ANDREW CHOI, HEALTHCARE MBA

Haven't written it a while since graduation, but this came across my email so I thought I would pass it along. Check it out:

Online Panel Discussion on Healthcare-Focused MBA, July 17, 2010

As the world economy continues to regain its footing, the emergence of a healthcare industry that is more globalized than ever before is obvious. The globalization has been driven by many factors, chief among them the ease of communication and commerce across far-flung nations, a highly mobile and affluent workforce, the transition of BRIC nations to western-style lifestyle diseases, and the increase in access to advanced therapies on a broader geographical scale. This globalization of healthcare industry has thrown up a truly unique set of opportunities and challenges, a fact not missed by the industry and academia alike. Over the last decade, the leading business schools have developed a comprehensive set of courses and programs to train the next-generation leaders of the healthcare industry. But are we ready? Who must we include among these future leaders - public health policy experts, engineers, biologists, doctors? Who among the MBA aspirants should consider getting an MBA focused on healthcare?

Come, hear the current and/or past officers of the Healthcare Clubs at the leading business schools such as Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Kellogg, Haas, and Fuqua discuss their respective MBA programs. These panelists will address via an online conference audience questions ranging from the specifics of courses offered and career opportunities for a "Healthcare MBA" to the ethical responsibilities of a newly minted MBA towards the clinical needs of the less-affluent parts of the world.

Panelists for the event include:

* Harvard Business School: Karen Sein, Co-President, Healthcare Club
* Stanford Graduate School of Business: Dr. Vandana Jain, Co-President, Healthcare Club
* The Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania: Lauren DiCola, President, Healthcare Club
* Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University: Ian Farrington, Co-President, Healthcare Club
* Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley: Heather Stamper, Co-President, Healthcare Association
* Fuqua School of Business, Duke University: Sarah Bruss, Chair of Admissions, Healthcare Club
* Moderated by:: Dr. Anurag Mairal, Ph.D., CEO, Gurome and Associate Director, Stanford Biodesign, Stanford University

Register here: Link
Healthcare MBA Online

The Best of Blogging 2009-2010 results are in and my blog has been selected as #9 by the Clear Admit staff, nominated bloggers, and judges! Even though I dropped a spot from last year I am very honored to be selected as one of the top 10 MBA bloggers in the country. I hope I was able to provide some insight over the past two years to my MBA experience and the USC Marshall School of Business. Congrats to all the BoB winners - definitely check out all the blogs below:

Top Student Bloggers
1. Orlando http://www.kelloggmbaclassof2011.com/
2. DG http://blog.dinogane.com/
3. July Dream http://julydream.blogspot.com/
4. Palo Alto For Awhile http://paloaltoforawhile.blogspot.com/
5. Gabrielle http://myharvardmba2010.blogspot.com/
6. Military to Business http://militarytobusiness.blogspot.com/
7. Windsor http://www.bschoolvoyage.com/
8. Mechanigal http://mechanigal.blogspot.com/
9. Andrew Choi http://www.andrewmchoi.com/
10. Choc Heaven http://dreamer-choc.blogspot.com/

Top Applicant Bloggers
1. Dream Chaser http://dreamchasermbajourney.blogspot.com/
2. Hari http://hariformba.blogspot.com/
3. Madalogue http://mad-bubbles.blogspot.com/
4. Rocky http://yoadrian.wordpress.com/
5. Beautiful Mind http://abeautifulmind1.wordpress.com/
6. XLick http://xlick.blogspot.com/
7. Steve http://sgargiulo.wordpress.com/
8. The Dreamer http://mymaidenjourney.blogspot.com/
9. Braveheart http://iamalittlemorethanuseless.blogspot.com/
10. Biz Wiz http://bizwiz-blog.blogspot.com/

Interesting food for thought on corporations' involvement in federal policy -

Why is it you can buy a double cheeseburger at McDonalds for 99 cents and you can’t even get a head of broccoli for 99 cents? We’ve skewed our food system to the bad calories and it’s not an accident. The reason those calories are cheaper are because those are the ones we are heavily subsidizing. This is directly tied to the kind of agriculture that we are practicing and the farm policies we have. All those snack food calories are the ones that come from the commodity crops, from the wheat, from the corn and from the soybeans. By making those calories really cheap, that is the reason why the biggest predictor of obesity is income level. Michael Pollan via soupsoup

I am very excited to learn that I have been nominated by Clear Admit for a Best of Blogging award for the 2nd year in a row!

