The Harvard Business School engaged Scriplogix to interview 58 CEOs they identified from around the world as the most innovative leaders in health care. We asked the CEOs to outline the biggest challenges facing their sector in the coming decade. We also sought their views on the skills needed to meet these challenges and the ways in which academia could foster them.

A Call to Action

The CEO interviews reflected significant dissatisfaction with the skills of academically prepared candidates from diverse types of health care management programs. A few highlights:

• Innovative processes are more important than innovative products.
• The current academic focus on isolated training in finance, ethics, medicine, etc., is less helpful than a holistic curriculum that mirrors real-life situations.
• Skills in change management, communication, and team building are essential for innovation.
• Breaking down the silos separating the schools that offer expertise in differing aspects of health care management is crucial for collaboration.
• A broad-based knowledge of how healthcare works—including financing, organizational structures, technology, and public policy—and how to apply that knowledge are prerequisites for evaluating and implementing innovations.
• Management education helps with business problems; health care policy, medical, and scientific education does not focus on managerial issues. Uniting these two camps with shared purpose and common language is a critical step for creating significant change in future health care systems.
• Fieldwork and structured mentorships offer lessons the classroom cannot.

We utilized a proprietary Word Cloud data visualization tool to transform hours of unstructured text from the CEO interviews into actionable, quantitative data. Here is a look at some of the key words CEOs used during these interviews.

To read highlighted sections of the CEO interviews and test our word cloud tool that aggregrates insights from each interview using key words and tags, please click here.

A PDF verssion of the Harvard White Paper titled ”21st-Century Health Care Management Education: Confronting Challenges for Innovation with a Modern Curriculum” based on feedback from the CEO interviews can be downloaded here.

CEOs of FIRMS INTERVIEWED, BY SECTOR & LOCATION

The selection of executives to be interviewed was driven by three goals: first, to represent all the sectors with a stake in health care, including biotech, delivery, diagnostics, health IT, insurance, medical devices, governments, and NGOs or foundations; second, to focus on innovative firms and large employers of the graduates of these programs; and last, to provide a global perspective.