Two Healthcare MBA students from the Simmons School of Management recently shared their experience with the school’s blog. Corinna McFarland and Johanna Georgics come from different backgrounds but decided to pursue the Simmons Healthcare MBA to further their careers in the health care field. McFarland was recently hired as the Decision Support Analyst in the Finance Department at Boston Children’s Hospital, while Georgics, who has a background in clinical nursing, now serves as the Senior Manager for the Clinical Quality Management team at athenahealth.
Both students contribute their new careers to the skills and knowledge that they learned through the Healthcare MBA program at Simmons. Georgics, who is also a Simmons Nursing School alumnus, hopes that her education can help to continue to support her career goal to have a significant impact to improve health care using technology. McFarland, who before taking the position with the Boston Children’s Hospital, worked for several years at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in development. She tells readers that the HCMBA coursework really prepared her for her new role that has more of a finance aspect to it than her previous job.
McFarland did not originally set out to complete her MBA to move in to a finance role. She had previously looked at MBA programs that brought together business, public health or health administration. The Simmons HCMBA was a perfect match for her. The program offered her the business skills that she needed with the health care lens that would also allow her to continue to work full time in health care. Her non-traditional finance role at the Children’s Hospital allows her to combine all of these things and apply what she learned in the program to her job directly.
Georgics also felt that the Healthcare MBA was a perfect combination of the healthcare field and the management field. She said that Strategic Thinking and Analytical Decision Making and Health Care Information Technology were her two favorite courses in the program. Both of the courses reminded her of her love of technology and its application to healthcare. The Strategic Thinking and Analytical Decision Making course helped her to move in to her new career. The class helped her to gain self-awareness about strategic thinking competencies, which led her to her current role that combines people management and strategic thinking.
Simmons will be holding a Healthcare MBA Information Session for prospective students on May 27. More information about the Healthcare MBA program at Simmons can be found at metromba.com.