A Legacy of Evolution
What happens when a revamp meets a pandemic?
By Claire Zulkey
As the oldest program of its kind in the country, Healthcare at Kellogg has faced many formative internal milestones and external pressures since its founding in 1943, challenging it to evolve as rapidly as the field.
“When [former Blue Cross Blue Shield President and faculty member] Walter McNerney was here in the 80’s, we evolved outside of being a program for hospital administrators to one that thinks more about the overall business of healthcare,” says Craig Garthwaite, director of the program on Healthcare at Kellogg. “This shift positioned Kellogg to recognize the early signs of pay for performance in healthcare that began in the 1990’s. In 2000, with the founding of the Center for Biotechnology Management, [former faculty] Alicia Löffler helped us expand to have a meaningful focus on biopharmaceuticals.” Then in 2017, Kellogg revamped its program by creating new courses, investing in influential healthcare-focused faculty. “The goal is not to create niche leaders trained only to work in healthcare,” Garthwaite said in a 2019 Kellogg Magazine article looking back on the first two years of progress since the revamp.
Throughout these changes, the program has maintained a constant focus on training students and executives to understand the business of healthcare. “This involves combining Kellogg’s historical expertise in training general managers with a growing focus on helping students in all parts of healthcare create and capture value, be it in health systems or biotech firms,” says Garthwaite today.
A series of changes in healthcare has confirmed the importance of Kellogg’s long-term strategy to train flexible managers with an expertise in healthcare. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic served to demonstrate the ways in which healthcare has evolved into an interconnected ecosystem of firms. “Prior to the pandemic, the system was moving, albeit slowly, towards insurers having new payment models and the doctors operating under new risk bearing arrangements,” says Garthwaite. “This was originally an attempt to better align value and spending, but the pandemic defined the degree to which key stakeholders must work together much more closely and the intersection between effective therapeutics, effective treatments, and effective healthcare." This is just one illustration of how true success in healthcare is about understanding the entire healthcare system, not just a particular silo. "That's the way we teach it here at Kellogg," he says.
Amanda Starc, associate professor of strategy who researches Medicare Advantage markets and consumer behavior in insurance exchanges, joined Kellogg in 2016. She says that she and Garthwaite, who both teach core strategy, select lessons that apply to healthcare now—and in the future. “In a world where we see increasing integration across different parts of healthcare, we see a world where CVS and Aetna merge. It's important not to think about the role that pharmacies or pharmacy benefits managers play in isolation from the insurance function, but to think about them in conjunction with one another. I think the training that we provide is likely to only be more valuable and appropriate going forward,” she says.
Starc, who received her PhD from Harvard and taught at Wharton before joining Kellogg, says that what distinguishes HCAK from similar programs is "this emphasis on training good managers who also know about healthcare. Our goal is to make you think carefully about strategic issues in the core strategy class and then think about applying them to the healthcare industry and ground you in frameworks that are going to help you going forward.” When so much in healthcare changes rapidly, she says, “knowing the acronym soup of what's important today is something that depreciates quickly. Knowing how to think about how we create and capture value in healthcare is something that will always be valuable in your career.”
In addition to preparing students for the interdisciplinary nature of a post-pandemic industry, the program has thrived in other ways since its revamp. Two members of the Healthcare at Kellogg Advisory Council, Griffin Myers, the chief medical officer of Oak Street Health, and Adam Koppel, the managing director of Bain Capital Life Sciences, joined HCAK faculty. In addition, Advisory Council member Kent Hawryluk, '07, co-founder of Avidity Biosciences and CEO of MBX Biosciences, established a Hawryluk Biopharmaceutical Scholars Program, creating a network of full-time MBA students with demonstrated interest in the biopharmaceutical sector. Scholars receive financial assistance and benefit from dedicated co-curricular programming throughout their time at Kellogg. Paul Campbell also joined as a full-time clinical faculty and executive director of HCAK coming from UnitedHealthcare where he was a national director. And in November 2021, HCAK debuted a dedicated alumni network to its thousands of alumni in the field, kicked off with discussions with Javier Rodriguez, CEO of DaVita, and Ron Squarer, former CEO for Array Biopharma and chairman and Advisor at ADC Therapeutics SA. And, appropriately, the upcoming Kellogg Business of Healthcare Conference, to be held in January 2022, will focus on the complex interconnectivities between groups across the healthcare system and how business professionals can leverage them to accelerate the realization of emerging innovations.
Starc says that the next steps for healthcare curriculum will consider the future of data, machine learning, and AI in healthcare. “Requiring students to think carefully about being good consumers of arguments made with data is something that we're thinking about developing some coursework on,” she says.
Garthwaite reflects on the keynote address Sachin Jain, President and CEO of the SCAN group and Health Plan, made at last year’s conference. “He spoke about the idea of the importance of planning, not for just the next four years of your career, but over the next 40 years,” Garthwaite says. “When you think about the way the healthcare landscape looked in 2019 versus the level of disruption we all had to live through in 2020, you need the core competencies and skills that a program like Kellogg teaches you in order to be able to adjust your business model, understand how to rethink your whole financing model, adapt, and form new partnerships.”