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.” While we’re present for the pitch, we’re most likely absent for the hallway huddles, backroom meetings, and email threads that decide the fate of our ideas. Backers become fierce advocates when they are on the inside of an idea. They crack their own egg and add it to the mix.

Stronger-than-average connections with your interviewer will cause people to go to bat for you in the post-interview huddle. So many interviews are bland Q&A. True connections are rare. If you can get an organic discussion going and the time flies, everybody wins.

Each interaction is an independent variable

We don’t typically win people over in one conversation, but through a series of interactions that builds trust and confidence. Even if the last conversation went poorly, you can use the next one to show them how they influenced your work. This type of follow-up is so powerful that it can often change a backer’s response from no to yes.

You can’t really do this with your interviewer (post-interview correspondence doesn’t carry that kind of power), but you can take each interview as a fresh start.  Don’t let one sour interaction spoil the day.

Interviewing is a skill that requires practice

We’ll spend hours researching, outlining, pulling together slides—but very little time practicing what we’re going to share. The feeling seems to be that if we have the right content and we know it well enough, then there’s no need for practice. But I’ve found that backable people tend to practice their pitch extensively before walking into the room. They practice with friends, family, and colleagues. They’re rehearsing on jogs with running partners, in the break room, and during happy hour. They prepare themselves for high-stakes pitches through lots of low-stakes practice sessions—what I now call exhibition matches.

You need to practice. The common approach is to do practice interviews, often with residents and faculty at your home institution (and potentially online organized on social media). You should do those things.

But I’d take it a step further.

You should talk to strangers. Practice having genuine interactions and conversations with people who don’t know you.  Practice really listening to your patients. Get to know them as the three-dimensional human beings they are.

The easy flow of conversation is a delight to interviewers.

You are a process, not an outcome

The other techniques in this book got me comfortable with content, but I still had to learn to get truly comfortable with myself. I had to learn to let go of my ego—to express, rather than impress.

So much of your identity feels tied to your success in school, the match, and your developing career as a physician. But internal validation is always superior to external validation. You don’t and can’t control outcomes. You—at best—control yourself and your approach.

You will enjoy and likely be more successful in the match process if you are content with yourself, happy to do your best, and try to find a good fit. We call it “practicing” medicine, but living life is also the practice of showing up each day working on being the version of ourselves that we strive to be.

When you receive an interview, your goal is not to impress your interviewers. It should be to express yourself and be open to others so that you can find the best place to live and grow in your practice.

When you read healthcare reviews online, so many of the 1-star reviews relate to prices: patients frustrated by high costs or surprised by high bills. It’s easy to think that price transparency rules will help. One key problem is that healthcare consumers are intermittently if not completely insulated from the true costs of their care due to the filter of commercial insurance. It’s hard to blame people for feeling that their doctor’s time is “worth” a $35 copay instead of the hundreds of dollars they really pay indirectly.

When my family moved from typical employer-provided health insurance to a high-deductible plan, I finally started seeing firsthand how much things really “cost,” and how ludicrous billing gamesmanship practices have become.

I’m a physician, and even I find it striking.

I recently received a bill for hundreds of dollars for an annual well-person patient visit that should have been covered at 100%. If you manage to complain about anything during the intake, you see, you also get billed for a problem visit at the same time.

Is that nuts? Well, yes, of course it is. But this is the world we live in and how institutions pay the bills.

Dr. Peter Ubel had an interesting article in The Atlantic back in 2013 called “How Price Transparency Could End Up Increasing Health-Care Costs” that holds up pretty well. His main thought experiment centers on imaging, which is an easy but sort of plus/minus example.

The same kind of consumer pressure rarely exerts a similar influence on the cost and quality of health-care goods. For starters, most patients have little inclination, or motivation, to shop for health-care bargains. Insurance companies pick up most of the tab for patients’ health-care. A patient who pays a $150 co-pay for an MRI (like I do with my insurance) won’t care whether the clinic she goes to charges the insurance company $400 or $800 for that MRI. The MRI is still going to cost the patient $150. Even patients responsible for 20 percent of the tab (a phenomenon called co-insurance) face a maximum bill of only $160 in this circumstance. That is not an inconsequential amount of money, but it is still not enough money to prompt most patients to shop around for less expensive alternatives, especially when most consumers don’t realize that the price of such for services often varies significantly, with little discernible difference in quality.

