At Kellogg, A Focus On Connection In New MBA Healthcare Pathway

Students in Kellogg School of Management’s new Healthcare Deep Dive pathway during the second immersion weekend in San Francisco. The program includes students from Kellogg’s fulltime, evening & weekend, executive, and one-year accelerated MBA programs. Courtesy photo

Just a few days after returning from the weekend immersion portion of a new healthcare pathway at the Kellogg School of Management, Christian Moreno had tangible examples of the value of the program’s new, innovative format.

“We had six additional LinkedIn requests from people that we would consider weapon-grade hires,” says Moreno, a partner and senior vice president at Lockton Dunning Benefits.

Christian Moreno, EMBA ’22

Moreno, an EMBA candidate, is one of about 80 students who participated in the first cohort of Kellogg School of Management’s new Healthcare at Kellogg (HCAK) Deep Dive Program. The format is designed to combine–in one classroom–rigorous academic discussion and case study with high-level practitioners in the industry. It also builds networking directly into the program, combining students from Kellogg’s different MBA programs and connecting them with Kellogg’s 4,000 alumni working in healthcare.

That’s how Moreno connected with full-time and evening & weekend MBA candidates with whom he’d normally have little direct contact. Those connections may prove invaluable to his healthcare benefits firm.

“We don’t spend a lot of marketing dollars (on recruitment), but when we see talent, we connect it with our senior leadership,” Moreno tells Poets&Quants. “From my perspective, these are people not only that I would not have otherwise met, but they are people who are automatically filtered” through Kellogg’s rigorous admissions criteria.

THE HEALTHCARE PATHWAY AT KELLOGG

Kellogg’s healthcare MBA pathway already combined the school’s signature management training with specialized healthcare courses. It is the longest-running healthcare business program in the country, which started after World War II, and has evolved along with the industry, says Professor of Strategy Craig Garthwaite, an economist and Kellogg’s director of healthcare. Rather than a program focusing on the hospital and healthcare service sectors, over the last several years it has been shifting its focus to the business side of the industry.

Craig Garthwaite, Kellogg’s director of healthcare

“The United States is not a national public health program. We are acknowledging the fact that, whatever people think, the U.S. healthcare market is dominated by private firms, and they need to create and capture value,” Garthwaite tells P&Q. “That requires taking the tools we teach in our regular strategy and finance classes, and all the things you need to run a business, and combining it with the unique nature of healthcare.”

For the school’s new Deep Dive format, a unique curricular differentiator is that it brings together students from four Kellogg MBA programs: full-time, one-year, evening & weekend, and executive MBA. Coursework is mostly delivered over the course of two intense, immersion weekends, with virtual content delivered in between.

This approach, Garthwaite says, allows the program to leverage three key Kellogg assets: (1) its leading healthcare course work, taught together by academics and practitioners, (2) students with different experiences and backgrounds across its MBA programs, and (3) the school’s 4,000 healthcare alumni.

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