The Physician and the Financier

A conversation between Kyle McAndrews and Owen Muir, M.D.

One of the real, honest-to-goodness delights in this life is meeting people with whom you really feel a connection. Many doctors spend significant time being very skeptical of business and finance. There are exceptionally good reasons for this. We're not trying to understand any of these things, and it seems like decisions happen beyond our control regularly. There are entire schools for business where a whole cohort of individuals learn to speak in the secret code. There are similarly such institutions for medicine. Ordinary people are kind of left out of the whole thing. We don't quite understand the details, or even the broad strokes of why money moves the way it does, even though it impacts our lives tremendously. A few years back, I had the utmost pleasure of meeting an executive at a health technology company with whom I just hit it off. To my surprise, it wasn't the chief medical officer, it was their chief financial officer. The money guy. The guy who had to put up wi…