To make matters worse, patients often don’t shop for health care in the kind of rationally defensible way that economic theory expects them to. According to neoclassical economics, when making purchasing decisions consumers independently weigh the costs of services from the quality of those same services. If toaster A is more expensive than toaster B, the consumer won’t buy A unless it is better than B in some way—unless it is more durable or has better features—and unless these improved features are worth the extra money.

While some patients shop around for imaging services, many stay within a larger system for all their care or go where their doctor tells them. A more meaningful scenario in a large metro would be to compare broad costs across multiple specialties/types of care across multiple health systems. Say, in Dallas, would you generally pay less at UT Southwestern, Health Texas, or Texas Health? Does that hold true for primary care and specialty care? Are there certain categories of chronic diseases that one network does better or worse with? What about labs and imaging?

Due to network effects, a consumer may not meaningfully be able to choose where to do every little thing, but rapidly comparing systems is perhaps not beyond reach. It would be nice to know, for example, which places are playing games to maximize insurance payouts at patients’ expense and which (if any) aren’t.

Sometimes, however, cost and quality are not perceived by consumers as being independent attributes. Instead, people assume the cost of a good or service tells them something about its quality. For instance, blind taste tests have shown that consumers rate the flavor of a $100 bottle of wine as being superior to that of a $10 bottle of wine, even when researchers have given people the exact same wines to drink. Other studies show that expensive pain pills reduce pain better than the same pills listed at a lower price. Price, then, leads to a placebo effect.

Such a placebo effect is no major concern in the context of wine tasting and pain pills (even if it suggests that consumers could save themselves some money if they didn’t hold this strange belief that higher cost means higher quality). But suppose your doctor asks you to get a spinal MRI to evaluate the cause of your back pain, and you decide to shop around for prices before getting the test. Would greater price transparency cause you to choose an MRI provider more rationally? Or would you instead mistakenly assume that higher price means higher quality? There is reason to worry that price transparency won’t lead consumers to make savvy decisions. It is too difficult for people to know which health-care provider offers the highest quality care.

If patients are not going to make savvy use of price information to choose higher quality, lower cost health-care, some health-care providers, like doctors and hospitals, will probably respond to price transparency by raising their prices.

And there’s the rub: is it a race to the bottom or a slow creep to the top? And if it’s both, how do we predict and influence the outcome? If the growth of debt-fluid corporate and private equity has taught us anything, it’s that competition is fickle, and it doesn’t take much for a dominant position to be abused.

Imagine you direct an MRI center in Massachusetts, and the state government requires you and your competitors to post prices for your services. You consequently find out that the MRI center around the corner from you charges $300 more than you do for their spinal MRIs, and that this increased price hasn’t hurt their business. Imagine, also, that you are convinced that your competitors don’t offer higher quality MRI scans than you do—your MRI machines are just as new and shiny as theirs; your radiologists and technicians are just as well trained. In that case, if patients are not going to be price-sensitive, you are going to raise your prices to match your competitor’s. Otherwise you are just leaving money on the table.

Quality in healthcare is a theoretically important metric but it is so, so poorly measured and understood. Customer satisfaction? Not so good. Outcomes? Highly influenced by patient selection. Healthcare is heterogeneous and complex.

Ultimately, the problem is complex and nuanced, but we should keep this in mind. Efforts to increase price transparency through state and federal law need to be carefully crafted and closely followed. Such laws should include research funding that would enable experts to evaluate how the law influences patient and provider behavior.

Also, whenever possible, price transparency should be accompanied by quality transparency. We need to provide consumers with information not only about the cost of their services but also about the quality of those services, so that they can trade off between the two when necessary. I recognize that this is a huge challenge. Measuring health care quality is no simple task. But if we are going to push for greater price transparency, we should also increase our efforts to determine the quality of health care offered by competing providers. Without such efforts, consumers will not know when, or whether, higher prices are justified.

It’s no surprise that optimizing for cost seems like a reasonable plan given how easy it is to compare versus how hard meaningful quality indicators are to measure.

But price selection in the absence of quality selection creates a perverse incentive for the cheapest lowest-quality-but-just-barely-permissible product.