Health Care a Top Priority at HBS
The HBS Healthcare Initiative is one of five interdisciplinary areas of interest that is a priority of the School (along with the Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Social Enterprise, and Global initiatives). Its director, Cara Sterling, who holds MBA and MPH degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and who has worked in the health-care industry for fifteen years, explains why health care is important to HBS. “It’s 17 percent of the U.S. economy and growing. As an industry, it’s underperforming so it requires new thinking and inspired professional leadership in all facets. It’s clearly a topic of great interest to our faculty, students, and alumni.” She notes that some 20 percent of HBS professors are interested in health care, pursuing research in four general areas: management best practices; lab-to-marketplace processes; strategy and consumer choice; and regulatory and market mechanisms. Some 3,500 HBS alumni work in the sector, 600 of whom belong to the HBS Health Industry Alumni Association. Each year, about 100 MBA graduates take jobs in the sector; more than 40 students are currently enrolled in the MD/MBA joint-degree program that was launched in 2005.
The initiative plans programs and activities that build community among health-care stakeholders, and represents and promotes HBS’s interest in health care. Explains Sterling, “For students interested in health care, we want to become the top MBA program and offer state-of-the-art Executive Education programs that focus on health care and health-care delivery. Simply put, we want to improve the performance of global health care and make an impact on the industry worldwide.”
