A Naveen Jindal School of Management team once again earned victory at the annual case study competition of the North Texas chapter of the American College of Healthcare of Executives. It was the fourth time in five years that a JSOM team has placed first. This year the winning team offered solutions to the struggles of a 290-bed hospital that was losing revenue to outpatient services and facing growing internal friction among its medical staff.
Awarded $3,000, the team placed ahead of The University of Texas at Arlington, the University of North Texas and LeTourneau University.
JSOM’s team members were MS in Healthcare Management majors Jason Fry and Mitaliben Maheshwari, Bradford Terry, an MBA student; and Andrew Lim, a dual MBA and MS in Healthcare Management student.
JSOM team captain Jason Fry says the foursome’s main solution for rising physician dissatisfaction, competition for outpatient services at the hospital and a threat to the hospital’s business model was a clinically integrated network — also known as a clinically integrated physician organization.
Team member Andrew Lim describes the arrangement as a “legal entity formed by physicians and a hospital with the intention of negotiating contracts…and sharing in the financial rewards of controlling costs while delivering high-quality care.”
The team believed, Lim says, that such a network could “realign the vision and the mission of the physicians and the hospital…while retaining the doctors’ autonomy and improving quality of care through better resource management and tightly coordinated care.”
The new organization could lead to opportunity for bonus sharing as well as referrals, and be a key driver to keeping better overall harmony, Fry says.
Dr. Britt Berrett, director of the BS in Healthcare Management program at JSOM, served as the group’s JSOM mentor.
An executive coach assigned to them as part of the competition, David Helfer, president of Texas Institute for Surgery and an ACHE Fellow, consistently raised questions the team had not considered, Fry says.
At the competition at the Joule Hotel in Dallas, “this group stood out when it came to thinking through the case study and being very thorough in their review,” says John Self, a contest judge and managing partner of JohnGSelf + Partners, Inc., an executive search firm with a strong focus on the medical field. “They were the most detailed [competitors], and you could tell the thought they had given it.”
Besides money, a trophy and a one-year dues-paid membership to ACHE, Lim says, “winning this case study also boosts our self-confidence when conversing with senior healthcare executives and shows them that we are dedicated in our studies and [commitment to a] a career in the healthcare management industry.”
