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Ikenna Okezie
So far my life has been filled with exciting challenges along with God's blessings," says Ikenna Okezie. Indeed, "challenge" seems to be the operative word for the soft-spoken Okezie, who is about to become one of the first two people ever to earn a joint degree in business and medicine from HBS and the Harvard Medical School. He plans to combine his two loves - medicine and entrepreneurship - in a way that will improve health care for all.
Born in Nigeria, Okezie came to the United States at the age of two and was raised in Detroit. His attraction to medicine has been influenced by the fact that his father and elder brother are physicians, but his close-knit family has always encouraged him to widen his net. "They support my diversification into business," Okezie says. He majored in economics at Yale, where he graduated cum laude and was captain of the wrestling team, the 1994 Scholar-Athlete of the Year, and a Rhodes and Marshall scholar finalist.
Having also taken premed courses, Okezie moved on to Harvard Medical School in 1994. He earned high honors and honors in all clinical rotations and in 1995 and 1996 led a delegation of medical students to introduce case-based medical education at the University of Tokyo Medical School. He also kept his quantitative skills honed working summers as a financial analyst in the Surgical Services Administration at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
Three and a half years into his medical degree, the pull to follow his interest in business became irresistible. "I knew I wanted formal training in the field so I could combine entrepreneurship with medicine," Okezie explains. With the encouragement of his HMS advisors, he submitted an application to HBS. Tackling the first semester at Soldiers Field alongside a primary-care rotation was tough but enjoyable. "I liked the juxtaposition of discussing a marketing case in Aldrich and then crossing the river to see a patient in Cambridge," he says.
This year, as part of an HBS field study, Okezie has formulated a business plan for AccessMED, a health-care information technology company that would give patients online access to their medical records. "Physicians don't always share enough information about a patient's status and treatment, which makes many patients anxious at a time when they already feel a lack of control," explains Okezie.
AccessMED would be available to patients through their HMOs and would link them online with their lab results, diagnoses, medications, and other relevant information. "We hope to prove that patients will comply more readily with treatment regimens when they understand them better," Okezie says, noting that such improvements in treatment and prevention would help lower health-care costs.
Although he has offers to join Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, his dream is to make AccessMED a reality some time after graduation. "I also hope to weave a residency or internship into my early plans, in order to gain more frontline patient management experience," he says. It will be a challenge, but Okezie wouldn't have it any other way.
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