OwenBloggers: Tyler

You'd Think that a B-School Could Do Basic Arithmetic

One of the little things that has bothered me in business school is the "credit hour". Each regular course per Mod equals 2 credit hours. The problem is, we're in class 3 hours per week. When I learned math in primary school, 3 did not equal 2. 

Now in undergrad, the credit hour made sense: each class was 3 credit hours, as it met 3 hours a week. Granted, the odd "lab" (for us science geeks) lasted 3-4 hours and only granted us only 1 credit hour. However,that was in combination with a regular class (i.e. chemistry), and, as the lab was supplementary to the main class. Thus, granting it equal or more credit hours than the original class would be foolish.

Some of you might be thinking, "Undergraduate credit hours were likely based upon a class lasting all semester. But, Owen adheres to the Module schedule, which is half as long as a semester. Thus, a discrepancy exists between the two." And I think it is this thinking that resulted in the inequality between class hours and credit hours.

The Administration must have rationalized it thusly: "As the average semester class is 3 credit hours, a course that lasts half as long (or one Mod), would have to count half as many credit hours, or 1.5 credit hours. Now, this non-integer is ridiculous and more difficult to track. So, let's just round-it up to 2 credit hours."

The Administration must have been from the Accounting Department at the time (those accountants, always trying to fudge with the numbers to make things totally irrational). And it still doesn't make sense.

In undergrad, you'd likely have to average 15 credit hours per semester, or five classes, or 15 class hours, to graduate. In business school, we have to take an average of 16 credit hours per two Mods (or one semester), or 8 classes, or 24 class hours. Therefore, I argue, establishing our credit hour system based upon the undergraduate system is comparing dissimilar things. Thus give us our 3 credit hours for 3 hours of classes!

Anyways, I'm off to see if there is a one credit hour "short course" (which, logically meets anywhere between 12 and 14 hours) that I want to take...

Things Only Get Easier...

That's what I was always told as I struggled through my first two Mods last year. Mods one and two are, traditionally, the most difficult, with classes, group work and readjusting to academics (with the recent reshuffling of the first year core class schedule, I'm not sure if this year's first year class had it any easier). While those months were intense, second years and alumni reassured me that it'd only get easier as we transitioned into electives. Then second year was supposed to be a relaxing time before you re-entered the workforce, with workdays filled with golfing and weekends filled with partying and traveling.

So far, those expectations have not been met, resulting in my absence from the blog. I have been able to fit in an occasional golfing outing or weekend bar hop, but things have been extremely busy, though enjoyable. Realizing that I will never have another opportunity to take various B-school classes, I have packed my schedule with full days of classes, with my "off-days" consumed by my job at the company I interned at and job searching. Juggling these various activities has been a challenge, though I'm surviving, as I start to dread graduation when the real-world hits again. Nonetheless, I will resume my blogging duties, focusing on my continued search for a job and various issues from the health care program.

 

Volunteering for Net Impact

We are in the final week of preparation for the NetImpact conference. Over the past eight months, the Net Impact team has made tremendous advances planning for this conference - the largest in Vanderbilt's history, largely as a result of the "endless supply of expendable labor", or student volunteers. Owen will be the smallest business school ever to put on this conference, and, if the conference is a success as it promises to be, it will be because of the students and their dedication to the worthy goal.

I was the Track Leader for the Business of Health, a new curriculum track created in honor of Owen's health care MBA. While I was charged with creating the curriculum, if it wasn't for my six outstanding panel managers who helped mold the panels, while identifying and recruiting the panelists, we couldn't have created the new panel offerings. Between enduring the endless number of process changes and convincing business leaders to come speak at the conference free-of-charge, they encountered many difficulties, but they each stuck with it, and for that the conference is forever grateful.

This commitment by student volunteers is repeated over and over again, from the students manning the booths at the career fair to the logistical need for "human signage" to direct the attendees to the appropriate location. Owen students have stepped up, making the impressive "Achievement" of putting on the conference a reality.

The Life of a Second Year

I was told that the life of a second year was to be significantly easier than that of a first year. Chalk it up to a case of many second-years succumbing to a case of senioritis; with some fellow students already having job offers, they're here just to finish the formalities before raking in the $$$s.

After surviving last fall, I would like to think that this assessment was true. The first two Mods were crazy in their intensity, primarily centered on academic obligations. However, for me, my life as a second year has been challenging. Though the demotivational poster pictured is a humorous slant on these challenges, they have been largely welcome and enjoyable, though stressful. It certainly seems at times that I am climbing up a mountain that never ends, but whose summit, if I ever reach it, promises to be rewarding.

