Last month, five leading U.S. business schools joined together to form the Business School Alliance for Healthcare Management (BSAHCM), an organization focused on fostering management education in the healthcare sector as part of an effort to improve healthcare overall.
Charter members of BSAHCM include Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Harvard Business School, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
“The Alliance aims to help the public understand the capacity of our institutions to bring about solutions to many of the management and leadership issues arising in the health sector on a global basis,” Fuqua’s Health Sector Management Director Kevin Schulman said in a statement announcing the organization’s establishment. To be successful, management education must help create leaders who design healthcare solutions built around business fundamentals, he continued.
Fuqua’s Schulman was appointed an initial member of the BSAHCM Board of Directors at the alliance’s inaugural meeting. Other initial board members, each nominated and approved for two-year terms, include David Dranove, Kellogg; Lawton R. Burns, Wharton; Richard Hamermesh, Harvard; and Kristiana Raube, Haas.
Alliance institutions are approaching their work with a sense of urgency, according to Schulman. “The recent healthcare reform legislation in the US largely revolved around the critical issue of access to care for the uninsured,” he said. “But other crises loom even larger for most Americans: the chronic over-utilization of tests and specialist services; misaligned incentives; staggeringly high costs; and variable or poor quality of care,” he noted.
Other BSAHCM member schools so far include Yale University, Arizona State University, Vanderbilt University, Boston University and the University of Colorado at Denver. Membership in the Alliance is open to healthcare management programs at top business schools that have shown a commitment to research, teaching and service in the health sector.
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