Preparing business leaders to shape the future of health care.
Traditional health care education programs perpetuate the fragmented nature of the industry; for example, physicians and financial managers with conventional degrees often don’t understand each other’s business. To create real change, managers must fully grasp how all of the pieces of the health care puzzle fit together, and how each decision affects the entire system. The Vanderbilt Health Care MBA program provides a unique insight into this complex world through a blend of solid business basics plus experiential and integrative learning.
Students complete the Vanderbilt Health Care MBA program in two years by fulfilling the MBA core requirements, along with the requirements for a traditional MBA concentration in addition to the Health Care specialization.
The MBA Core
Because effective managers in all sectors of health care need solid grounding in management disciplines, Health Care MBA students take a set of core courses (28 credit hours) emphasizing business fundamentals. The core curriculum equips Vanderbilt students with exceptional analytical, strategic thinking, and teamwork skills.
A Focused Functional Concentration
Health Care MBA students select from one of the following concentrations, each of which requires 12 credit hours beyond the core: Accounting, Finance, General Management, Human and Organizational Performance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations or Strategy.
The Health Care Industry Specialization
To earn the Health Care specialization, students complete a rigorous curriculum that requires more health care courses than other programs of its kind. In addition, the innovative seven-week modular framework allows students the flexibility to take a variety of health care electives.
The following courses are required to complete the specialization:
Health Care Clinical Immersion
Health Care Landscape
Health Care Delivery and Insurance
Health Care Regulation
Health Care Ethics (also satisfies school ethics requirement)
Plus choose one of the following:
Health Care Technology
Health Care Information Technology
Customize your degree with the following electives:
Health Care Entrepreneurship
Health Care Finance and Accounting
Financial and Strategic Analysis: Applications to Health Care Services
Health Care Innovation
Health Care Marketing
Health Care Operations
Health Care Organizations
Health Policy: Business and Medicine
Personalized Medicine
Practice of Transplant Administration
U.S. Health Care Industry: Health Care Policy
Learning by Doing
The Vanderbilt Health Care MBA offers a groundbreaking approach to educating health care business leaders with its focus on experiential and integrative learning. Students are actively engaged in real-world health care settings, “learning by doing” instead of just passively receiving information. Through immersion courses, students are encouraged to discover and create, integrate and interpret knowledge from different disciplines, and apply what they learn within real health care organizations. This unique learning experience is designed to educate the whole person, encouraging a broader outlook, the ability to see connections, and make sound decisions.
Following are several examples of how you many experience first-hand the challenges of health care:
- Change into scrubs and head to the operating rooms at Vanderbilt Medical Center. Stand right next to doctors and nurses and watch surgeries being performed. Procedures include open heart surgery, brain surgery, tumor removal and more.
- Watch and learn from radiologists as they scan and interpret the results of x-rays, CT scans and sonography.
- Sit behind a surgeon's console and operate the remote robotic arms of the multi-million dollar da Vinci Surgical System, "feeling" how surgeons can perform complex and delicate procedures through small incisions with precision.
- Work alongside nursing students as they use life-size "Sim-Patient" mannequins-including realistic heartbeat sounds, breath, veins, and more-to learn how to care for patients in emergency situations.
- Work with a team of your classmates to design a solution to a critical issue for a local health care company.
- Go on rounds with nurse case managers and social workers, who function as a bridge between severely ill patients and the hospital staff.
- Visit a community clinic, which primarily serves low-income patients at highly subsidized rate.
- Experience LifeFlight, the critical-care helicopter service supporting the Level 1Trauma Center at Vanderbilt hospital.
- Tour the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative Health and learn about alternative health methods such as acupuncture and massage.
- Spend a 12-hour night shift at either the Vanderbilt adult emergency room or the pediatric intensive care unit.
- Tour a biotech company that develops products to repair orthopedic injuries to bone cartilage, ligaments and tendons.
- Visit Vanderbilt's Mass Spectrometry Research Center, where state-of-the-art research aims to improve pharmaceutical care.
- Lean how Healthways, a disease management company, helps consumers take control of their health care issues, such as diabetes or cancer, as well as prevent disease through education and support.
- At a dialysis center, watch patients with kidney failure receiving dialysis treatments and learn about patients who have been trained to complete their own dialysis at home.
- At the Vanderbilt billing center, learn about critical financial concepts such as the revenue cycle, physician billing, patient registration, encounter forms, insurance collections, claims processing and reimbursements.
- Spend your summer internship working for a health care company, either in Nashville or beyond.
- Travel to Washington, DC, to meet health care policymakers and get a better understanding of how policy, regulations and governmental reform impact the industry.
- Learn about health care companies from the ground up by valuing a pharmaceutical or biotech start-up.
