Stahl says that when the program was being developed, the university took into consideration the myriad changes healthcare was experiencing and incorporated these elements into the program’s curriculum for real-world instruction.
“We knew there would continue to be dramatic changes in healthcare,” Stahl says. “Turning the clock back 10 years, managed care organizations were big at the time. And healthcare was starting to experience numerous impacts such as baby boomers who are voracious healthcare consumers; there have been issues relating to access to healthcare and the government getting more involved, including an increasing percentage of healthcare expenditures coming through federal or state means; and we can’t ignore the growth of the Internet, which allows patients to become better informed as they enter the healthcare system. We’ve also seen in that time the introduction and growth of electronic medical records to reduce error rates, as well as a focus on improved quality of healthcare, and that’s just skimming the issues.”
Stahl explains that these industry changes necessitated a program that could make sense of the trends and incorporate that knowledge into high levels of business functionality. “It was our hypothesis that physicians needed to acquire knowledge about the business side of healthcare enterprises so they could do what they wanted back in medical school when they took the Hippocratic Oath – to improve the lives of their patients, particularly if they were in a leadership role. It didn’t matter if they were running an ASC, the outpatient division of a hospital, an imaging center, or an urgent care center; they needed to understand these issues if they were going to lead as an executive and improve patient outcomes.”
Email this article
Add a comment
Printer version
Order reprints
RSS Feed
Bookmark article