Tag: healthcare

SAN JOSE, CALIF.  – The Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) today bestowed the fifth annual AdvaMed Lifetime Achievement Award to former Beckman Coulter CEO and Chairman John P. “Jack” Wareham, for his contributions to improving patient care and health care system efficiency through innovation of clinical laboratory testing.

Jack Wareham

“Jack is one of the unsung heroes of modern medical practice,” said Scott Whitaker, president and CEO of AdvaMed. “His work at Beckman Coulter helped pioneer automation in the clinical laboratory and transformed the diagnostic industry as a result. Millions of people every year benefit from his vision of more accurate and efficient clinical testing, and we are honored to present Jack this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award.”Wareham began his career in the life sciences after earning a bachelor’s of science degree in pharmacy from Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. He worked as a pharmacist while earning an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked his way through the ranks of the pharmaceutical company, Smith, Kline and French.

SmithKline acquired laboratory instruments company Beckman Instruments in 1981 in a $1 billion deal. Beginning in 1984, Wareham held several senior management positions in the new division. In 1993, he was named president and COO of Beckman Instruments, which was spun off as a separate, public company in 1989.

As COO, he was the driving force behind the successful merger in 1997 of Beckman Instruments with Coulter Corporation, the leading manufacturer of systems for blood and other cell analysis. In 1998, he was named CEO of the newly formed Beckman Coulter.

Today Beckman Coulter is recognized as a powerhouse in the diagnostics industry, developing and marketing instruments, chemistries, software and supplies to simplify and automate laboratory operations, and ultimately save patient’s lives.

After retiring from Beckman Coulter in 2005, Wareham has continued to share his vision and business expertise, helping to guide a number of diverse enterprises as a director for medtech companies including Steris, ResMed, Accuray and Greatbatch

Wareham also served as chairman of the Board for AdvaMed in 2000, helping lead the association in a new direction for the 21^st Century as it rebranded from the Health Industry Manufacturer’s Association.

“I am proud to be honored by my peers with this incredible award,” said Wareham, “and I gratefully accept on behalf of all the wonderful people I’ve worked with over the years who are dedicated to improving patient care.”

AdvaMed’s Lifetime Achievement Award highlights the accomplishments of pioneers in the medical technology sector whose contributions have had a significant impact on patients’ lives and the industry as an essential part of America’s economy. The award was presented during The MedTech Conference powered by AdvaMed at the San Jose Convention Center.

AdvaMed member companies produce the medical devices, diagnostic products and health information systems that are transforming health care through earlier disease detection, less invasive procedures and more effective treatments. AdvaMed members range from the largest to the smallest medical technology innovators and companies.

Army veteran Katie Buehner, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot, has found a new and rewarding career path in the medical profession. Buehner’s professional and personal journey from serving in the Army to creating a new business venture has recently been featured in both The Denver Business Journal and The National Business Journal.

Buehner’s accomplishments cross the educational, military and healthcare sectors.  An alumnus of Olin’s Executive MBA program (EMBA), Buehner served ten years in the Army as a Black Hawk pilot. Her husband is a fellow army aviator and she did not originally intend on leaving the Army, but family responsibilities took priority. With three kids ranging from ages one to four, a pending assignment to Germany for six months provided a milestone moment for Buehner. She chose to care for her young children stateside, and in so doing, that pivotal moment opened the door for a career-changing opportunity, earning her MBA degree via WashU’s EMBA program.

While at WashU, Buehner took advantage of the rich business school network by meeting and eventually partnering with fellow classmate, John Spranger and his wife Erin. The team focused on the need for staffing nurses to local medical offices, clinics and hospitals. Meeting demand for nursing supply, their company, Presto Staffing, benefits both its clients and its talent. By permitting flexible scheduling, the firm naturally draws nurses who search for alternative schedules to help their work-life balance, while also serving a growing healthcare industry.

Notably, with a revenue of $260,000 since opening in July 2016, Presto Staffing had a 150 percent growth rate, between September and December of that same year.  A May 2017 EMBA graduate, Buehner applies her “operational background” to a role that also allows her to manage her own flexible schedule while focusing on essential time with her family.

Buehener credits her journey through EMBA with connecting her to the business realm, pointing out that the “classes are… comprised of experienced professionals.”  Through molding her in-depth military operations experience with her acquired real-world business knowledge and connections at WashU, Buehner is looking forward to the next chapter of her joint venture.

For more coverage of Buehner’s career, please click here (note: full article is available for National Business Journal’s subscribers only).

