Fellowship provides new opportunities for students redesigning healthcare ecosystems

Inaugural fellows will explore how to design business models that move beyond diagnosing misaligned incentives to deliver better outcomes.
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Kellogg
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The Kellogg School of Management’s Global Hub building stands prominently along the water, its modern glass facade reflecting the clear blue sky. The striking architecture is framed by leafy tree branches, highlighting the serene and picturesque campus setting.

By Craig Garthwaite and Paul Campbell ’00 MBA
Faculty Director of Healthcare at Kellogg and Executive Director of HCAK

The U.S. healthcare system continues to struggle with fragmentation, inequity and the slow pace of change. These challenges, however, should not be surprising. They are the predictable result of a set of misaligned incentives, competing stakeholder priorities and deeply entrenched organizational structures. For today’s leaders, the central question is how to redesign incentives and organizations to produce sustainable, outcome-driven improvement.

At Kellogg, we view these challenges as fundamentally business problems. This guides how we construct our curriculum to focus not just on particular verticals but instead on the entire ecosystem. All Kellogg students build deep functional expertise in strategy, finance, operations, analytics and organizational change; skills essential to reforming legacy institutions and building new ventures capable of scaling.

Building on this foundation, the school’s healthcare program examines which business and operating models support value-based, patient-centered care; how capital, data, policy and regulation shape strategic choices; and how organizations can be designed to coordinate care across historically siloed settings. Success in healthcare requires not only excellence in core business disciplines, but also a deep understanding of the industry’s unique structure and constraints.

A combination of fiscal pressures and patient demand is pushing the healthcare industry into a period of consequential change. New reimbursement models, digital platforms and policy shifts are reshaping how care is financed and delivered. At the same time, providers face growing financial risk from alternative payment models, labor shortages, rising utilization and the transformative but uncertain impact of AI.

The future of healthcare

As a result, today’s healthcare leaders are no longer simply managing small firms focused on a single take. Instead, they are designing complex systems, aligning incentives across the value chain and orchestrating partnerships among payers, providers, technology firms and public agencies. Despite the emergence of promising models, many organizations struggle to create and capture value. A key reason is that current and aspiring executives often lack integrated business, industry and systems-level training. The school’s goal is to prepare leaders who can transform healthcare by launching new enterprises or by reforming established organizations to deliver higher-quality, more equitable care.

One of the school’s newest initiatives advancing this mission is the Healthcare Ecosystem Leaders (HEL) Fellowship. Designed for students committed to leading healthcare services organizations, the fellowship combines structured mentoring, alumni engagement, targeted coursework and thought leadership with guest lecturers. Together, these experiences form a capstone that equips 20 fellows with the skills, mindset and ecosystem-level perspective needed to address the industry’s most pressing challenges.

Fellows will engage with leading practitioners and Kellogg alumni, including Parth Mehrotra ’06 MBA CEO of Privia Health; Martha Wofford ’01 MBA, president and CEO of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island; and Don Calcagno ’02 MBA, former chief population health officer of Advocate Health.

Healthcare Ecosystem Leaders Fellowship

The fellowship includes two required courses. Value Creation and Capture in an Evolving Healthcare Services Market, taught by Andrew Hayek, co-founder and CEO of Triple Aim Partners, examines emerging payment and operating models, including FFS, capitation and hybrids and the roles of culture, talent, technology and AI. Scaling Innovation in Healthcare, taught by Mike Pykosz, co-founder of Oak Street Health, focuses on identifying opportunities, designing scalable models, and leveraging partnerships, with particular attention to AI.  Developed in partnership with Kellogg faculty, these two courses help students understand how ecosystem players fit together and how to design business models that move beyond diagnosing misaligned incentives to deliver better outcomes.

Our objective is to educate leaders who are redesigning healthcare ecosystems and rewriting the value chain. Reform will not occur overnight, but as Rüdiger Dornbusch observed, “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could.”

The funding for this new programming will come from several streams including a generous gift from Parth Mehrotra ’06 MBA. Welcome to all the new HEL fellows:

  • Kaiya Adam
  • Nabil Alam
  • Mackenzie Anderson
  • Lolly Buenaventura
  • Robin Gaines
  • Justin Grady
  • Charlotte Grimm
  • Haley Hammond
  • Rishab Jain
  • Yuyun Liang
  • Geralyn Lam
  • Charlotte Matthews
  • Joe Moeller
  • Samantha Shuflin
  • John Syme
  • Sonia Salunke
  • Ryan Walsh
  • Holden Ward
  • Drew Weinstein
  • Nathan Zanig

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