According to Clear Admit, the criteria for selection is two-fold: "First, we want to recognize and celebrate the best MBA applicant and student blogs covering the 2009-10 admissions cycle/academic year. Equally important is Clear Admit’s commitment to identifying valuable sources of information for the next round of MBA applicants and students."

Even though I have blogged a lot less this year about MBA life, I am honored and excited about the nominatation. I wish I would have written a lot more about 2nd year because it has definitely been a roller coaster of a year. The schedule and intensity this year was nothing compared to 1st year, but the combination of academic, community, career and stress mixed in with a huge dose of libation and partying networking made it one of the most interesting years of my life. It's pretty crazy I will be graduating in less 30 days!

Thanks to all of you who continue to visit my site and Clear Admit for the nomination. Representing USC Marshall - Fight On!

Maja Matarić's, a professor of computer science at USC and Director for the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (CRES), research is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people, especially those with special needs. She has begun working with stroke and Alzheimer’s patients and autistic children, searching for a way to make machines that can engage directly with them, encouraging both physical and cognitive rehabilitation.

This is a very fascinating read -

Robots That Care by Jerome Groopman Here's an excerpt: A woman I will call Mary, a schoolteacher in Los Angeles, suffered a stroke in 2001, when she was forty-six. She spent six months working with a physical therapist at the U.S.C. Medical Center to regain strength in her weakened right arm and leg, before taking part in Matarić’s study. I watched a videotape of her session with Matarić. Mary, who was dressed in a white blouse and dark slacks, shuffled slowly to a desk stacked with magazines. There was a shelf nearby, set above shoulder level. She looked at the robot, several feet away, and waved to it. “Come over here,” she said warmly. The robot, which was three feet high and looked a little like R2-D2, in “Star Wars,” scooted close to her and stopped. “Very good,” Mary said. Set on a mobile base with rotary wheels, the robot could turn in any direction and move around the room, guided by sonar. It tracked Mary’s movement with a scanning laser range finder; a pan-tilt-zoom camera allowed it to look at Mary, turn away, or shake its head. A speaker, embedded in the robot’s side, produced prerecorded speech and sound effects. Glancing at the robot, Mary lifted a magazine from the top of the pile and guided it into a rack on top of the shelf. As soon as the magazine was in place, the robot emitted a beep. During the next few minutes, Mary moved each magazine, one by one, to the rack. Gradually, she increased her pace, and the beeps from the robot came faster. Mary began to laugh. She turned and looked squarely at the robot. With a sly smile, she moved her weak arm toward the remaining magazines on the desk and mimed putting one into the rack. She then stuck her tongue out at the machine. Matarić said, “She is cheating. She is totally thrilled, because she thinks she cheated the robot.” The robot, though, was on to the game. A reflective white band that Mary wore on her leg allowed the robot to follow her movements. A thin motion sensor attached to her sleeve transmitted Mary’s gestures to the robot, so that it knew almost instantly whether she was raising her arm and in what motion. A sensor in the rack signalled the robot when a magazine was properly placed, and the robot communicated with Mary only when she performed the task correctly. Although the task lasted about an hour, the novelty of the interaction did not seem to wane. In a debriefing after the study, Mary said, “When I’m at home, my husband is useless. He just says, ‘Do it.’ I much prefer the robot to my husband.”

Visit the USC Robotics Open House on 4/15/2010 -

I haven't posted an entry in a while - with a full course load, a healthcare field project at the USC University Hospital assessing operation efficiencies in surgical teams, and a spring internship at Second Sight there just haven't been time for much else. Thank goodness for spring break!

I love working for start-ups especially with a company creating such an amazing medical device that restores sight to the blind. I actually saw Dr. Mark Humayun at the #TEDxUSC conference last year talk about developing the artificial retina that would provide sight - the detection of light - to people who have gone blind from degenerative eye diseases like macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

This year through my USC network and the Alfred Mann Institute, I realized there is an actual company working on this breakthrough technology so I jumped on the opportunity to see how I can learn more. You can read about how the device works here - How does a "bionic eye" allow blind people to see?

We so often take sight for granted it's fascinating to hear stories of the patient rediscovery process diving into the nuances of the complex relationship between presence and absence, and see the experiments patients conduct to differentiate between imagining, remembering and actually seeing.

