Dr. Kimberly Henderson discovered her love of medicine at an early age.
When she was in sixth grade, she entered a “What I want to be when I grow up” contest. At that time, what she wanted to be was based on the growing admiration she had for her pediatrician.
She remembers being that weird kid who was excited whenever she had the chance to go to the doctor’s office. “I wanted to see what he did, and you know how he listened to the heart and this and that,” she recalled. Henderson came in second in the school competition, but that was when she realized that medicine was her heart.
Born at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, Henderson grew up there alongside her brother and a mother who was originally from Quitman, Georgia, and a father who was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey.
Henderson had spent her school years tagging along with her mother every month to attend Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority community events: they prepared food for people, took part in toy drives, and collected books for kids. Henderson started to feel like her natural posture was in helping others. “I’m kind of a natural helper,” she said. “That’s how I’m bent.”
That trait followed her throughout high school and into college. As an undergrad at Georgetown University, she joined GERMS. “It was a terrible acronym, but it stood for Georgetown Emergency Response Medical Service. We were basically a bunch of college kids that were trained as EMTs, and we would go to other college kids’ dorms to help them when they were sick.”
Her training inspired her to consider getting a medical degree, but she soon realized that most students come from families where a parent or close relative is a doctor, and are often advised about the medical school process. Henderson’s mother had been a schoolteacher, and her dad was a firefighter, so she was mostly on her own in that respect when she enrolled at Georgetown.
“I was going to go to medical school and do my residency and live happily ever after. But I got to Georgetown pre-med, and I did terribly: I got C’s and D’s, which was a first-time occurrence for me. It had never happened in my whole life of schooling. And I would watch the people around me get these incredible grades.
“What I didn’t know at the time was that this was usually either the second or third time they’d taken the class: you never take the class for credit the first time, you just audit it. It makes sense because chemistry is chemistry –– wherever you take it, the information is exactly the same. But if you take it the first time around just as an audit, it doesn’t matter what grade you get because you’ve learned all the material. When you go back to your home institution, you take it for real, you take it for credit, and you end up with these just sterling grades. I didn’t know that at the time; I learned it afterwards.”
Now intimidated by med school, Henderson instead attended Georgetown Law. That’s where she met a professor named M. Gregg Bloche who was both a medical doctor and a lawyer. Bloche became an inspiration, and by the time she graduated from law school, Henderson had signed up to take part in the Georgetown Experimental Medical Studies (GEMS) program. This time, she was determined to succeed.
GEMS prepared her for medical school, and Henderson was accepted into and graduated from Georgetown School of Medicine. “I graduated with the class of 2000, the year my first son was born. I was a very pregnant graduate and went on to complete an emergency medicine residency at George Washington and came to New York to work here in Manhattan, started at Beth Israel, which finally became part of the Mount Sinai system, and have never left.”
Today, as a board-certified emergency medicine physician, Dr. Henderson admits that ER work can be very taxing. In addition to working in the ER, she has worked in urgent care and with pharmaceutical companies, and currently, she serves as the head of health and wellness with Morgan Stanley investment bank. “So, I’ve sort of traded in my lab coat and I don’t work with patients, I work with clients. But you know, I say it every day: believe it or not, clients are people too, and they do have health and wellness needs, and they do have concerns. It’s a bit of a different venue, but it is, you know, helping people with their problems and concerns all the same.”
Henderson was recently appointed to serve as a board member to the National Medical Fellowships (NMF) program — an initiative that offers scholarships and various forms of support to underrepresented students in medicine and health care. She told the AmNews that she’s eager to encourage young doctors to push past their boundaries. “It is very typical for physicians to shy away from these kinds of roles,” she said, “because they’re like, well, I’m a doctor, I’m not a business person, that’s not what I’m here to do. But what I know after watching many, many great hospitals in New York City go under is that medicine is a practice and a calling, but if there’s no margin, there’s no mission.
“The business of medicine is super important, and understanding how to make this business work should be –– and it’s going to probably be for the next crop of doctors that are coming up –– as important as learning your craft. …I think that’s what I have to share after having spent time not only at bedsides but in Big Pharma and in a heavily matrixed corporation –– you have to understand your own business better than anybody else.”