The making of a hospital physician executive

Physicians are accustomed to having the "buck" stop with them in the clinical arena. Indeed, they resist any attempt to have it otherwise. Management has only recently come back into their consciousness as a career possibility. Management is the "buck" that now belongs to the enemy, represented by managed care, paperwork, and regulation. The thoughts in this article have grown from the author's experience over the past six years as a physician executive in a community hospital, a career that followed 25 years in clinical and anatomical pathology.