Check out the video below - Dr. Humayun at TEDxUSC last year:

I just realized through emails from fans of my blog and causal conversations with friends that a lot of MBAs don't necessarily understand the power of personal branding and social media. So I started to consolidate everything I have learned about blogging, social media, relationship building and job searching over the past 2 years into a presentation especially for MBAs about Building a Powerful Personal Brand and Using Social Media to Find Your Next Job -



More to come...

Jamie Heywood, co-founder of Patientslikeme.com talked about his brother and the inspiration behind one of the biggest patient-driven community sites at TEDMED09.

Just got back from the Haas Business of Health Care Conference Saturday - great event! Kudos to the co-chairs of the healthcare conference and the conference committee of the Haas Healthcare Association for putting together excellent panels and keynote speakers. It had a little something for everybody whether you were interested in biotech, pharma, device, diagnostics, hospital, or payer.

I didn't actually know what to expect, but the conference was dubbed as the 'largest MBA healthcare conference on the West Coast' so why not? It was quite a trek just getting up to Berkeley. I went into Consultant mode - took the earliest flight (6:30am) on Virgin America, rode the BART for an hour, and braved the cold rainy hike up to the Haas school. Why is Berkeley so hilly anyway?

By the time I got there I already missed the first keynote on healthcare reform. The first breakout session was very interesting - Realizing Comparative Effectiveness Research's (CER) Potential in the United States: Promoting Value while Encouraging Innovation. Having done work with the Health Economics team at GE Healthcare this summer, I understand the implication of placing a value on specific treatments. In some cases it is going to be decided that a treatment isn't worth the cost and potentially lead to restrictions on specific treatments. And when quote unquote death panel gets politicized and distorts the truth to the public this becomes a very sensitivity topic. The panel did a great job diving into the nuances of CER in finding the best therapeutic outcome for the patients. While I assumed CER was used to maintain cost in the system the panelists all agreed that CER had little to do with driving down costs and more focused on informed decision making based on clinical data. So while CER might not be driving down our spiraling healthcare costs, it's good to see how CER can help patients and physicians make better decisions by providing information on what therapies work best. Now the $286 million dollar question is how much is that worth?

The other panels all provided very thought-provoking perspectives. Jason Hwang from Innosight Institute who worked with Clayton Christensen on The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care dove into how we can potentially implement a disruptive solution for our broken healthcare system. He drew parallels to the computing industry and how we were able to take a centralized product, mainframes, and through disruptions created a decentralized solution that was more affordable and accessible to the consumers. By breaking down the current healthcare model into 3 specific tracks - fee for services, fee for outcome, and fee for membership - patients, physicians, hospitals, and healthcare providers can all start to dissect and disrupt the current model. But since each of them cannot make the changes on their own, Jason suggested an integrated healthcare provider like Kaiser might be the best possible candidate to lead the change. Not easy, but a well laid out plan, which is a good start.

After the event, there was a networking reception for some good drinks and mingling. There were a lot of companies represented at the reception and the Haas alums and students were very welcoming and hospitable to a fellow MBA from USC Marshall (I made sure I didn't talk about football).

Overall, very impressed and highly recommended next year for those in the healthcare industry. Well worth the trip!

When I was an undergrad I always thought networking was an awkward attempt at socializing and getting something you need from someone. It felt icky, sleazy, and a bit cheap. I thought I would just never engage in those tactics and I would never need to. The truth was I just wasn't very good at it and my mindset about networking was all wrong.

Actual relationships with people are a big key to success, and it’s also true that most people simply aren’t very good at quickly building mutually beneficial relationships with others.

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi is a guide to networking, or relationship building, in a mutually beneficial way that avoids the cold, sleazy tactics of randomly chatting people up and grabbing their business cards. It provides usable advice and action items you can use to build relationships quickly and find ways to make other people more successful in their endeavor. It also calls for you to take inventory of who you are and what you have to offer.

As an MBA and especially in this economy, networking is a must for you to find your dream job or start your business. The more meaningful connections you have, the more you will find opportunities start coming to you.

Keith Ferrazzi also has a new book out, Who's Got Your Back, that will be next on my books to read. You can also follow Keith thru:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Personal Blog

"It's ultimately about the people. The question is 'Are you leading in this world, walking around in this world inviting those people in?' That's what networking is all about." - Keith Ferrazzi