Making Health A Priority At Business Schools

Where will business schools have the most impact in the next ten to twenty years?

With John Byrne, Editor-in-Chief of Poets&Quants we have put this question to Deans of the world’s top business schools at the CentreCourt MBA Festival we host together. From AI, data analytics and supply chain, to ESG, climate finance and smart retail, there are plenty of informed opinions. But one of the most consistent responses in the past five years, from Boston to the Bay Area is that business schools have a significant role to play in the future of health care.

Many of those responses preceded the global Covid-19 pandemic that has impacted every individual and every sector around the world. In addition to a tragic death toll that continues to rise it has caused massive societal turmoil, exacerbated physical and mental health conditions, provoked business collapse and triggered a sharp rise in unemployment.

And with other health threats such as obesity, heart disease, air pollution adding to the challenge of an ageing population, it is no wonder that health care is now a priority on the business school agenda.

A growing number of business schools now offer specialist electives in health and healthcare-related courses and programs to allow students to customise their learning experiences for the ever-changing world we live in. More than 25% of the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore specialize in the Business of Health. They also offer eight health degree programs and two Executive Education health courses. Carey Business School knows that, now more than ever, healthcare cannot be treated with traditional business fundamentals. Individuals need specialized industry knowledge if they want to bring innovations to market and lead in this sector.

In Nashville, where the health care industry contributes more than $46 billion and more than 270,000 jobs to the local economy, Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management offers MBA students a concentration in healthcare with more than a dozen electives that range from Healthcare Law & Regulation to Healthcare Analytics. A healthcare immersion through this course allows students to gain the perspectives of those working on the frontline of health, including physicians, nurses, patients, scientists, and administrators in real healthcare settings. MBA students are even offered the opportunity to observe real-life surgeries being performed.

Elsewhere, Cornell Johnson offers an Executive MBA/MS in Healthcare Leadership, the Yale School of Management offers an MBA with a healthcare focus, and you can earn an MBA from Wharton, Kellogg, Duke Fuqua, UCLA Anderson and Berkeley Haas with a Health Care Management program or major. These are just a selection of leading US business schools which offer healthcare-related options and electives as part of their business programmes.

But what about going a step further, and making health care your entire focus?

The prestigious University College London (UCL), ranked among the top 10 universities in the world and renowned for teaching and research from archaeology and anthropology to life sciences and medicine, is launching the UCL Global Business School for Health. Instead of being a business school that offers healthcare electives and options, the UCL GBSH is the world’s first business school dedicated to health. Aimed at current and future leaders of the global health economy, the new school will equip leading professionals with the necessary skills to meet the challenges faced by healthcare systems today.

All the courses offered by the UCL GBSH incorporate both business and healthcare. This includes a selection of short and online courses, Master programs, Executive Education, and their MBA Health program. Through these courses and their research, the school will provide an education to empower tomorrow’s healthcare management leaders to make a real difference to healthcare systems around the world, and transform healthcare access and outcomes globally through leadership, partnerships, and innovations.

The Director of the UCL Global Business School for Health, Nora Colton is a health and international development economist by training with experience working in the Middle East and North Africa region. Throughout her career, she has seen how important high-quality healthcare is to improving life outcomes, and emphasizes how important it is for the health-focused business school to seamlessly incorporate both business and health.

“We need to not just increase the number of people in healthcare and upskill them; we need to make them comfortable with technology and analytics and work across multi-disciplinary sectors to solve health challenges,” explains Professor Colton. “And this is what this school is all about. We are a business school with health so operate across many other faculties at UCL to give students that multi-disciplinary experience.”

Nora Colton believes we are now moving into a new historical epoch where health and healthcare is becoming the new important definer for society. Even before the pandemic, various factors were increasing the amount of GDP worldwide that was being utilised by health and healthcare. Unhealthy diets, changing lifestyles, non-communicable disease, and ageing societies; all these factors and more are impacting the health of people around the globe at an increasing rate, but the global healthcare sector is lacking in healthcare workers.

“We will continue to see health exposed for its inequalities and challenges. By 2025, we will be 15 million health workers short of meeting the gap in terms of what we need in the global healthcare system,” reveals Professor Colton. “Training up individuals and professionalising healthcare management is integral to what we need. We have seen around the world that health is a sector taken for granted; we have not paid salaries, we’ve not invested in training and management, and we now realise the serious consequences of not focusing more on health.”

Although Colton does acknowledge training individuals to take up healthcare management positions is important to the future of a better healthcare system, she is also aware that’s not all which needs to be addressed: “The Covid pandemic has exposed how important it is to get healthcare right, but it is not just about training doctors. It is about how we manage our healthcare systems.”

This is why the UCL GBSH is not just focused on training future healthcare leader to ensure there are enough workers. The school also aims to have a global impact on helping women move into more senior roles in healthcare systems.

“In the UK, 75% of the healthcare work force are women, but only 20 to 25% are in senior roles,” Professor Colton points out. “If we look across the globe, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, we see even more starkly that women are not seen in leadership positions.”

Through their offering of a ‘Women Healthcare Leaders Scholarship’ for female students on their MBA Health and MSc programmes, the school aims to help female graduates move into senior management or C-suite roles in healthcare. Recipients will be provided with leadership coaching and high impact leadership training as part of their scholarship: “As we see professional boundaries disappear, we need to make sure there’s a group of women who can step up and make a difference.”

Professor Colton wants the new health-focused business school to become so much more than a place for education and training. She wants it to become a place where health professionals and others in healthcare can unite, regardless of the roles they hold, and learn from and with each other. Professor Colton states, “I imagine it as a place where our global health sector can get some needed white space to reimagine the healthcare management ecosystem together and for a healthier world. Anything we can do to positively contribute to a more focused understanding in this sector is invaluable.

“I think the timing of this school is critical. This is an opportunity for UCL to be a leader and define how business schools incorporate health.”