It’s hardly a secret that business pressures are continually remolding the landscape of medicine. Some physicians view this transformation as a challenge to get up to speed on economics, accounting, and even the law. They’re earning degrees that were rarely, if ever, combined with an M.D. in decades past. Here are three double-degree physicians who can hold their own whether the topic is treatment regimens, target markets, or torts.

For Steven Falcone, M.D. ’87, M.B.A. ’03, the decision to enter a UM program granting M.B.A. degrees to medical professionals was a simple one.

“The payment methodologies have changed, with physicians receiving much less in the way of reimbursement,” says Falcone, executive clinical dean for the Miller School of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University.

“The cost of doing business has risen, such as double-digit increases in the premiums for malpractice insurance,” Falcone says. “Expenses have risen dramatically, while revenues have not kept pace.”

A neuroradiologist who had been the Miller School’s medical director of MR services before his recent appointment as an executive dean, Falcone found the administrative and business aspects of operating academic health centers intriguing. So he enrolled in the 23-month Executive MBA in Health Sector Management and Policy program run by the School of Business Administration. This is a separate entity from UM’s new dual M.D./M.B.A. program, which just got under way this fall. (See article on page 10 on the new joint-degree program.)

Falcone’s classes consumed one weekend per month, on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday for eight hours per day. He was in a group of roughly 25 students comprised of physicians, nurses, hospital administrators, pharmacists, and pharmaceutical sales representatives.

“We learned a lot from each other based on our work experiences,” Falcone recalls. “You work on projects in small groups, as well as by yourself, and there’s a lot of independent reading and studying.”

It helped that Falcone’s wife and the mother of his three daughters, Janet, was supportive. A teacher, Janet Falcone highly values education, “although toward the end—about a year and a half into it—she couldn’t wait for it to be over!”

Ultimately, Falcone found earning an M.B.A. to be a worthwhile endeavor. “I learned a lot of skills that I’m using in my current position,” he says.

Unlike most physicians with business-related degrees, Jonathan Sanders, J.D., M.D. ’99, had practiced business law in New York prior to earning a medical degree.

Sanders left law practice after growing disenchanted with it. “In law, if you want to get better and better at your profession, you cause more and more people pain,” notes the physician, who is on the staff of Treasure Coast Dermatology, a Port St. Lucie practice specializing in skin cancers.

After less than five years as a lawyer, he enrolled in UM’s medical school. His father, Jay Sanders, had been chief of medicine at Jackson Memorial Hospital during the 1970s, while his mother, Marjorie, was a Jackson radiologist.

“I think when you practice medicine it helps to understand both the law and how lawyers think,” says Sanders, who earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from UM before attending law school at the University of Chicago. “You need to know a heck of a lot about the legal environment.”

But probably the biggest advantage to holding an M.B.A. or J.D. is the myriad career options it makes available, according to Sanders. “It gives you the opportunity to understand the business of medicine, so you can help people or companies decide where to allocate resources,” he says.

“Also, there are a lot of physicians with M.B.A. degrees who go into the venture capital business.”

The downside to obtaining an M.B.A. or J.D. degree is the expenditure of time and money required, Sanders notes. “But I think the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.”

Weary of seeing business “encroach” upon medicine, Nicholas Namias, M.D., M.B.A. ’07, professor of surgery and anesthesiology and holder of the C. Gillon Ward Endowed Chair in Burn Surgery, decided to act.

“I wanted an M.B.A. not so much because I wanted to run a business, but to know what the people who are running businesses are thinking,” says Namias, who, like Falcone, went through the School of Business Executive MBA in Health Sector Management and Policy program. “I want to know how to defend a noble profession, which medicine is, from people who would use it just for money-making.”

Namias found taking business classes enjoyable. “I was there living in another person’s world,” he says of the experience. “It was very interesting, very different from medical study.”

For Namias, the biggest downside to his M.B.A. program had to do with the birth of his third child. Namias’s wife, Beth, delivered during an M.B.A. program weekend, and he reluctantly went to class immediately after the blessed occasion.

“Like my senior colleagues told me, ‘Your wife and your kids don’t care about your CV,’” Namias recalls. “They’re the ones who really end up paying for it.”

Still, Namias is glad to have three additional magical letters after his name. “I understand things I didn’t understand before,” he says. “I can understand where the business people are coming from—and point out to them where I think they should be focusing their efforts and where I think they’re wrong.”