<p>Does anyone know the percent breakdown of seeing patients, teaching, and research for an academic physician? Do you have to do research, or can you just see patients and teach.</p>
<p>I have absolutely no knowledge about this subject, but my intuition tells me that younger researchers teach/see patients more than the well established (old) research MDs, with the older ones who decide they dislike research go back to teaching or even revert to primary care.</p>
<p>I liken it to grad-student/post doc, and that’s why I could be totally wrong.</p>
<p>You don’t necessarily have to do any research or any clinical work as an academic physician. A large chunk do a combination of the two. Most physicians that do both follow the 80/20 rule. You do 80% of your time in one and 20% in the other. It is possible to do 50/50, but that tends to be a very rigorous lifestyle even by physician standards. Many academic residencies/fellowships have research time built in as well (a year or two off). Some baseline level of teaching is expected at a lot of academic institutions, but this is highly dependent on your desires (simply asking medical students and residents questions and giving tidbits of knowledge on rounds all the way to actually directing a whole course).</p>
<p>I have a friend who will retire from being on faculty at a medical school next month. He’s in a surgical specialty for which the med school has a very strong reputation. He spends most of his time seeing patients and training his residents. He does occasionally present papers on topic directly pertaining to his specialty, but it’s my feeling that his research is more or less an organic outgrowth to patient care and not something that undergrads think of as ‘research’–i.e. lab-based bench work. His papers have dealt with patient care and the management of organ donation programs.</p>
<p>This is also true of my acquaintance who is a prof of pediatrics. She spends 85% of her time seeing patients and the rest of her time training residents in her subspecialty and doing administrative work at the med school. (She’s on the admissions committee every third or fourth year.) She has publish one paper in 20 years, and that was recently. Again her paper was a comparison of treatment protocols and outcomes—nothing lab based.</p>
<p>so do academic physicians run their own practice and bill their own patients or are they employed by the university and get a set pay based on how many patients you see?</p>
<p>They are usually employed by the university and paid a salary. They generally see fewer patients than private physicians and the patients tend to be more complex and more likely to be uninsured. There are fewer “gimmies” (as an academic plastic surgery physician you may spend 8 hours doing a free flap to an uninsured patient’s butt wound; as a private plastic surgery physician, you could have done 6 breast augs in the same amount of time and earned far more money). So, fewer patients, more complex, more uninsured = salary generally in the bottom 25% for that specialty. In general, however, the hours are better as an academic physician. You just have to sacrifice a lot of salary.</p>
<p>There are two main categories of academic physicians: clinician educators and clinician scientists. </p>
<p>While nothing is completely out of reach (that’s why you negotiate a contract) in general the break down of time spent by each category is as followed.</p>
<p>Clinician educators will typically spend 50% time with clinical duties, 30% on educational responsibilities and the remaining 20% of their FTE on research/administrative duties. Depending on their interests and specialty clinical duty and educational responsibilities may overlap considerably. Your general internal medicine attending may spend a considerable time supervising medical students on their clinical duties. Meanwhile a highly specialized attending - say a pediatric electrophysiology cardiologist - may only see medical students while giving a lecture to preclinical med students on the conduction size of the heart, while spending far more time with the cardiology fellows. Both would be considered time spent on “education”. </p>
<p>For Clinician Scientists, the breakdown is most usually 50% on research, 30% on clinical duties and 20% spent dealing with administrative and educational issues.</p>
<p>It depends on the medical center, but most physicians in academic practice have a hybrid model, with a base salary and some production benefits. That said, if money is your sole factor in choosing a specialty, you don’t go into academic medicine. It should be pointed out that being an employee of a academic medical center does have some benefits - your malpractice insurance is likely to under the institutional policy, there’s a legal team on speed dial, and there’s no overhead to worry about. </p>
<p>Certainly, the most common reasons why you might head to into academic medicine would be if you have an interest in doing research as a major part of you career, or youre very interested in teaching. There are also some fields that almost by definition are limited to academic medical centers - basically anything that’s so highly specialized that the you need a very wide referring area in order to establish a large enough practice base to sustain yourself - that includes a lot of pediatric subspecialists (hard to be a peds nephrologist in private practice in all but the largest of metropolitan areas…which all have multiple children’s hospitals you’d be competing with) as well as surgeons who perform unique procedures. Yes, that plastic surgeon may get stuck doing flap repair on a butt wound, but they also probably get the volume of radical cleft lips/palates repairs that is their passion.</p>
<p>thanks brm. that was really helpful and answered many questions I had.</p>
<p>i was looking through the msar and looking at the mission statements of various schools. It seemed that the top schools are looking for students who want to go into academic medicine or research. true??</p>
<p>In the past it was more true, but the current environment has a lot of research oriented schools starting to push for people interested in the undeserved areas and primary care specialties. Still heavily academic relative to, say, public schools.</p>