What are these challenges? Well, let's begin with classes. Last Mod, I took five courses; a heavy load for anyone, adding up to 9.5 credits (one course- Transplant Administration - is offered over at the medical center over the course of two mods - 1 semester, so I'm counting it as 1.5 hours for the first mod). However, each class was excellent in its own way. Business forecasting, fast growing businesses, managing and improving processes, managerial science in spreadsheets, and transplant administration were each led by outstanding professors who really made a heavy load enjoyable. Between Mods, I took the US Health Care Policy course in Washington DC, which was a fantastic experience and showed us the complexities surrounding the development of health care oriented policies in the most political town in the world. This Mod, I tried to take it "light" with so many other projects up in the air, so I'm only taking 8.5 credits. From the dynamic duo of game theory and negotiations, taught by two more of Owen's finest professors, to health care innovation and health care ethics (and the remaining transplant administration credits), this Mod promises to be very interesting. However, with an added entrepreneurship independent project, that adds up to 22 credit hours, where the "average" is around 15, and lower for 2nd years.

In addition to the academic commitments, I'm involved in the aforementioned project with 5 other students working on a global market analysis for a medical device technology. Throw in a little conference called Net Impact (which you will hear more about this next week here on OwenBloggers), where I'm the Track Leader for the Business of Health Curriculum, my part time commitments to the company where I did my internship this summer, and my job search, and you'll find that I'm faced with a number of significant challenges. But like climbing the mountain in the poster, the climb might be difficult, but the outcome will be enlightening and gratifying. If only that summit would come sooner....

The MBA Toolkit: Excel - A Broken Tool?

One benefit of a MBA education is that you learn to use the entire suite of Microsoft Office products. Love them or hate them, they are ubiquitous in the business environment (often overly so when it comes to Powerpoint). My favorite product in Office is Excel.

Prior to coming to Owen, I had used Excel extensively in my role as researcher where I was handling significant quantities of data. Therefore, I thought I was quite proficient at Excel, knowing how to use most "Functions", absolute and relative references, and simple macros. Boy was I wrong!

I'm currently taking Management Science in Spreadsheets, basically a Excel 201 type course. We're learning about pivot tables, the solver function (easily the most powerful tool in Excel for any manager in business), and simulations (i.e. modeling people waiting in a line who randomly arrive, balk and leave if there are too many in line, and are served - really not an easy task to model). Nonetheless, this class is one of the most useful course here at Owen, as it augments a principal tool in the MBA toolbox. As long as I can remember the reams of information we have covered in class, I'll be okay.

And it's not only in this class that I use Excel. Excel has become my "scratch paper" when solving quantitative case problems (like the one I'm currently covering for Fast Growing Business). Instead of bringing out my ole reliable TI calculator, I open up Excel and enter the numbers in there. It's just so much more organized and clean.

Now I learn that there is a chink in Excel's armor. For the class, we had to upgrade (free if we bought our computer through Owen) to Office 2007. The new version is, largely, well created and an improvement over Office 2003 (once you get used to it). However, there is a very interesting glitch.

Evidently, if you try to multiply two numbers (77.1 * 10.2 or 6425*10.2 or 20.4*3212.5) to obtain a solution of 65535 or 65536, Excel shows an answer of 100000. Granted, the likelihood of ever arriving at these precise numbers is rare, but just learning that a program that you have always assumed was so reliable might not be so accurate 100% of the time causes you hesitancy when you obtain an answer you were not expecting. Nonetheless, it is still one of the most powerful tools in your MBA toolbox - one that every MBA graduate is expected to understand intimately, and one that becomes a second friend during your studies at B-school

Researching Business?

A recent article in one of my favorite publications - The Economist - analyzed the role of research at business schools ("Practically Irrelevant?", August 28th 2007). Coming from a scientific research background, it had been difficult for me to understand how the social sciences could produce quantifiable research. However, after reading many articles on business research in several classes (and delving into publications like the Harvard Business Journal), I had concluded that, after all, it was possible to research business.

However, this article cites the recent declaration by the AACSB International - a global accrediting agency for business schools - that questions the emphasis that schools place on research from their faculty.

