For thoracic surgeon Ankit Bharat MD, innovation is often synonymous with survival. When no donor organs were available for a patient who needed a double lung transplant to survive, for example, he and his team developed a first-of-its-kind artificial lung system. The device kept the patient stable until transplantable organs became available two days later.
Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and executive director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute, has many achievements under his belt, including leading one of the nation’s top transplant programs and performing the country’s first double-lung transplant on a COVID-19 patient. Recently, he asked himself: How do you keep innovating after you’ve already transformed your field? His answer was to step outside of medicine — and enroll in the Executive MBA (EMBA) Program at Kellogg.
Bharat knew that advancing medicine further would require more than clinical expertise. Ultimately, he wanted to learn new ways to solve existing challenges.
“The problems I’m solving are often matters of life and death for patients,” says Bharat. “I wanted to have an innovation-based career and take care of tough, complex patients but also think about new ways of solving healthcare problems that don’t have established solutions.”
I’m mesmerized by every class, but simultaneously a little saddened because I wish I had learned this sooner. I could have done so much better in my day-to-day career
— Ankit Bharat MD
He started classes in January and says the EMBA Program is already changing how he approaches decision-making and leadership. The skills that he learns from both professors and fellow classmates — many of whom are industry leaders — are helping him implement change and scale innovation to save more lives.
“In order to mediate change, particularly if you have new solutions, presenting the data is not enough — there are many tactics and skills needed.
As doctors we are so used to looking at it with a fixed lens, and I think that becomes very inefficient,” he says. Recent lessons, including how to use data to make decisions in the face of uncertainty, left him with mixed feelings. “I’m mesmerized by every class, but simultaneously a little saddened because I wish I had learned this sooner. I could have done so much better in my day-to-day career,” he says.
Bharat is already incorporating business school lessons in his work. For example, he is contributing to the development of a patent focused on mitigating the uncertainty patients face when making medical decisions. Conceptually, the idea is straightforward: When a doctor presents multiple treatment options, how does the patient decide? The solution is a mathematical model designed to help patients evaluate those choices and make more informed decisions.
In addition, Bharat recently built a first-of-its-kind program at Northwestern Medicine to explore a cure for patients with Stage 4 cancers that have spread throughout both lungs and have resisted every available medical therapy. He pioneered a surgical technique to remove both lungs, meticulously decontaminate the chest cavity, and implant a pair of healthy donor organs. In a forthcoming paper, his investigative team reports that 100% of the patients who went through the surgery were still alive a year later — despite pre-surgery prognoses of just days left to live.
Attending business school has long been on Bharat’s radar. Several years ago, he participated in an executive education program for Northwestern Medicine doctors through Kellogg. The nine-month offering allowed him to think about the challenges he faced — be it leadership development, entrepreneurship or managing people — through a business lens.
“It made me realize that I’ve had reasonable success in the medical arena, and that if I could learn those skills on a deeper level and use the right thought process, it would further my expertise,” he says.
That experience planted the seed, but turning the idea into reality required finding a program to fit his demanding schedule. The every-other-weekend structure of the Kellogg Executive MBA Program meant Bharat wouldn’t need to put his medical career on hold. Bharat also needed to give himself permission to keep pushing forward.
“After 14 years of practicing, I felt like it was a good stage in my career to challenge myself by learning,” he says. “It started to feel right to go to business school and learn something new.”