For more on the WashU Executive MBA program, please visit our website.

Retired US Air Force veteran Don Halpin, a 2016 graduate of Olin’s Executive MBA program, is the Healthcare Systems Engineer at the Jump Simulation Lab at OSF Innovations in Peoria, IL. He is responsible for supporting socio-technical innovation projects. In this role, he develops new technologies and processes – particularly the incorporation of aviation safety tools into the healthcare arena. Halpin’s second career at “Jump” was recently featured in The Edwardsville Intelligencer.

Don Halpin is a graduate of the USAF Academy with a BS in Electrical Engineering (computer design focus) and a MS in Aeronautical Science from Embry-Riddle University.

Halpin employs forward-thinking best-practices from his 28 years in the Air Force. His final assignment was as the Director of Safety for Air Mobility Command where he was responsible for the flight and ground safety of its 55,000 person operation. He was an airlift and air refueling pilot, capability planner, political-military affairs officer, squadron and wing commander.  Now, he’s applying his knowledge of mobility operations to the medical sector at Jump Simulation, also known as Jump, for short.

Jump, which opened in April 2013, is a collaboration between OSF Healthcare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, and aims to improve the experience of medical practitioners and patients through education and simulation initiatives. One such initiative includes printing 3-D hearts for cardiovascular surgeons to employ before surgery, an example of the high-tech atmosphere at the innovative company.

Halpin credits his strong family support system and Olin’s Executive MBA program as assets to his work at Jump, where he started working following his retirement from the Air Force. He was actively engaged in the EMBA curriculum, graduating with honors, while also fully engaged in the important work at Jump. Managing work, family and EMBA is a challenging yet rewarding experience for Executive MBA students.

With healthcare positioned as one of world’s most relevant and global industries, Halpin practices the EMBA pledge to take “business knowledge and translate concepts into real world applications,” on a daily basis.

To read more about Halpin’s work, please see the news article from The Edwardsville Intelligencer here.

Boeing Center members had the privilege of touring Express Scripts’ automated prescription fulfillment center and analytics research lab on November 15. The new cutting-edge Technology and Innovation fulfillment center, located in north St. Louis, is one of five such facilities in the country and dispenses up to 110,000 prescriptions each day.

The center is operational 21 hours per day, six days per week, and is almost entirely automated, with the exception of a few humans (around 400 employees in various roles) to make sure that everything runs smoothly. And everything does, indeed, run smoothly.

Photo courtesy of Express Scripts.

Each pallet of prescription-filled bottles contains a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows the contents to be tracked and sent to the appropriate location. Then, each bottle has its photo taken to ensure precision, and an ultrasound scan measures volume displacement. Before the scripts are shipped out, computer algorithms calculate “porch time,” or distance, traffic, and weather conditions used to determine how much ice and/or gel should be used if the package needs to remain within a certain temperature range.
These quality assurance measures and state-of-the-art technology result in a 99.996% accuracy rate when filling prescriptions bottles, which are distributed to over 70,000 pharmacies all over the United States.

Adjacent to the fulfillment center was the state-of-the-art analytics research lab. Using the data analyzed in the lab, Express Scripts saves its 85 million customers more than $2 billion each year. One way they are able to reduce cost is by negotiating prescription prices with pharmaceutical manufacturers and determining which medications will be included on their formulary, or list of drugs covered under a benefit plan. They also take into account the prescription price index (PPI), which they calculate using data on the number of prescriptions filled per year, as well as the cost paid by benefit plans and consumers. The PPI gives them further insight into price trends of name brand and generic drugs.

The lab also contained a prototype of a vending machine designed to dispense drugs on the spot within a matter of minutes. The machines will use demographic and location information to determine what drugs to stock, and contain a phone that can be used to call a pharmacist. Another innovation in the works is a laser system that etches custom messages on pill bottle caps. These messages range from reminders about renewing prescriptions to invitations to download prescription management mobile apps. The personalized messages are expected to be a welcome update to the age-old “Push Down & Turn to Open” caps.

We are grateful to Express Scripts for inviting us to their campus to see their cutting-edge technology, especially Jan Burkett who organized the event and Susan Lanctot and Kyle Amelung, our tour guides for the evening. Stay tuned to the Boeing Center digital network (@theboeingcenter) for more fresh supply chain content!

On Thursday, November 3, 2016, the Weston Career Center and Health and Life Sciences club held the annual Olin Healthcare Symposium. This flagship event was attended by a variety of graduate students from the full and part-time MBA program, medical school, public health and social work, supply chain management, and Ph.D. program. We also had representatives from Ernst and Young, ECG Management Consultants, The Resource Group, Amitech Solutions, Lumeris, Compass Clinical Consulting, Kindred Healthcare, and ePharmix.