The basic premise is that, in its current form, academic research at business schools rarely produces anything useful to the practice of business on a real-world managerial level. In a 'publish or perish' mentality, business faculty seek to produce as a sizeable reputation for themselves and the school on producing highly quantitative, hypothesis-driven, and esoteric research in the more than 20,000 business articles that are written each year in journals, who, themselves, seek to build a reputation by publishing a sheer volume of articles, whether practical to managerial business or not. The Economist cites a 2006 issue of Strategy and Leadership that said that "[Research] for the most part...has become a self-referential closed system [irrelevant to' corporate performance." 

Therefore, the AACSB is proposing evaluating the research performed at schools by requiring schools demonstrate the value of their faculties' research, not solely by listing citations in journals, but demonstrating the impact it has on the work environment (however that can be quantified).

Critics of this plan argue that publishing research in academic journals, designed for the academic, ensures peer reviewed rigor. Ultimately, they claim, this research is "translated" into the business world, either by consultants or by teaching in MBA and other executive programs.

However, many debate this "translation" hypothesis, claiming that the research performed and published in academic journals rarely make it to the classroom, where professors maintain the standard practice of teaching traditional methods and beliefs. Instead, inductive research - that which proceeds without preconceptions, and instead observes organizational behavior and then draws conclusions - is much more likely to be applied in the real world than the theory driven articles in most academic journals. Yet, "Inductive research tends to draw sneers from the editors of academic journals."

I know from my own experience that the most relevant and memorable academic articles I have read at b-school have been precisely those inductive studies. The theory-driven articles takes it out of context and makes it hard to apply to my life. Yet, having become the tradition among faculty across the academic institution, it will be hard to deviate away from the prestige that the current system evokes for faculty. Hopefully, the industry will be able to strike a balance.

Getting Outside of the 'Shoe

For those of you who read "Big Red Horseshoe" might be aware that Owen's building resembles, well, a big, red horseshoe. As students, we are surrounded by the red bricks and glass on a daily basis, often for ridiculous periods of time. Therefore, it is often a treat to break free of the monotony of Room 218, top floor of the library, the drive to and from work, and your bed, as that is all I have seen over the past few weeks.

Tonight, I am writing from San Diego...that's right, I'm 1750 miles from the Magnolias and squirrels of the Vanderbilt campus, surrounded instead by the the sun, the sand, and the surf of southern California. Occasionally, your studies warrant a change in environment from the Owen classrooms. This weekend, a sizeable portion of the Owen student body is in Orlando at the National Black MBA conference, investigating the tremendous number of companies that recruit there. However, I and four of my fellow health care second years are on the other coast attending a Transplant Administration conference at the Hotel del Coronado.

This conference is a requirement (though many would argue a vacation) for a unique course offered to Owen students in the medical center entitled, Transplant Administration. The course is taught by the business administrator at the Vanderbilt Med Center's transplant program - Ed Zavala. It investigates the organ transplant industry from a  strategic and logistic business perspective. We learn about how organs are registered, delegated, acquired, paid for, and physically transplanted. Ed is also the principal at the leading transplant consulting agency and has put on a conference/workshop in San Diego for 13 years. This year the conference discusses strategies for managing Medicare organ acquisition costs as well as managed care contracts, staffing effectively, maintaining sustainable revenue streams, marketing a successful program, and other important issues to surgeons, hospitals, payers and administrators. Therefore, it is a tremendous opportunity that we Owen students are exposed to such an opportunity.

Aside from the experiential learning on the industry and tremendous networking opportunities, this trip has also allowed me to see two of my good college friends (and Senior year roommates) who currently live here. We attended a Padre's game versus the SF Giants in amazing weather, ate a fabulous Italian dinner in the Gaslight district, sat in the second row along the first base line, and were able to heckle Barry Bonds after he got on first base. Quite a difference from my perceived Saturday night had I not come to SD - tailgating and watching Vanderbilt enjoy a win versus SEC rival Ole Miss. Which is better? While I'm a diehard Vandy fan (you have to be after almost 10 years of losing football), San Diego is hard to beat. And, hey, at least I'm away from the big red horseshoe.

Implementing the "e" movement in Health Care

In my last blog, I mentioned the policy debates that occur regularly in health care classes. Take for example, the issue of the issue of electronic health records. This often cited "cure-all" to the system is much more complex for it is a term that defines a wide array of eHealth solutions (from a computer system within a single hospital or a regional grouping of hospitals that either stores patient data as a digital copy of the patient's chart or is capable of interacting with various departments and providers at a larger level).

This past Thursday in Health Care IT (a class I am technically auditing because of a full schedule), we delved into this issue with perhaps one of the most dynamic speakers we've had - Mark Frisse, Director of the Center for Better Health here at Vanderbilt and also director of the eHealth alliance - a demonstration program in health IT,that seeks to develop a comprehensive health information exchange system for southwest Tennessee (in the Memphis area) among disparate hospital groups and providers.

