Roundtables

Always a popular feature, Breakfast Roundtable Discussions get executives swapping valuable ideas and experiences on some of the most important issues facing the business of healthcare. Categories include Healthcare Services, Bio/Pharma, Healthcare IT, and Partnering and Investing. Choose early, because tables fill up fast. Grab your coffee and breakfast and pull up a chair for a lively session on a timely topic.

1. Leadership in Health Services: Careers Beyond Investment Banking, Pharma, Devices?
2. The Healthcare Tug-of-War
3. NEW: Preventive Genetics – A Powerful Tool in Individualized Health Management Is Making a Difference!
4. Consumerism 2.0 – What’s Next in Healthcare Financing?
5. Building an Effective Board of Directors in the Healthcare Industry and Getting on a Corporate Healthcare Board
6. The Healthcare Ecosystem – Has Its Time Come?
7. International Medical Travel, aka Medical Tourism
8. Why Have Clinical Trials Gone Global? What Do They Contribute to Global Healthcare? At What Cost?
9. Nanotechnology: Its Impact on Healthcare and Its Commercialization
10. Leading Today's Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies 
11. So Your IPO Was Successful – Now What?
12. The Role of Integrative Medicine in Transforming the Healthcare Delivery System
13. Health as Human Capital

1. Leadership in Health Services: Careers Beyond Investment Banking, Pharma, Devices?

Jeremy Friese, MD, MBA ’08, is interventional radiologist at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, MA. Bob Harrington, MBA ’72, is part of Cambridge Management Group and its sister firm, Kenagy & Associates, in Cambridge, MA.

Health service organizations are experiencing growing demand for professional managers. These positions offer diverse, challenging career opportunities in complex, high-tech, capital-intensive regional service corporations with enormous economic and political clout. Compensation is on a steady upward curve. Demand for physician executives is a particularly hot segment of this dynamic talent market. However, few Harvard MBAs, including MD/MBAs, take positions in traditional health service organizations. Is this a matter for concern? Should corrective action be taken?  What realistic changes could be considered?

2. The Healthcare Tug-of-War

Sonny Bloom, MBA ’75, is President, Collect Rx, Inc.  Lekshmi Venu, MBA ’03, is Director, Express Scripts, Inc.

Over the last 40 years, new strategies emerged to manage healthcare delivery, creating new sub-industries: managed care (HMOs, PPOs); consumer driven health plans; pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), mail order and specialty pharmacies; retailer clinics and on-site pharmacies; revenue cycle vendors (advocating for payers and providers). What will be the next frontier for each of these players?  How will they continue to lower healthcare costs and deliver shareholder return?  Can managed care successfully tackle out-of-network costs?  How will physicians continue to carve business away from hospitals?

3. NEW: Preventive Genetics – A Powerful Tool in Individualized Health Management Is Making a Difference!

Peter Cooper, MBA '75, is CEO & co-founder of Toronto-based Scienta Health, a pioneer in design and delivery of individualized preventive health programs using genomics and other leading-edge diagnostic protocols.

The power of Genetic analysis has already progressed far beyond identifying presence of disabling disease genes. For the past three years Scienta Health has incorporated an extensive genetics test panel as a core component in its individualized preventive health management programs, enabling its physicians to truly personalize recommendations on nutrition, lifestyle and medications for its clients. Results are exciting. Hear how it's working and discuss the implications for healthcare.

4. Consumerism 2.0 – What’s Next in Healthcare Financing?

Tom Policelli, MBA’97, ran United’s CDHP business, and worked at Monitor and CIGNA. Grady Clouse, MBA’97, held senior positions at venture-backed companies Purkinje and ePhysician, and worked at CSC Healthcare.

Driven by escalating costs, employers continue to shift financial responsibility to healthcare consumers. However, current cost-shifting approaches are fatally flawed for two reasons: providers aren’t being paid for the consumer receivables risks they now bear, and administrative and financial hassles are reducing consumer satisfaction and uptake. We will discuss Constitution Healthcare, a health plan company that is revolutionizing healthcare financing and payments to create wins for employers, consumers and providers.

5.  Building an Effective Board of Directors in the Healthcare Industry and Getting on a Corporate Healthcare Board

William Altman is a Senior Client Partner at Korn/Ferry International. He was formerly CEO of Kardia Therapeutics, co-founder of FemPartners, and Board member of a publicly traded company.
  
Serving on the corporate board of a healthcare company can be challenging, rewarding, and yet also fraught with risk. Building an effective board is an art. We will discuss the board search process, and how an executive can become a board member.

6. The Healthcare Ecosystem – Has Its Time Come?

Jim Hummer, MBA '80, is Founder, President & CEO of Whole Health Management. James Mault, MD, FACS, Director, New Product Development, Microsoft Health Solutions Group, will provide Microsoft's perspective. 

