MIT Healthcare Certificate Recipients Are Enthusiastically Celebrated at First In-Person Ceremony Since 2019

On May 25, 36 students from eight programs received the MIT Healthcare Certificate in a ceremony at Le Méridien in Cambridge. For the first time in three years, the event was held in person, although the Zoom option let people from all over the world join too. This year’s continued increase in graduates is one of many signs of the growing interest in healthcare at MIT.

Similar to previous years, Anne Quaadgras, Director of HSI and Healthcare Lab co-lead, one of the required courses for the Certificate; Jacob Cohen, Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate and Master’s Programs; 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.

One of the recurring themes was Healthcare Certificate graduates’ returning to Sloan to collaborate on research and to be host companies for Healthcare Lab. Joe Doyle spoke about the kind of healthcare research that interests students and professors, “we use management techniques to work on meaningful problems, providing evidence that results in intrinsic benefit.” A current project, studying the efficacy of the Fresh Food Farmacy at Geisinger Health started with an MIT student suggesting the idea to faculty. Joe Doyle is now running an RCT at the program to come to definitive conclusions and evidence-based recommendations.

Anne Quaadgras also spoke about working with alumni. Alumni at Lahey Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Hartford Health have been Healthcare Lab hosts in recent years.

Barry Stein, EMBA ’17, spoke at length about the benefits that continue to accrue from his time at MIT. He told a compelling story about working with HSI researchers when COVID first exploded putting great strain on the healthcare system. Using the skills he learned at Sloan, along with collaborations with operations professors, enabled Stein and his team to pivot quickly to handle the influx of patients needing hospital beds and ventilators. This year, when supply chain issues in Shanghai affected the crucial hospital supply of contrast media, Stein and his collaborators used operations knowledge and skills to manage that emergency.

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 innovations, data science and finance. So far, enrollment for the coming year shows an even larger increase in interested students than last year, proving that healthcare studies are alive and well at MIT. 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.