Building a bank for doctors: Financial literacy for physicians

What would it take to integrate more financial training for physician at the undergraduate, medical school and residency levels? Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd, president and co-founder of Panacea Financial, explains how it might happen if a national accrediting agency pressed the issue.

Medical Economics:What changes would you like to see in undergraduate and medical education to help basic financial literacy for physicians, and then maybe beyond that, actual business operational training?

Michael Jerkins, MD, MEd: I think you're not going to make any changes until an ACGME like body requires it. There are plenty of schools that have had really good financial literacy programs in place at medical schools. And what ends up happening is the clinical faculty in charge of that isn't generating revenue based on their time facilitating. It takes a lot of time. You got to come up with materials, you got to find speakers, you got to be at the sessions. And those are all minutes or hours you're not seeing patients or doing research, and so the school says, meh, this is a waste of time, it's done. But if you align the incentives and said, hey, school actually, did you know you actually have to this is required for your students, and not just on checking the box from a financial aid office perspective, but on basic personal financial literacy, handling debt, understanding budgeting, making housing decisions, things like that, all should be required. And once you do that, the schools would line up and find the people they have in house that have some expertise. And probably naturally what would happen is, there would have l some national best practices and standards that become kind of throughout the system. Because the other thing I see in the residencies is, you're not going to teach something that you don't know already. So there's a lot of faculty that don't know financial literacy and personal financial habits that are healthy themselves. So they can't teach it. So they find someone who does and they kind of reinvent the wheel. We have thousands of residency programs all reinventing the wheel on trying to educate their doctors, on how to negotiate a contract, how to make sure you're not making bad choices with your purchases right out of residency. We're expending so much energy on this. There are ways that we could probably incentivize an adoption of basically national best practices to get doctors through with less financial stress in their practice.