Johnson Healthcare Club 2nd year members met with 1st year members to facilitate conversations on their internship experiences and advice for the process. 2nd year students interned in consulting, marketing, clinical trials, venture capital, and strategy.
Congrats to the class of 2021! We enjoyed hearing about your favorite graduate school experiences and words of wisdom during our last networking event of the semester.
The Sloan Program in Healthcare Administration’s Healthcare Students Association held their inaugural national case competition in partnership with Henry Ford Health system, co-sponsored by the Johnson Healthcare Club. This virtual one-day case competition allowed teams to work and present solutions to a real-world case in Henry Ford Health System's occupational health division.
Congrats to Johnson Healthcare Club members- Harley Keh MBA/MHA ‘21, Rodney Cruzan MHA/MILR ‘21, Habib Sabbagh MHA ‘21, and Christian Tadje MHA ‘21 on winning 1st place out of 36 national teams!
Congrats to Harley Keh MBA/MHA ‘21, Pragati Chaudhary MHA ‘21, Karan Rai MBA/MHA ‘21, and Leanne Werbeck MBA ‘21 on winning 1st place out of 54 teams in Cleveland Clinic’s 8th Annual Case Competition! Go Big Red!
Johnson Healthcare Club members recently participated in a virtual networking event where they were able to engage with healthcare peers across the MBA, MHA, MPH, PhD, and EMBA/MS programs. Students enjoyed discussing their previous experiences, career interests, and areas of healthcare innovation they were following. We look forward to the next networking event!
Name/Hometown: Nikita Shrinath / Boston, MA
What you did and where you were before business school?:
Population Health Coordinator at Atrius Health (i.e. worked in clinical operations and population health for an independent medical group in the Boston area)
Where your internship was (city before it went virtual)?
CVS Health (Woonsocket, RI)
What industries you recruited for?
Healthcare (general management and consulting)
Internship experience summary?
Worked in Network Operations within the Retail Operations Innovation group, worked on a project to design a strategic roadmap to improve the prior authorization process in Retail Pharmacy
Most important thing you learned this summer?
How much I didn’t know about certain parts of the industry! I learned more about retail pharmacies, the PA process, product development, and claims billing, among many other things, than I ever anticipated.
What helped you most to prepare for internship?
Management Cases actually helped me a lot during my internship. The exercise of building nice decks and being ready to present at any time was good preparation for my summer experience.
What was one thing you wish you did to prepare for the internship?
Because I came in without pharmacy experience, background, or knowledge, I wish I had done more personal background research into the area.
Biggest piece of advice during the recruiting process?
You are in the driver’s seat—make sure you are being proactive and engaging with the companies you are interested in.
Name/Hometown: Lauren E. Gergel - Boston, MA
What did you do before business school?
Before I came to Johnson I was a scientist in the biopharmaceutical industry. I loved my job, and I was able to help push treatments for cancers and rare diseases towards FDA approval. Healthcare is my passion, but I wanted to step out of the lab and learn more about the business side of science. Cornell was the perfect place to make this transition. I wanted to be part of a collaborative, supportive community where I could make a lasting impact.
Where was your internship?
My internship was 6 weeks and virtual, but I was able to fully participate from my home. It was a great way to learn how to work both in a new fast-paced environment and with a remote team. My company made it very easy to interact with other interns and practitioners, and I appreciated the extra efforts that they made for us to get to know each other.
What industries did you recruit for?
I recruited for consulting, marketing, and general management. Each club: Consulting Club, Marketing Association, and Executive Management Association taught me unique lessons that were applicable for recruiting for all the others. The thread that tied them all together was healthcare, and having that industry focus helped me focus my efforts.
What was your internship experience?
This summer I was a Senior Associate Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers in their Health Industry Advisory, Pharmaceutical Life Sciences, R&D Operations group. I was able to work on a great project involving machine learning. My role was to contribute to organizational change management and future business planning, and I learned so much. I felt that my work, time, and contributions were really valued. It gave me good insight into what my future career could look like, and I’m looking forward to returning there next year.
