A direct HIT: new course immerses Sloan students in information technology.

Thompson, Sarah S.

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Last fall, Professor Sean Nicholson, director of the Sloan Program in Health Administration, and Arnaub Chatterjee, MHA/MPA '07, pictured above, launched a new course: a health care information technology (HIT) "boot camp" designed to immerse second-year MHA students in the ways data and information technology are transforming health care. Twenty-six Sloan students participated in this 1.5-credit course, which took place November 13-14 in New York City and combined presentations from industry experts, case studies, and insights from faculty and students from Weill Cornell Medical College and Cornell Tech.

For Nicholson, the goal was to tap Cornell's engineering and entrepreneurial resources to give students a deeper base for evaluating, implementing, and managing HIT solutions. He and Chatterjee took advantage of the New York City campuses to recruit a "star cast" of speakers: health care executives, start-up founders and CEOs, venture capitalists, and clinicians. Back in Ithaca, student teams completed their final projects, conducting in-depth business, market, and regulatory analyses of selected HIT companies.

"The course is a blast in 36 hours of the current and future opportunities in HIT," says Nicholson. "It's a heavy dose of real-world learning, helping students critically evaluate HIT in their post-graduation roles--and cut through the hype."

Indeed, there's plenty of hype in digital health--a field that garnered $4.5 billion in investments during 2015. "For me, the impetus for this course was to expose students to opportunities they may never have considered," says Chatterjee, who is director of data science and insights for Merck and teaching associate at Harvard Medical School.

Chatterjee says the biggest HIT trends right now deal with harnessing the power of "big data," advances in genomics and precision medicine, and a growing use of telehealth services. These tools are altering clinical practice, whether through the nearly 30 million video consultations between patients and providers last year or the array of patient data now available.

At Merck, Chatterjee works with a growing landscape of patient information that ranges from insurance claims to Fitbit sensors.

It's an exciting world that, like most areas in health care, is rapidly evolving. This is where Chatterjee, a former health care advisor for the Obama Administration, believes Sloan students have an advantage.

"The Sloan program provides a solid grounding in health care policy, combined with quantitatively rigorous coursework," he says. "If you can understand the economics and design of the health care system, you're way ahead of the curve."

For Dae-Hee Lee, Sloan '16, the experience bridged coursework with his next role in hospital administration, providing up-to-date insights he'll use to make better management decisions. "Clinicians and administrators have lots of frustrations with HIT systems," says Lee. "Now I know what things to look for as an administrator when HIT vendors approach me. This was very helpful for me and created a wave of ideas for everyone."

Nicholson credits Chatterjee and David Artz, M.D., an associate professor of health care policy and research at Weill Medical, with helping recruit expert presenters, including some with academic and clinical ties to Weill Medical and its affiliate, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Artz, a co-founder of Standard Molecular, teaches information technology to students in Weill's Master of Science in Health Informatics program; he and 12 of his students also joined Nicholson's course.

Nicholson and Chatterjee are already planning the next "HIT Trek," which they hope will increasingly integrate students and faculty from Cornell Tech and Weill Medical to make Sloan graduates even stronger. "We want students to get a sense of the real world, to hear from people who are walking the walk," Nicholson says. "It reminds them why they're pursuing this degree: to improve the health care system."