Should hospitals be run by doctors?

Are the best hospitals run by medical doctors or business managers? The conventional wisdom is that doctors should focus on patient care, and managers with a business or administrative background are better suited to running the day-to-day operations of a hospital. Among the nearly 6,500 hospitals in the United States, only 235 are run by physician administrators, according to a 2009 study in the journal Academic Medicine. But now new research suggests that having a doctor in charge at the top is connected to overall better patient care and a better hospital. The findings, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, are based on a review of 300 top-ranked American hospitals in the specialties of cancer, digestive disorders and heart surgery.