What is the most important thing you learned this summer?
I learned to mock up ideas early and get fast feedback. In my second week on the job I spent a lot of time working on one deliverable, making sure it was perfect. When I turned it in it was torn apart. I had misinterpreted the ask and took up all of the time that I could have used to get feedback with perfecting something that wasn’t needed. From then on, I learned how to work in an agile, iterative way.
What helped you most to prepare for internship?
The best thing that I did was to take time to get excited and positive. Starting an internship that you’ve worked so hard for can be intimidating, so it was important to get in a great mindset.
What was one thing you wish you did to prepare for the internship?
I could have spent more time researching my industry, understanding trends, and reading thought pieces from my company. This would have helped with my fluency in certain high-level conversations.
What is your biggest piece of advice for the recruiting process?
Cast a wide net but focus on companies that are a great fit. For me it was absolutely worthwhile to explore different avenues, but finding companies that were at the intersection of my interests and strengths helped me focus my efforts and stay on track. Use every touchpoint to see if they’re right for you: your goals, life, and happiness.
Join us today for a great discussion on how COVID-19 has affected the biotech and pharmaceutical industries featuring alumni from banking, consulting, general management, and healthcare. Register at https://bit.ly/Healthcare0522
Today I’d like to talk about technology and healthcare. Specifically, AI and healthcare. And by ‘AI’, I mean ‘Artificial Intelligence’. And by ‘Artificial Intelligence’, I really mean ‘Machine Learning’ or ML.
First, we should clear up any confusion between ‘AI’ and ‘ML’. I spent nearly 4 years selling IBM’s AI product portfolio to a variety of customers eager to solve their business problems with the magic of AI. 90% of the time, I spent my first meeting with a customer explaining what AI actually was and debunking any misleading marketing myths about AI.
#1 AI is not an out-of-the-box solution. Utilizing AI in a business requires training and model adjustment over time.
#2 AI is not a technology; it is the idea that machines are capable of being able to carry out services and tasks in a way that we would consider ‘smart’.
#3 We achieve AI through Machine Learning.
#4 Machine Learning is the current technique being utilized to drive us towards the notion of Artificial Intelligence.
#5 Skynet is not in our immediate future.
That should cover the bases for now.
Researchers turned to using AI in attempt to tackle some of the most pressing questions around the spread and origin of Covid-19. I have selected a few such applications to highlight here:
1. Tracking the spread of the virus– BlueDot (https://bluedot.global/)
Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, Blue Dot knew about the Covid-19 outbreak before anyone knew what Covid-19 was. The software program uses hundreds of thousands of sources (public health organization announcements, digital media, livestock health reports, etc.) to detect infectious disease threats as early as possible. BlueDot was able to predict the spread of the Zika virus to Florida six months before it happened in 2016.
2. Understanding the way Covid-19 operates – DeepMind, the AI arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet (https://deepmind.com/)
DeepMind has built a deep-learning library called AlphaFold. Much like how the human brain uses neural networks to process information, so too does this program which is built to predict how the proteins in an organism will ‘curve’ or ‘crinkle’ based on their genome. Once the structure of a protein is known, then the shape of the receptors can be determined. After training the program on large genomic datasets, researchers are hoping to use the tool to get a sense of the types of drugs that might have an effect on Covid-19.
3. Imaging: identifying signs of infection – Darwin AI (https://www.darwinai.com/)
Darwin AI trained a program using image recognition applications to identify signs of Covid-19 in patient X-Rays. When testing kits were in short supply, this program was used as a diagnostic tool by doctors to get a better sense of what the patient was really dealing with.
And this is only the beginning. Healthcare is a highly regulated space and the primary obstacles are the ones that we all know and love…regulation, privacy, trust in the technology, etc. The industry still is in the process of figuring out how they are going to position themselves.
If you would like to learn more about applications of AI in healthcare, I highly recommend subscribing to ‘The Algorithm’ newsletter by the MIT Technology Review. They cover all industry applications but have a good assortment of healthcare-specific articles to peruse
This week we’ll talk about clinical trials and how technology is driving rapid change in this market expected to reach over $65 Billion by 2025. (Click the embedded links to follow along.)
