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By Claire Zulkey 

The numbers speak for themselves — Healthcare at Kellogg (HCAK) ranks as one of the country’s top business schools for its healthcare program, strategy and general management. It is also number one for programs ranked for approachability and supportiveness. Meanwhile, more than 800 HCAK alumni occupy C-suite positions and 351 are healthcare CEOs.

However, those statistics don’t capture the true value of why HCAK is the leading business school program for preparing business decision makers in healthcare to have a positive impact on the world.

Eighty years since its 1943 founding, the program continues to expand, with new initiatives like the Deep Dive immersion program, the Healthcare Entrepreneurship Initiative, a certificate program for Executive MBA students, and co-curricular platforms connecting alumni and current students.

Wide-ranging course offerings reflect the industry’s cutting edge

At its core, HCAK’s robust healthcare curriculum provides students with business decision-making skills and layers of healthcare-specific acumen. The Full-Time MBA, Evening & Weekend MBA and Executive MBA options allow students to tailor their degree to their career goals, designing their curricular roadmap to reflect their career journey with payers, providers, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, health services and as an entrepreneur.

“To really make a contribution as an entrepreneur, you have to know some of the broader issues of the industry and the fact that there are very different segments within the industry with different dynamics,” says Peter McNerney, adjunct professor, and director of HCAK’s Healthcare Entrepreneurship Initiative. “Before you can be successful, you have to make sure that what you’re doing makes sense within those broader trends and constraints.”

The program’s robust mix of 22 in-depth and experiential courses reflects the industry’s cutting edge, from an experiential lab class with professor Paul Campbell focused on health equity to professor of entrepreneurship Kate Wolin’s new Digital Health for Entrepreneurs class, which addresses business model issues in a changing landscape. Strategy professor Amanda Starc, who teaches a course on using analytics, tells her students, "You don't have to be a good producer of arguments made with data, but you need to be a good consumer of arguments made with data. ‘Do I understand the difference between a correlation and a causal estimate?’ ‘What questions can this data answer and not answer?’ That type of knowledge does not depreciate over time.”

Healthcare Deep Dive offers immersive learning from industry experts

This year marks the third year of the Kellogg Deep Dive immersion weekend, the only ���������� of its kind that combines students from the Full-Time, Evening & Weekend, and Executive MBA Programs. “The idea was to bring together people intentionally around a common career interest and allow them to take intensive classes over a set of weekends,” says Craig Garthwaite, faculty director at Healthcare at Kellogg. “It allows current students and alumni to deepen and broaden their healthcare network within Kellogg, since we have several alumni participating in the program.”

Taking place in San Francisco, Miami and Evanston, each three-weekend set of classes covers  topics at the forefront in the field, like Value Creation and Capture in an Evolving Healthcare Market with healthcare startup founder Andrew Hayak, Growing and Sustaining Success in Biopharmaceutical Firms with former Horizon Executive vice president and CSO Andy Pasternak, and Value Creation and Capture in Biopharmaceuticals that Garthwaite teaches with Adam Koppel, the managing  director of Bain Capital Life Sciences. The class helps students think about how to start a company, what they need to know about allocating capital and how to evaluate acquisitions. The adjunct lecturers, Garthwaite says, represent “a wide breadth of different kinds of academic and real-world experience. They're going to help the students understand how to build a successful career.”

Hands-on courses prepare healthcare entrepreneurs for success

The Healthcare Entrepreneurship initiative helps students gain knowledge and connections in healthcare where innovation is most impactful with foundational and in-depth courses. The initiative includes the Entrepreneurship Innovation Lab, which pairs Chicago early-stage companies that need talent with Kellogg students looking for experience. “Students interested in an independent or field study apply to the lab, and through incubator and accelerator organizations in Chicago, we try to source projects from early-stage companies that we think are interesting, worthy and educational for the students,” says McNerney.

Alicia Löffler, the former executive director of Northwestern’s , recently returned to Kellogg to lead the lab. “With these entrepreneurial labs, we hope to prepare people to lead cutting edge technologies into the market and great benefit to society, health and the economy,” she says. The initiative also includes an annual forum every spring for current students and alumni, plus a business plan competition with cash prizes.

Alumni give back as part of a growing and active network

These events reinforce an ever-growing benefit of the HCAK program: its active alumni network, which is over 5,000 strong and growing. Many of the 351 alumni who are healthcare CEOs operate locally. “Chicago is a great healthcare town, especially when you get into the digital health services area because that’s where the customers, payers and providers are,” says McNerney. “There are many successful healthcare entrepreneurs and graduates in the real world, and it takes work to succeed in healthcare. And when you do, you do want to give back.”

With over 30 years of healthcare operating and venture capital experience, McNerney sees HCAK currently providing “a total offering for those students who are really serious about making a positive impact in healthcare,” he says. “Which is not easy.”

Learn more about Healthcare at Kellogg and explore our annual events convening researchers, students and industry experts.