Consumers are at the center of the healthcare ecosystem and assuming greater financial responsibility for their care. Technology must support consumers and their changing needs. Microsoft’s newly unveiled health ecosystem enables better chronic health management and better preventive care. What will drive consumer behavioral change and adoption? What incentives will drive physicians participation? Will an open technology platform successfully link healthcare providers to patients? Will it also lead consumers to health applications and medical devices to drive more informed decisions for improved health and lower costs?

7. International Medical Travel, aka Medical Tourism

David Williams is CEO of MedTripInfo.com and principal of consulting firm MedPharma Partners. He is chairman of the board of medical risk management company APS, and a board member of ECG biomarker company iCardiac Technologies.

Hundreds of thousands of US patients are traveling abroad for medical care. What began with facelifts and tummy tucks has expanded to major procedures and treatments in orthopedics, cardiology and cancer, to name a few. Patients are discovering high quality, low-cost care and excellent customer service in countries such as India, Thailand, Singapore, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Brazil. Insurance companies are contemplating coverage and entrepreneurs in the US and abroad are jumping in. Come discuss this emerging market and the business opportunities it presents.

8. Why Have Clinical Trials Gone Global? What Do They Contribute to Global Healthcare? At What Cost?

Candace Kendle, PharmD, is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Kendle, a leading, global clinical research organization (CRO) with more than 3,000 associates and operations across North America, Europe, Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Africa. Chris Bergen, OPM 25, is President and COO of global CRO Kendle, the fourth-largest provider of Phase II-IV clinical development services worldwide.

With total global R&D spending estimated at $160.6 billion in 2010, the number of global clinical trials continues to rise. Pharmaceutical companies are migrating drug development efforts to emerging regions offering access to untreated patient populations, lower trial costs and rapid regulatory approval. Patients benefit from new research medications while contributing to advances in medical science in areas such as infectious diseases, AIDS and vaccines. This roundtable will explore why trials have gone global, what they contribute to global healthcare and at what cost.

9. Nanotechnology: Its Impact on Healthcare and Its Commercialization

Rutledge Ellis-Behnke, PhD, AMP 148, Associate Professor, University of Hong Kong Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine. Trevor McCaw, MBA ’03, is founder and COO, Sentinel Medical Technologies.

Advances in healthcare nanotechnology  and the challenges in commercializing them out of academic institutions from two hands-on experts in the field.

10. Leading Today's Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Companies 
 
 Tig Conger is Partner and Kevin Butler is Managing Partner of Heritage Partners International (HPI), a senior level executive search firm that  works with a select group of clients globally in the Life Sciences Industry. 

 Strong leaders constantly develop their leadership skills to take on the increasingly complex challenges of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry.  In a recently completed research project appearing in Med Ad News we spoke with ten leaders across the pharmaceutical  industry to understand the qualities needed to succeed. We also discuss how characteristics of leaders have changed during the past 25 years and the requirements needed in the future.   Please join us and share your views and experiences regarding leadership in our industry.

11.  So Your IPO Was Successful – Now What?

Lee Steele, MBA ’73, is a Financial Leadership Partner at Tatum, LLC.

Times were when the life sciences IPO defined the successful corporate end game and the ultimate liquidity event for patient, ever-hopeful venture investors.  Not so these days.  Now that the public markets have turned more friendly, the IPO is increasingly viewed as one major step in the long term financing strategy.

12. The Role of Integrative Medicine in Transforming the Healthcare Delivery System

Robert A. DeNoble, MBA ‘72, is President/CEO, The Marino Foundation for Integrative Medicine, Inc. Guy F. Pugh, MD, is Medical Director, The Marino Foundation for Integrative Medicine.

Integrative Medicine is care with an attitude of mind that seeks preferentially those traditional and non-traditional therapies that enhance the body's innate ability to recover from injury or illness and maintain good health.  It emphasizes minimally invasive therapies that facilitate or strengthen host defenses and resources and elicit a desire for ongoing self care. Integrative Medicine has no single unified healing paradigm but it is always guided and informed by the evidence of sound scientific theory, research and systematic observation.

13. Health as Human Capital

Martin November, MD, MBA '98, has been a practicing OB/GYN for the last 10 years at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and recently worked at HBS to develop a healthcare immersion program for MBAs through the HBS Healthcare Initiative.

There is a wealth of economic research examining the issue of health as a component of human capital. The impact on a company's bottom line of an employee's health and well being extends beyond the direct healthcare costs already crippling many businesses, but also affects productivity or what many are calling "presenteeism." The challenge is whether this can be quantified and how this evidence might change the debate about market solutions for controlling healthcare costs.

 

©2007 Harvard Business School Health Industry Alumni Association.