Our guest today, Dr. Akshat Kumar, earned his MD from Kasturba Medical College in India and completed his residency in Internal Medicine at Rutgers University/St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Jersey, where he became Chief Resident and then Attending Physician. In his spare time he co-founded thewisemd.com and later joined WellUHealth as Business Development Lead and Chief Medical Officer. Today he is an attending physician at Penn Medicine and a Wharton MBA student.

Can you tell us about your background? Where you grew up? What you were doing before Wharton? [1:28]

I am originally from Delhi, India. I was a math nerd in school, and none of my friends expected me to go to medical school, instead expecting me to focus on math/finance studies. But I wanted to use my problem-solving abilities to help people, which is why I decided to attend medical school. In my final years of medic al school I was able to work in some U.S. hospitals – in Boston and in Rochester, and those experiences motivated me to pursue further education in the U.S. I moved to the U.S. five or six years ago to pursue my residency training and then further worked as you outlined earlier.

You managed to get into a U.S. residency as an international medical graduate (IMG). How did you do it? [2:30]

There are two things that help IMGs - one is obviously having strong stats and the other is doing training in the U.S. I was lucky to have gotten some chances to work in the U.S. There is one more thing I have also come to realize since coming to Wharton - the power of networking. In medicine this is not a skillset that is touched on. During your training there is just so much focus on academics. It really helps to have people who can vouch for your work, which I had.

Can you give a couple of examples of how the practice of medicine is different in the U.S. than in India? [4:56]

The power of academic medicine is what made me decide to come to the U.S. If you want to do academic research, there is no place better to do it than here. There are negative aspects to that as well, though. For example, if I walk into the ER to see a patient I already have a lot of data with me – their CAT scans, their blood work, etc., so I have more data to work with, but sometimes that can lead to less use of bedside clinical medicine skills. I am a big believer in traditional medicine. You have to work hard especially in the U.S. on your clinical skills and not rely too much on technology. That is one aspect. The other is from a business standpoint. In India, everybody knows the cost of care, but here because insurance companies are paying for it, and the lack of cost transparency here was very surprising to me.

How has your experience at thewisemd.com, which you co-founded, and at WellUHealth influenced your decision to join the HCM program at Wharton and to get an MBA? [6:55]

Thewisemd was a consequence of this realization of lack of cost transparency. When I fractured my wrist I knew it was a specific type of fracture and required a specific type of treatment, but there was no way for me to know the cost of an x-ray vs an MRI, even as a doctor in my own hospital. So that led to the idea of cost transparency at the point of care for physicians to help patients make better decisions.