In this discussion we discussed the various privacy, compatibility, transparency, and infrastructure issues involving such a regional program. Many people question, because of the standards that must be implemented to have a system-wide HCIT network that maybe the government should implement it. Though, such a undertaking will be about 5-10 times what the government currently spends. However, the private sector is currently too fragmented (with 100s of companies offering one type of service) to establish standards. Therefore, the HCIT industry is in a conundrum, though a IT system is in dire need. A report by the Commonwealth Fund (and then elaborated in Mark Frisse's blog) stated the need for such a system best:

"despite our vaunted prowess in computers, software and the Internet, much of our health care system is still operating in the dark ages of paper records and handwritten scrawls. American primary care doctors lag years behind doctors in other advanced nations in adopting electronic medical records or prescribing medications electronically. This makes it harder to coordinate care, spot errors and adhere to standard clinical guidelines." Admittedly, these claims must be considered in light of the correlation between payer complexity and automation and the reports of dissatisfaction and information technology snafus in the U.K. and elswhere, but it does seem unconscionable for a sector controlling this much of the GDP to have allowed such neglect in our infrastructure.

The question is what should the industry do about it? While in a system as complex as HC there are no clear solutions, it is the goal of the class to impress upon students ways that they, and their future companies, might implement some change.

Diving back into the Deep End...

Well, with school back in session it is time to dive back into the deep end. By that, I mean the complex structure of policy and care that is the US healthcare system. While my internship was tremendously insightful in the mechanisms of a start-up biotechnology company seeking to release its major product into the marketplace, my day-to-day experience centered on how to navigate through the current system than how to change it.

• For example, the centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) - the governing body for the most influential healthcare payer -  has proposed a new payment system for inpatient services at a hospital. This new system is a modification of the Diagnosis Related Groups (DRGs) called Medicare Severity DRGs (MS-DRGs). This new system hopes to restructure the payments for procedures performed by hospitals according to the severity of the patient's condition. Therefore, a hospital treating a patient undergoing a spinal fusion who is otherwise healthy will receive a lower reimbursement than a patient undergoing the same spinal fusion who has other complications or comorbidities (CCs) such as diabetes. This process hopes to capture the higher technical and resource involvement with more complicated procedures. Because most people do not fall into a CC (or a major complications or comorbidities - MCC - an even higher reimbursement rate) group, Medicare seeks to cut its costs by better classifying the patient's condition.

Alright, enough of a reimbursement lesson. The reason I mention this change is that it has major implications on the reimbursement of products and procedures used in hospitals. The company I interned at this summer must clearly understand these changes in formulating the pricing point of their new product (eventhough the Medicare population only forms about 20% of their payer base - private payers set their rates against Medicare). Therefore, I spent most of the summer wading through the changes to the DRG system to understand its impact on the company and its chief competitor (and this is only one of several reimbursement plans that are constantly in flux affecting biotech companies; others include physician fee schedules, outpatient reimbursement, and every private insurance company).

While I spent the summer understanding the changes, never did I really spend time to question the merits of the change and its overall impact on the system. If one biotech company is struggling with understanding the impact, so must hospitals (who will be the direct "beneficiaries" of these changes), providers, billers, and all payers (all of whom must relearn how to classify and pay for procedures).

However, now that I am back at school, we examine policy issues at a critical level. This enables us to understand how the system works, but also understand how the private sector might try to implement changes. While I do not mean to imply that neither policy debates do not occur in business nor the private sector can cause changes, companies(especially small ones) and providers must primarily react to policy changes and examine their effect on the company rather than take a proactive approach to examine the effect on the entire system(counterexamples include Intel and GE). However, policy debates and their  implications are standard in the HC MBA program. In my next post I'll cite an example of policy debates in the health care IT class...

More Simpson's Advertising...

In continuation of Asif's recent blog about 7-Eleven teaming up with the marketing team for the new Simpson's movie, Burger King (the masters of weird online advertising like the "Subservient Chicken") has also joined forces to allow you to "Simpsonize" yourself. All you do is go to the SimsonizeMe website, upload a portrait of yourself, answer a few simple questions, and, voila, you're a Simpson's character. You can then make some (pretty heavy) alterations, but none-the-less there you go (alright, it bears very little resemblance to me, but it sure is hard to two-dimensionalize the brilliance of my personality...uh, yeah sure that's it)