The theme of the symposium was the “Integration of Healthcare Operations in the Transition from Volume to Value-Based Models.” Our keynote speaker was Lee Bernstein, the Regional Executive Vice President of Hospital Operations and Chief Operating Officer of SSM Health. He spoke of current challenges in providing care, adherence to quality programs, and the “survival mode” of the state of hospitals. During the transition model from volume-based to value-based models, Mr. Bernstein emphasized the need to have “a foot in each canoe”—utilizing volume-based models to gather revenue while optimizing the hospital to comply with value-based models.

A panel with representatives from Centene and The Resource Group spoke more of the theme of transition from volume to value. The panel also discussed current healthcare industry trends and news, provided advice to our graduate students on career choice, and made recommendations on how to have a successful healthcare career. Students can potentially join the 15 percent of the previous MBA Class of 2016 that accepted jobs in the Pharma/Biotech/Healthcare Industry.

Here is some career advice that a graduate student should consider:

• Arvan Chan of Centene advised using a summer internship to determine whether you like working in healthcare or not, and to also be open-minded and flexible when considering various sub-sectors of the healthcare industry.
• Dr. Amy Poole-Yaeger of Centene expressed that healthcare is very broad, and there are many opportunities available that you can find based on your interests and strengths.
• KaLeena Thomas of The Resource Group, found that despite her initial disinclination to work on a healthcare consulting project, she found herself working for a health system client in Columbus, Ohio and later realized that the healthcare industry needed individuals who had business acumen, a willingness to solve problems, and a “passion to give back in a bigger way.”
• KaLeena Thomas echoed Dr. Yaeger’s statements that being in healthcare is “personal”. KaLeena urged “Think about you, think about your parents, your friends, your sisters, and brothers—all of you are going to experience the healthcare system, so we need really smart people that can work in this industry and make it a system that we all want to be a part of.”

The night concluded with a hor d’ouevres and drinks at a networking reception. Our graduate students had an opportunity to ask our speaker and panelists questions. They also connected with special guests from local companies, many of them Olin alumni.

We want to extend special thanks to our keynote speaker and panelists. Thank you for sharing your valuable insights and advice! We appreciate your time and effort in giving back and engaging with the Washington University community.

Guest blogger: Francis Monsada, MBA ’17

New research from Olin sheds light on the relationship between employee benefits and the profitability and competitiveness of small businesses. Ulya Tsolmon, Assistant Professor of Strategy at Olin and her co-authors at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, reviewed data on some 15,000 firms over the 2004−2010 time period—before implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act—to compare the labor productivity, employee turnover, profitability, stability, and growth rate of companies that voluntarily offered their employees health insurance and those that did not.

Providing health insurance is typically very costly, especially for small firms. Small firms generally pay more for health insurance per employee than larger firms because they have fewer employees and therefore smaller risk pools. Is the payoff for a small firm worth this investment? How do small businesses that provide health insurance fare compared to their counterparts that do not?

One key finding was that following the economic crisis of 2007, firms that did not offer health insurance lowered employee wages by an average of 25 percent; by contrast, the average wages in firms offering health insurance declined only 5 percent during the same period. Further, firms that did not provide their employees with health insurance laid off a larger percentage of their workforce during the Great Recession than did firms providing health insurance.

In comparison, the group of firms providing health insurance had a much lower employee turnover rate, higher profitability, and higher sales per employee. However, the average growth rate of the group that provided health insurance was lower when compared to the group not providing health insurance.

The cause of this discrepancy? The study results seem to indicate that firms with health insurance enter into an implicit contract with their employees: The firm shields employees from economic downturns but asks them to exert effort and commitment to increase the firm’s performance. However, according to lead researcher Ulya Tsolmon, “firms with health insurance seem to be more cautious than those without health insurance when expanding, as making and keeping commitments to employees is not an easy task, especially during economic downturns.”

This study offers important insights for policymakers—especially with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including the question of whether to expand the employer mandate on health insurance to businesses of all sizes, likely to return to the congressional agenda early in 2017. Inasmuch as 99 percent of all US companies are small businesses that together employ more than 50 percent of US workers, expanding the mandate to require these firms to offer health insurance clearly has the potential to dramatically increase the number of insured Americans. But any such discussion, the researchers note, should include consideration of how a broadened mandate might affect the growth of these small businesses.