Tung Giep, MD, has been in medicine long enough to witness and experience the financial mistakes that physicians often make at each stage of their career — from medical school to private practice ownership and employment contracts.
That’s why he decided to write and publish “The Business of Medicine: The Definitive Guide to Help New Physicians Start Their Career on the Right Path and Avoid Costly Mistakes.”
Published in March, the book is a culmination of Dr. Giep’s more than 30 years of experience across various healthcare markets and settings.
“I wrote the book because I feel that there are a lot of things I have learned over the past 30 years in my private practice, and in medicine in general, that I want to sort of give back to the medical community,” he told Becker’s.
Dr. Giep is a neonatologist and the director of community hospital nurseries at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. He said that while medical schools educate physicians on a wide range of necessary clinical skills and knowledge, there is little education on the business behind medicine.
“As doctors, we’re book smart, but we’re not street smart. We are not good business people. It’s something they don’t teach us in school,” he said. “They just teach us how to take care of the disease process, how to do this and that, how to talk to patients, but they don’t teach us how to run a practice. They don’t teach us how to run a business. And the business of medicine is very complicated.”
Originally from Vietnam, Dr. Giep relocated to the U.S. in 1974 and grew up in South Carolina. He attended medical school at MUSC and completed a fellowship in Kansas City. From there, he moved around several southern states before starting his own private practice in Houston in 2000. In 2017, he sold the practice to a large national company, at which point his practice was one of the largest in Texas.
This led to his retirement, which lasted only five months before he took a position at MUSC and moved back to Charleston. Having worked in both clinical and administrative roles in medicine, Dr. Giep provides insights in his book for physicians at every level of their career, starting with medical school interviews.
“I’ve interviewed probably thousands of candidates; some interviews last two hours, three hours, some last less than five minutes,” he said. “It’s great to hear what your requirements are, but you need to know what my requirements are as an employer.”
The book also details the do’s and don’ts of employment contracts, including salary negotiations and noncompete agreements.
“Ninety-something percent of the employment contracts are written to protect the employer. There’s very little that you can negotiate,” he said. “It’s like a prenuptial. It tells you how to get in and how to get out of that relationship and what to pay attention to besides how much money you’re going to be making, because that’s not the only important thing.”
The book also has insights for physicians entering retirement, drawn from both Dr. Giep’s brief experience with retirement as well as that of his father, who was also a physician.
“When I retired for five months, I had no hobbies, so thinking about doing this the second time around, I need hobbies,” he said. “Writing this book is sort of a way for me to sort of segue from clinical work to doing something that I can give back to the community, medical students, residents and fellow doctors.”
