Healthcare | OwenBloggers: Life as an MBA student at Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School

Tag Archives: healthcare

Health Care Immersion Week

Posted on November 5, 2012 by Allyson Mariani

With Mod 1 final exams over in October, many of my classmates began a well-deserved weeklong break from school. As a first-year Health Care MBA, however, I prepared for the first step in earning the “health care” part of my degree: Immersion Week. I, like most of my fellow Health Care MBA’s, came to Owen specifically for the health care specialization and had been hearing about Immersion Week and its purpose—experiencing the clinical side of health care before starting our education on the business side—for months. I had signed up for my clinical rotations, sent in my scrub sizes, picked up my Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) badge, and was ready to go.

One of the most anticipated (and for some, scary) parts of the week was the operating room rotations. I arrived at VUMC bright and early on my assigned day, suited up in hospital scrubs, cap, mask, and booties, and was ushered through an OR door. Soon, I was standing a few feet away from two plastic surgeons as they tried to save a motorcycle accident victim’s leg from amputation by repairing blood vessels and applying skin grafts. Fortunately I’m not squeamish because the injuries were severe enough that the nurses seemed concerned I might faint just looking at the leg before the surgery even began. I walked out afterwards never wanting to ride a motorcycle, but before going under anesthesia the patient insisted that he would be back on his soon.

Read the full post (est. reading time 2:29 mins)

Posted in Graduate Life, Guest & Alumni Bloggers, Industry Insights, OwenBloggers | Tagged business school, healthcare, immersion, mba, owen, owenbloggers | 1 Comment

Primary Care in the United States is on Life Support

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Avery C. Fisher

This post was written by Avery C. Fisher, a member of the MBA Class of 2011.

On a recent trip to Washington D.C., part of Owen’s healthcare policy immersion led by the Executive Director of the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, healthcare MBAs had the opportunity to get a another perspective on the recent health reform and its broad implications for the future of healthcare in America from policymakers, lobbyists, and senior executives.

Primary care physicians (“PCPs”) are the lowest paid physicians in the United States. A quarter of PCPs describe themselves as “burnt out,” while an additional half describe their lives as “chaotic.” In a system that rewards seeing more and more patients while reducing the amount of payment to PCPs, they are forced to see more and more patients and spend less time with each. PCPs go into medicine because they like getting to know their patients and developing meaningful relationships that can deliver a real impact on a patient’s life. Today, that’s nearly impossible for a traditional PCP.

Read the full post (est. reading time 2:07 mins)

Posted in Guest & Alumni Bloggers, Industry Insights | Tagged healthcare, primary care | Leave a comment

What’s in a Grade?

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Bradford Cayer

So now
that Mod 2 is done… it’s time for grades. Who cares… this is grad school,
right? I thought that grades weren’t supposed to matter. (somewhere in New
Hampshire my parents are crying) Yet every time grades are issued, the same questions
pop up, the same issues are raised, and the same complaints are aired.

I have
had professors comment on the fixation that our class (2010) has on our grades.
Not so much that we “Grade Grub”, but that we generally worry about our scores
too much, as though we were undergrads. Some have asked “Why do we care?” … “Most
of the companies do not use it as a measure of employability.”

This question has been posed by most
of my professors… and of course when this conversation starts, someone always
chimes in “If grades don’t matter, then I’ll take an SP, thank you.” (I try to
be first, just in case they say yes… SP is the Owen version of a 4.0 / A ) It IS
true that most disciplines don’t ask to see a GPA. (Finance is the exception.)

Read the full post (est. reading time 1:16 mins)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged dores, duke, finance, grade grub, grades, harvard, healthcare, hop, mba, owen, owenbloggers, vadnerbilt, vanderbilt | 1 Comment

Process Flow Diagram

Posted on November 9, 2008 by Bradford Cayer

So I am sitting downstairs in the quicksand chairs that Owen has strewn about
the first floor. (see pic)
Actually,
they are organized neatly, but since I don’t like these chairs much, I thought
I would talk some trash. I have a break. It seldom happens that I get a break…
students here are always busy. I would love to get one of those stop motion
cams to snap a photo of the second floor every 30 seconds. Start at 8am, end at
2am. Watch the students shuffle in, shuffle out, sit down, stand up, fall
asleep, and generally work their butts off.

Break time, means looking at my task list. It is ever changing. I have my class
work timed to flag on the list when its coming due, then there are replies,
thank you letters, blog posts, even calls to family, so I don’t let it go by
for too long. The list is always moving… in one task, out another. This reminds
me of the current class I am in… Operations!
(said with an energetic Dutch accent, if you are lucky enough to have Lepre)
It’s Exciting!