Beginning in the fall of 2018, St. Thomas’ Opus College of Business will add a new Masters in Health Care Innovation, a one-year program that will allow more people to enter the booming health care industry in Minnesota.
The program will offer an opportunity for people with less health care experience to enter the industry and to provide a quicker, less time-consuming program than the current two-year-long Healthcare MBA.
“This, we hope, will provide an avenue for people who have less than five years of health care experience wanting to (advance in) healthcare,” said Kate DiAna, director of the Health Care MBA.
Another important reason for creating this program is to emphasize the importance of innovation in the current health care industry.
“Health care is being disrupted by innovation in a huge sense right across the country, and so the skills of innovation are becoming increasingly critical to get a job in health care,” said John McVea, director of strategy for the Health Care MBA at St. Thomas.
The fast growth of the sector in Minnesota was also a deciding factor in creating this program.
“It’s one of the largest sectors in Minnesota, we have one of the premier clusters of health care businesses in the world,” McVea said, “and it’s a sector that’s growing four times faster than any other sector within our economy.”
McVea said the health care industry is innovating so quickly that it will be virtually unrecognizable in the next 10 years. That’s why it is important for people to be part of the change.
“So at the current trajectory, something has to change, and the best prospect for that is innovation, learning to do more with less, learning to innovate in the way we’ve seen some of the fundamental changes in retail,” McVea said.
The program will focus on teaching three fundamental concepts: understanding the customer experience, understanding how innovation works, and being fiscally responsible.
“Health care is a big player in the Minnesota workforce, so being able to provide skills to people to bring to those organizations is really exciting,” DiAna said.
The program planning has been underway for the past two years with a lot of it coming in the past six months.
McVea said he expects two groups of people will be interested in this program: those in mid-level management positions in health care, and those who are more geared toward the business side of things, who might be skilled in marketing or operations.
“I’m most excited to give access to our curriculum to this new group of students,” McVea said. “There are a lot of people in healthcare who realize healthcare is going to be turned upside down, and they don’t want to be victims of that; they want to be people leading that change.”
Ignacio Garcia-Creighton can be reached at garc3913@stthomas.edu.