The graduates are employed in various sectors of the health care industry and average 23 years of previous work experience, said program director Katy Milligan '90 Tu'07. The class included six students who received their undergraduate degrees from Dartmouth and one who graduated from the Geisel School of Medicine, creating an "all-in-the-family" feeling for the program's first group of graduates, she said.
The core curriculum consisted of 14 courses taught online by faculty from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and the Tuck School of Business to provide students with instruction from medical and financial perspectives.
"The business school people had such a financial view of things, and the medical people were like, We have to do what's right," so you had a liberal and a conservative," Michael Lachenmayer GR'13 said. "They didn't always agree and we didn't always agree with them, but the discussions made it a lot richer."
Milligan said the program's online component, an example of asynchronous learning, expanded education beyond conventional face-to-face learning models and allowed students to participate in the program without putting their careers on hold.
"Our students are mid-career executive," Milligan said. "We have chief financial officers, chief medical officers, people in positions of great responsibility who are unable to step away from their day jobs to complete an 18-month residential program, so the online component is absolutely critical."
The program made it possible for health care professionals from other countries to participate in the program, introducing a variety of perspectives on health care systems, Barbara Barnett GR'13 said.
The program is designed to build the health care delivery field, admissions director George Newcomb Tu'02 said.
"There are many good regional programs, but to be able to share experiences, opportunities and solutions from everywhere from Rwanda to Singapore to China, Norway, Sweden, France, India and South America," Newcomb said, adding that the U.S. can learn from other countries that have developed health care systems using fewer resources.
Although the program required 15 hours of coursework each week, students were still able to spend time with their families.
"I'm married with two kids and have a full time job, so the hardest part of this was definitely just finding the time," Lachenmayer said. "They designed the program to make it easier and make it possible. There was no way I could've done it otherwise."
Features such as Adobe Connect, which allowed students to view live lectures, made the program easy to use and more enjoyable than reading articles or browsing the web, Lachenmayer said.
"What our students told us was that even though they were nervous ahead of time about how effective the technology would be, after the first couple of weeks, it almost melted away so that it wasn't even something they thought about," Milligan said.
Students were given a week's break between classes and days off that mirrored school holidays to accommodate their professional and personal lives.
The program also included a residential component, during which students stayed at the College to collaborate on group projects. Students completed leadership and "action learning" courses that apply course skills to real-life problems. Teams designed solutions and provided the class with regular updates on their progress.
Students should be able to envision and design organizational responses in a changing health care environment, Newcomb said. Although students entered the program with backgrounds in various disciplines related to health care delivery, they have a common goal to improve its quality and access.
"At the root of things, it's amazing to see that if you look across health care systems, nations and states, we all have the same common set of challenges," Newcomb said.
The network of health care professionals in all sectors of the industry, as well as around the world, is a major asset, Barnett said.
"Even though the program was only 18 months, we've all developed a very strong bond," she said. "I consider them good friends and colleagues and wouldn't hesitate to pick up the phone and call them. That feature alone the networking and the group they exposed me to, so that I now have connections in almost every aspect of health care is really incredible."
The recent graduates are currently planning next year's class reunion and symposium.
"Creating that alumni affiliation, creating the right relationships, creating people who are committed to staying connected and helping us build that field is absolutely essential to this effort," Newcomb said. Barnett said she joined the program because she believes that the act of practicing medicine alone is not enough to understand health care systems.
"In medical school, I learned how to treat illness and now work for a hospital and am very good at treating illnesses patients have, but I was never really trained to promote wellness and that's really what we should be doing," she said. "I had been focusing more on individual patients than on patient populations."
Dartmouth's interest in developing leaders in the field may encourage other institutions to do the same, Milligan said. Brown University will launch its two-year Executive Master of Healthcare Leadership program in August.
As word of Dartmouth's program spreads, its applicant pool has been expanding, Milligan said. Class size, however, will remain limited to 50 students.
"What we do in the master's program is like what Dartmouth does for the undergraduates," she said. "It's a very intimate experience and part of what makes it so good is the small class size to give students the opportunity to connect with each other and the faculty in a very personal way."
Though class size will not increase in the foreseeable future, it is possible that multiple classes can be launched at once if the program continues to grow, Newcomb said.
The program's third class, which will graduate in 2015, begins its studies in July.
