By Catalina Cortes
The University of Miami is approaching its centennial in 2025, celebrating 100 years of academic excellence and community engagement. It is well known that our mascot is the Hurricane due to the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 that caused extensive destruction of the campus and necessitated resiliency and ingenuity for classes to continue. Resiliency and adaptability continue to serve us well, as the health care system experiences disruption from artificial intelligence, the pandemic, movement towards value-based care, and other challenges. The business school-based curricula we offer in our Health Executive Master of Business Administration (HEMBA) (which celebrates its 45th anniversary this year!), Master of Health Administration (MHA), MD/MBA, and undergraduate Health Management and Policy (HMP) programs provide our students and alumni with essential skills necessary to transform organizations while navigating disruption.
Dr. Karoline Mortensen
The Miami Herbert Business School has become the third business school in the nation to earn “triple crown status” with accreditation from the three most prestigious business school accreditation organizations. Triple crown status is achieved by less than 1% of the world’s business schools. This accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), and the Association of MBAs (AMBA) recognizes the high standards of achievement at Miam Herbert. In addition, our health care programs are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME). The department continues to actively engage with the Business School Alliance for Health Management (BAHM), an elite, collaborative group of business school-based health management programs offering national and global resources.
Our Center for Health Care Management and Policy hosted its 12th annual conference, “The Business of Health Care: Managing Through Uncertainty.” Executives from major professional organizations, including America’s Health Insurance Plans, American Hospital Association, PhRMA, Healthcare Financial Management Association, Medical Group Management Association, National Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association, joined for a keynote panel discussion on strategies for navigating the uncertainty we face in health care in a post-pandemic world. The conference offers our students, community, alumni, and supporters unparalleled access to industry experts who are actively shaping the landscape of the healthcare sector.
The students, alumni, and faculty in the University of Miami Department of Health Management and Policy continue to achieve success. Both our graduate and undergraduate teams placed first in the South Florida Chapter of the American College of Health Executives (ACHE) case competition, and we will serve as host for the South Florida ACHE chapter career fair and networking event this fall. Our graduate and undergraduate students partook in internship experiences that span over fifteen health systems and organizations, located across three states and two countries. From a faculty standpoint, the department welcomed Dr. Danielle Ellerbe as the new academic director of the MHA program. Dr. Steven Ullmann continues to serve as the academic director of the HEMBA and MD/MBA programs. Dr. Emma Dean presented her research at the International Health Economics Association conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Dr. French continues to serve as Department Chair, and Dr. Karoline Mortensen is serving as Associate Dean of Business Programs. Dr. Mortensen and Dr. French are hosting the Southeastern Health Economics Study Group (SHESG) this fall on the UM campus. Our faculty continue to publish research and play editorial roles in high-impact journals, serve the community, and hold leadership positions in the department, school, and university.
Dr. Danielle Ellerbe
Our courses continue to offer increasing interdisciplinary, experiential learning opportunities. Our HEMBA public health policy class was co-taught in spring 2023 by two former United States Health and Human Services Secretaries (Donna Shalala and Alex Azar)- perhaps the first time in history for such a collaboration, and they will co-teach again in spring 2024. Our new MHA director brought her experience as a nurse practitioner and the patient perspective to the business classroom in the MHA health and medical decision-making class. The department hosted a monthly distinguished speaker series open to students and faculty throughout the academic year, hosting researchers from across the nation to impart the latest findings from the HMP field. Dr. Mortensen brought in leaders from across South Florida’s health systems to impart experience and wisdom from their own paths to her professional skills class. The department welcomed another astute practitioner, the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Baptist Health system, in addition to the Chief Marketing Officer at Jackson Health who also teaches in our programs, to bring her expertise from the field to the classroom. The MHA, HEMBA, and MD/MBA graduate programs have attracted increasing numbers of students who desire to augment their future clinical practice as advanced practice providers and medical doctors with a degree in the business of healthcare. Our HMP department advisory board, made up of representative leaders from distinguished local and national health care organizations and companies, continue to provide valuable insight that grounds and fortifies our programs’ curriculum in the current state of health affairs.
In this era of artificial intelligence and disruption, the mission of the Miami Herbert Business School, to develop transformative scholarship and principled leaders for business and society, resonates more than ever and our commitment to advance and shape healthcare for a better tomorrow is unwavering.
For more information, visit www.bus.miami.edu.
