Second-year medical student Jeffrey Roberson says listening to a panel of parents whose children have asthma talk about how the cost and convenience of treatment dictated their choices was an eye-opener for him.

The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences student says that was of the most meaningful lessons he learned so far in medical school.

He learned that sometimes the best medical option for patients wasn’t a possibility if they couldn’t afford the time or cost of the treatment.

The 25 -year-old Virginia native says his experience is one example of how a comprehensive understanding of health policy and economics can help doctors recognize how lifestyle influences health. That knowledge, he says, helps doctors identify a suitable treatment for each patient depending on his or her individual circumstances, instead of taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

Experts say this big-picture perspective of the modern health system is critical for preparing future doctors.

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Financial literacy, experts say, is fundamental to being a successful doctor. Dr. Tom Harbin, an ophthalmologist and author of “The Business Side of Medicine ,” says medical students who ignore what patients can afford and how to make enough money to run their practice do so at their peril.

Harbin says many medical schools fail to teach students to think about money and its role in health care.

He says he is unaware of any medical schools that teach the nitty-gritty details involved in setting up a practice, but says prospective students should see if they can find a medical school that will teach them how to apply the principle of cost-efficiency to the practice of medicine.

“If a school is far-sighted enough to teach about the business of medicine,” he says, “then that’s the one they should go to.”

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Learning how to work within the health system is important, experts say. Dr. Matthew Davis, a professor with the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, says doctors can easily become frustrated by the complexity of the health system if they do not understand it.

Davis says education about the health system can boost doctors’ job satisfaction.

“It helps doctors see that health policy is something they can work with rather than something that is done to them,” he says.

Doctors need to be able to both navigate a complex health bureaucracy and relate to patients, experts say. Dr. Nathan Moore, co-author of “The Health Care Handbook,” says without a solid grounding in health policy and economics, medical students will be at a loss when confronting these issues as doctors.

“When students get out of school, the systems stuff is just as important as the medical knowledge, because the medical knowledge is useless if you can’t implement it,” says Moore, a general internist with BJC Medical Group and clinical medicine instructor for the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. “If you can’t help your patients navigate through the system, you’re not giving the best possible care. ”

Moore says prospective students should look for medical schools which not also incorporate lessons about the health system into their mandatory courses but also offer electives on that subject , and speak with a school’s recent graduates. One red flag, he says, is when grad s appear to be overwhelmed by the intricacies of the health care system.

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He says prospective students should target medical schools that teach about different ways health care is paid for , including the traditional , fee-for-service model and a new effort to find a way to pay doctors more for successful treatments .

An understanding of the outside forces that affect the practice of medicine — such as politics, for example, or the availablility of grant funding — helps doctors prepare for the future, says Dr. Antonio Webb, an orthopedic surgery resident at the University of Texas Health Science Center–San Antonio.

The 2014 Georgetown University School of Medicine graduate pointed to malpractice insurance reform, Medicare reimbursement and funding for musculoskeletal research as a few of the political and economic factors that affect his work.

Insight into what developments are coming next in medicine is also key , says Dr. Lawrence Deyton, senior associate dean for clinical public health at George Washington University ‘s medical school. .

Deyton says that — in the future — doctors may be paid more by insurance companies for curing the root cause of a disease, as opposed to addressing its symptoms.

For instance, he says, a doctor who discovered that the cause of a child’s asthma attacks was a mold infestation in the child’s home might be compensated more than a doctor who simply treated the child’s asthma attacks.

Deyton says that preparing for the evolution of health care means that prospective medical students should look for a school that will teach them how to provide permanent medical solutions, rather than temporary fixes.

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Policy, Economics Show Med Students the Big Picture originally appeared on usnews.com