Clinical trials are big business. It takes an average of 10 years before a drug is approved and can cost over $1 Billion from Phase 1 through post-market surveillance.
With over 300,000 trials registered globally, their numbers and complexity are growing every year. However, the failure rate is particularly high. For example, only 1 in 10 cancer drugs make it to FDA approval. There are not many other industries with a 90% product failure rate. Even with accelerated approvals, many treatments just don’t measure up. There is even a growing debate about whether large trials are still necessary in the coming era of personalized medicine and data mining.
So what can be done, and who is making moves in the industry?
One challenge is finding people to participate in trials. Industry is stepping up in big ways with artificial intelligence and machine learning leading the charge. Digital-health companies such as Antidote, Deep6 AI, and Watson IBM are empowering both doctors and patients to access novel trials themselves. They may also help decrease the disparity in who we base medical decisions on: currently over 80% of clinical trial participants are white. This racial disparity has large implications , especially for diseases that affect marginalized racial and ethnic groups.
Another sector that industry is changing things is in remote patient monitoring. Instead of coming into a hospital, patients can be monitored at home. Companies such as Pillsy and Medminder help with pill reminders, dose tracking, immediate data collection, and remote caregiver support. Telemedecine technologies, from webcams to medical-grade wearable sensors are coming quickly online, making site-less clinical research a more and more likely possibility. Even virtual reality has been predicted to become a large disrupter in patient monitoring and experience.
So where do you fit in? Right now there is a problem with patients withdrawing from clinical trials after they have given their consent. The reasons are varied, and there are plenty of opportunities to help the healthcare industry solve some of its most important problems.
We hope you enjoyed this week’s letter! As always, let us know what topic you’re interested in and reach out to the Healthcare Club with any questions.
Welcome to the first Healthcare Club weekly newsletter!
Here you can find new content every Monday on a different aspect of business in healthcare. This week’s theme is “Vaccines: Development, Regulation, and Response”. Vaccines have been a hot topic for many years and there are many misconceptions around their manufacturing, use, and safety. Simple in theory, understanding the way that they get from research and development to us can be complex. We hope that these resources help you learn about how vaccines move through development and approval, the business of vaccines, and where we are in the fight against COVID-19.
Our mission is to educate students and strengthen career opportunities at Johnson, the Sloan program of Healthcare Administration, and in the greater Cornell Graduate community. We are students with varied post-MBA goals across general management, marketing, tech, consulting, finance, hospital administration and more. If you have questions the club would love to connect. Send an email to johnsonhcc@cornell.edu or contact any of our members.
- The Healthcare Club
Development, Business, and Regulation
Infographic on Steps in the Vaccine Manufacturing Process and Unique Operations Requirements
What it Takes to Get Through the FDA’s Vaccine Approval Process and in Infographic Form
Coronavirus
New York Times Article on COVID-19 Vaccines : How many are in development and where are they in the pipeline?
Great podcast on Wired about the race to develop a COVID-19 Vaccine
The Johnson Healthcare Club would like to recognize the achievements made by our members and their teams in the 2020 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Case Competition focusing on medication safety strategy at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. All of our participants this year came from the Cornell’s Sloan Program of Healthcare Administration.
2nd Place Team (Top Left to Bottom): Noorein Ahmed, Christian Tadje, Pragati Chaudhary
3rd Place Team (Top Left to Bottom): Nico Nigro, Laura Yang, Mark Yacoub
The Cornell team attended the case competition at Yale School of Management on 2/20/2020 and placed 2nd among more than 25 teams. The Yale Case Competition objective was to commercialize a gene therapy that effectively cures Multiple Sclerosis. Our team’s solution utilized a licensing agreement modeled after MIT’s Broad Institute and extended the gene therapy’s reach to cure diseases with similar genetic dispositions.
HCC Members (left to right): Blake Alston, Matthew Judy, Chad Kurylo, Ph.D.
Not Pictured: Murphy Lu, M.D.