2023 Healthcare Certificate Recipients

Healthcare Certificate Graduates Urged to Harness New Skills to Address Industry Challenges

On May 17, 2023, 26 students from eight programs across the Institute received the MIT Healthcare Certificate at an in-person ceremony held at MIT’s Samberg Center. A webcast option provided access to friends and family who weren’t in Cambridge. Please click VIDEO if you would like to watch a recording of the event.

Anne Quaadgras, Director of HSI and Healthcare Lab co-lead, one of the required courses for the Certificate; Joe Doyle, faculty Director of HSI and Professor of Applied Economics; and Barry Stein, Sloan alumnus and Chief Clinical Innovation Officer and Chief Medical Informatics Officer, Hartford HealthCare, all spoke to offer their congratulations.

Joe Doyle spoke about the power of management techniques for addressing healthcare challenges. He spoke about some of his research as an example. There was anecdotal evidence that heart attack patients cared for at a hospital near a business school fared better than those who were not. Prof. Doyle worked to prove or disprove a causal relationship and found that those patients in a hospital near a medical school fared somewhat better than those who were not, yet being near a business school, but not a medical school did not result in significant improvement. However, those heart attack patients in hospitals near a business school and a medical school had the best outcomes of all. Prof. Doyle concluded that the hospitals near both business and medical schools are the best managed and have the best outcomes.  

Anne Quaadgras spoke about working with alumni. One student who took Healthcare Lab a few years ago now works at the organization at which she completed her team project. In her new role, she will be working with HSI researchers testing the efficacy of a substance use disorder program. Her Healthcare Lab experience and learnings were the drivers that brought her from student, to collaborator to employee at an organization with strong HSI ties.

Barry Stein, an EMBA in the Fall 2016 Healthcare Lab class, emphasized the power of students and alums working together. “There’s no place like MIT if you want to make an impact,” he asserted. There are few people who bring management frameworks and an array of management skills to healthcare, so “don’t underestimate what you can do together.” When COVID made the healthcare landscape incredibly more complex, Stein said that his management skills guided him while others were left flatfooted. Stein ended his talk advising graduates to carry MIT and all their fellow students to their next professional position. “Pay it forward and stay involved”

The Healthcare Certificate is open to all MIT students. It focuses on applying business principles to healthcare and addresses the question of how to deliver more effective care in a more cost-effective way from a business standpoint. The Healthcare Certificate prepares students to take on these challenges by providing them with perspectives including operations, economics, entrepreneurship, biomedical innovation, data science and finance. As Barry Stein said, the degree and certificate signal to the world that the graduate is dedicated and passionate, and wants to participate in transforming healthcare.