B-School to Healthcare: Breaking Into an Industry Like No Other

• Among business school students, interest in a career in healthcare has grown rapidly over the last decade.
• As the industry faces mounting financial challenges, business school graduates can help healthcare companies meet their bottom line while continuing to provide quality care for patients.
• Gaining healthcare experience through volunteering or internships is vital to understanding the unique challenges the industry faces.

Casiner Gray Bailey had been working in telecoms for almost a decade when she realized it was time for a change.

“COVID showed us that a lot of work that we do could be offshored,” she explains. “The dynamics of the business changed. In 2023 our company decided to do another round of layoffs: 80 percent of the work would be offshored, the rest would remain in the U.S. So I started looking for industries that are going to be sustainable for the next 20, 30 years.”

After narrowing her search down to two industries—tech and healthcare—something told her healthcare was the right path. “I knew there was something inside of healthcare I could contribute to. And I realized that there are jobs in healthcare for business students. So one day I just said: ‘I'm going into healthcare.’”

She went on to study an MBA program at South Carolina State University with a focus on healthcare management. It proved to be the link between her role in telecoms and her current job as HR director of employee relations for the Medical University of South Carolina.

If that sounds like a non-linear route into the industry, Bailey’s story is more common than you might think. Though you might associate healthcare with doctors in white jackets striding purposefully down corridors, the evolving nature of the industry means that there are more entry points into it than ever before—particularly for business school graduates like Bailey.

That’s partly because the last few years in healthcare have been so tough, with COVID-19 “still having a big impact on the industry,” according to Mara Hillyer. She’s currently the manager of a healthcare consulting practice at Plante Moran in Detroit, Michigan, but studied business and then accountancy at the University of Dayton. That financial acumen is proving to be invaluable in an industry grappling with many complex problems.

“We’re seeing that a lot of providers are struggling, especially because operational costs are much higher these days,” Hillyer explains. “On top of all that, you’re looking at a business but also providing care to patients. So it’s about balancing profitability while providing the best care possible.”

The evolving nature of the industry means that there are more entry points into it than ever before—particularly for business school graduates.

Is that need for financial control opening the door for more business and finance professionals to enter the industry? “I would say so,” says Denise Thrush, a clinical operations manager for Providence Health & Services and an MBA graduate of Washington State University. “In the past it was more about just doing what you need to do and it will all work out. But now we’re finding we have to balance it all out.”

The numbers seem to back up the thoughts of healthcare professionals like Thrush. According to the GMAC Prospective Students Survey, interest in a career in healthcare has risen exponentially in recent years: from 6 percent of millennial b-school students in 2016 to 18 percent in 2022. In the most recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek Best Business Schools ranking, healthcare was found to be the fourth most popular industry for graduates.

But healthcare companies are not normal businesses, and normal business rules don’t apply. For one, there’s that constant balance that needs to be struck between profitability and patient care. “We have to be able to provide the care that patients need, but we have to be able to cover the expenses that go with that care,” says Thrush.

The unique challenges of healthcare mean that, at times, business graduates entering the industry aren’t quite prepared for what comes next. “The one downside of MBAs coming into healthcare is that they don’t understand what happens at the clinical level,” explains Thrush. “You don’t want to be that person sitting five layers above everybody, telling them what’s going to happen without understanding the impact at the ground level.”

To avoid being “that person,” getting a taste of the industry is absolutely vital. That doesn’t mean you need extensive healthcare experience—internships or simply volunteering are both viable bridges into the industry.

Healthcare was found to be the fourth most popular industry for graduates.

“Once I got into my program, I started volunteering at hospitals just to see whether I could really handle this,” Bailey recalls. “Because business is business—I know numbers and reports like the back of my hand. So that’s why I started volunteering.”

Hillyer went down the internship road before her own pivot into healthcare. “I found that doing an internship in a hospital was really interesting because it taught me the nuances of healthcare—you’re dealing with reimbursement, you’re dealing with federal regulations, you’re sitting in on budgetary meetings … seeing how it all worked was really helpful to me.”

That combination of business acumen and healthcare experience is an increasingly valuable asset in the industry. And even for those who went into healthcare without any business experience, they soon realized the two fields together could take their careers to the next level.

Killian Lozach studied international relations at the undergraduate level, and it was during those years that he founded his healthcare startup, Find My Clinical Trial. It seeks to democratize the clinical trial process by making trials more accessible and open to the general public. For Lozach, the venture allowed him to make the impact he had always wanted to make in life.

“There’s definitely personal satisfaction when you’re working in healthcare,” he says. “One of the best experiences I have is working with patients and bringing them to talk to policymakers about their story. And it’s extremely gratifying to work with patients directly.”

Still, although his startup found success early on, he was starting to hit obstacles that were stunting its growth. “I got thrown into this world of business. I fell in love with it, but I was very much learning everything as it goes. At a certain level there was stuff I just needed to know.”

The combination of business acumen and healthcare experience is an increasingly valuable asset in the industry.

Lozach decided an MBA from American University would give him the stimulus he needed to take his startup to the next level. “We recently partnered with Mayo Clinic, so that was a crash course in getting through a partnership collaboration agreement. That took six months—which is relatively fast for a deal like that—but there was always part of me that said, ‘Could we have done this faster if I had known some of the required information?’”

Through the hard skills acquired in his MBA and the support of American University’s business incubator, Lozach is slowly but surely impacting the complex world of clinical trials. “The MBA and business incubator were extremely helpful in [helping me learn] how to navigate those conversations and how to move forward on those deals,” he reflects. “And the company wouldn’t be where we’re at without the incubator.”

Regardless of the path these graduates followed into healthcare, there’s one thread that runs through all of their experiences: the acknowledgement that this industry is like no other. At its core it is firmly human-centric, in terms of both the patients you’re dealing with and the people working in the industry.

“I was drawn to healthcare, especially senior care, because even though I’m dealing with a lot of business people, it’s all people that want to do good and want to help their patients,” Hillyer explains. “People in healthcare are very altruistic, very kind, and at the end of the day everyone here wants to do the best by their patients and residents, including me.” Hillyer’s job satisfaction comes from ‘enabling’ healthcare professionals to perform their duties. “It makes me feel good,” she says.

And that’s perhaps what lies at the heart of healthcare—a satisfaction that no matter what you’re doing or where you’re working, you’re enabling good people to do good things. In an industry that’s changing rapidly, it’s one aspect that will always stay the same.