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MBA/MPH Students Reach Semifinals in Case Competition.

March 8, 2019
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Three students in the School of Public Health’s dual-degree Management and Public Health (MBA/MPH) program reached the semifinal round of a Health Administration Case Competition, held February 28 and March 1 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Susannah Rudel, Tricia Hartley, and Claire Doherty spent almost a month preparing for the competition, in which they were tasked with developing a strategic plan for the long-term growth of a Georgia-based community hospital. After studying the hospital’s financial history, operational model, and a community wellness report, the students prepared a 20-minute presentation of their recommendations to pitch to judges who serve in senior health administration positions. The team advanced to the semifinals based on criteria such as feasibility, creativity, and quality of the required deliverables.

The annual competition is sponsored by the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System and draws students enrolled in graduate programs in health administration from across the nation.

“The competition was a really good learning experience that challenged me to think in different ways,” says Doherty.

All three students are studying chronic and non-communicable diseases at SPH; they agree their combined education of management and public health provided a valuable advantage over their competitors studying health administration.

“This case touched on so many different subjects and public health concepts that we’ve studied in our courses,” Rudel says. “The challenges they presented us with are very real challenges that a lot of hospitals face, and we spent a lot of time doing research and coming up with suggestions on they could improve their strategy for growth.”

Hartley concurs, saying the time the team spent analyzing the contents of the case was the most difficult part of the process.

“We put an enormous amount of time into analyzing the data and putting together our content, but I am very proud of our finished product,” she says. “I enjoyed how much our team learned in such a short amount of time.”

The dual-degree MBA/MPH program is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year offers an integrated curriculum at SPH and Questrom School of Business that supplies students with the core disciplines of public health as well as health policy and planning, effective management, and financial analysis for health care. The accelerated, two-year program celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

Doherty, Rudel, and Hartley each plan to work in health administration after they graduate this May.

“These students have grown tremendously over the past month,” says Chris Louis, program director of the Healthcare Management certificate and codirector of the MBA/MPH program with Ned Rimer at Questrom. “Developing a creative plan, and then learning to tell the story about how to solve the problem, was even more important than presenting in front of the judges. We’re truly appreciative of how serious the students took the competition.”

—Jillian McKoy

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