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Larry Van Horn, Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management

It’s tough for physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals to return to the classroom. There’s just not enough time. Yet the business of healthcare evolves rapidly, and continued higher education in healthcare management has the potential to improve medicine and enhance careers.

That conundrum is what prompted the Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School of Management to introduce a new program, a master of management in healthcare (MMHC), which begins this month on Aug. 20. Classes meet one night a week and one weekend a month for one year for a total of 30 credit hours. “It’s configured such that working healthcare professionals can go through this program and maintain their full-time employment,” explained Larry Van Horn, associate professor of management and faculty director for healthcare at the Owen School. He directs the new program with Wright Pinson, MD, Vanderbilt University Medical Center chief medical officer.

“What we anticipate and would like to see is that two-thirds of the class is comprised of people with clinical backgrounds, either physicians or other clinical leaders in the delivery side of healthcare. Then the other third of the class is mid-level administrators from the delivery side who have management responsibility for clinical departments or clinical operations,” Van Horn said.

The core business courses are taught during the weekly night classes, and healthcare industry-specific courses are taught during the monthly weekend classes. A significant component of the program — about 20 percent — is an applied project, dubbed the Capstone Project, which engages students in teams to tackle a critical problem. The Owen School envisions that students will be sponsored, at least in part, by their places of employment, and the Capstone Project would give sponsors a return on their investment.

“We spend a lot of dollars on consultants in the world of healthcare. Instead of spending $50,000 or $100,000 on a consultant’s report, why don’t you take three or four people, send them through the program, get their business acumen elevated and at the same time get the high-quality deliverable that you would have gotten from a consultant,” Van Horn explained. The Capstone Project requires that teams develop suitable recommendations in written and presentation form to address the problem they identified and analyzed. Van Horn described the project as an “integrated learning vehicle.” Examples of potential Capstone Projects are expanding services to a new territory, developing a business plan for a new product or service, redesigning a process to improve efficiency or developing a more effective sales and marketing program for an existing service.

The MMHC program is $43,000. “We’ve heard varying approaches towards how organizations are thinking about supporting and encouraging interest on the part of the individual,” Van Horn said. The first class will be 20 to 30 students (the program received more than 140 applications), and no more than 30 to 40 students after that. “It’s never my intention for this to be a big program,” he said, adding, “These people have busy work lives, and we need to do things to make this easier for them. So there’s a lot of personal interaction here.” That means the program will offer books, parking, meals and social networking to augment the experience.

In addition to standard business courses in economics, marketing, accounting, finance, operations and leadership, each student will take:

• Healthcare Landscape and Innovation,

• Strategic Marketing of Healthcare Services,

• Organizational Economics of Healthcare Delivery,

• Accounting and Finance for Healthcare Managers,

• Configuring and Optimizing Healthcare Organizations and

• Strategies for High-Performance Organizations.

The MMHC program joins the Owens School’s Healthcare MBA program, introduced in 2005. “That program is doing very well. It is increasing year over year. We probably have between 60 and 80 Healthcare MBA students at the Owen School right now. They’re doing great in terms of jobs, too. They’re being welcomed into the market,” Van Horn said. The healthcare MBA is a two-year program of 60 credit hours designed for full-time students, most with several years of work experience under their belt.

The Owen School also offers an Executive Development Institute, with practical, occasional two- and three-day courses that result in a certificate of completion. Two of those programs are healthcare related – Strategic Marketing for Healthcare Services and Emerging Healthcare Trends. Other topics are on the drawing board, Van Horn said.



August 2008

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