Learning to Heal Healthcare: Specialized MBAs
Specialized MBAs enable doctors and other healthcare professionals to extend their skills from the OR and exam room to the C-suite.
From Clinician to Administrator: Dr. Monica Hum, a colorectal surgeon who is now the CEO of Piedmont Rockdale Hospital in Conyers. Photo credit: Stan Kaady
After a decade of education and training – typically four years of undergraduate college, four years of medical school and three to seven years of residency and training – most physicians are happy to leave the university behind. So why would a surgeon with a busy, successful practice take two years out of her schedule to pursue a master’s in business administration?
“I was in private practice, and I was trying to make my practice a little more efficient,” says Dr. Monica Hum, a colorectal surgeon who is now the CEO of Piedmont Rockdale Hospital in Conyers. “Our group was four or five people at that point. It was just a personal decision to improve myself and my own business.”
She gained much more than that. In addition to earning her MBA with a healthcare concentration from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in 2017, Hum learned what she called “the language of business” and strengthened her understanding of finance, data and analytics. In 2018, she was asked to serve on the board of Piedmont Healthcare.
Hum is among the growing number of professionals who have earned an MBA in healthcare to add value as they pivot from clinician to administrator. Though most practitioners wait before seeking a business degree, about 9% of medical students pursue dual degrees – MBAs with a healthcare concentration or Master of Public Health – while in medical school, according to data compiled by the Association of American Medical Colleges, a nonprofit organization that represents all 175 accredited U.S. and Canadian medical schools, more than 490 teaching hospitals and academic societies.
The business education enables physicians to be a part of finding solutions to pressing healthcare problems. As a board member, Hum’s projects involved managing efficiencies of administering antibiotics during surgery and aimed to improve operating room safety and patient outcomes.
“Our students are mostly healthcare professionals, some are upper management, others are [in] lower management, trying to gain promotion. We also have business majors trying to get into the healthcare area with an MBA in healthcare management.” – Edgars Patani, director, MBA Programs, Albany State University
Hum was engaged in discussions with key stakeholders, seeking out viewpoints that needed to be heard and represented.
“You’re involving so many people,” she says. “How do you get the pharmacy involved to ensure antibiotics are present and available? Which antibiotics are we giving? You’re getting the anesthesiologist to make sure you’re giving it at the right time. You’re talking with the nurses and people in your OR to make sure that redosing happens. And then outcomes-wise, looking at all the business analytics and data analytics to prove we’ve helped the population.”
In 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Hum was named chief medical officer at Piedmont Rockdale. Understanding the challenges facing both the clinical and administrative sides of the healthcare system became even more crucial.
“I always thought [the phrase] pay it forward was about knowledge,” she says. “Pay it forward in knowledge of what you learned from me, the style, skill or technique that you might learn from me. But now, it was bringing those skills across the hospital for the community, to do what’s right for the patients, make a positive difference in what we can do, and be fiscally responsible.”
Hum was named CEO of Piedmont Rockdale in 2023. Now her focus is on “the whole healthcare entity,” she says. “It’s the patients; it’s the employees; it’s the surrounding community. And then how is what I decide on or what we decide as a team going to affect everybody else in that environment?”
For Hum, the return on her investment of time and money in getting the MBA couldn’t have been better. It changed her thinking, making it less gut instinct and more fact-based.
“It formalized a lot of my analytical skills by helping me with data-driven decision making,” she says. “And it was able to really integrate my clinical, financial and strategic planning.”
Simplifying the Complex
Healthcare is becoming increasingly complex, whether on the high-touch side – patient care, physicians, nursing and staffing – or the nuts-and-bolts side – the physical plant, the beds, the Band-Aids and bandwidth.
Hospital and healthcare system administrators frequently seek leaders with healthcare-related MBAs, believing physicians already understand how boardroom policy may affect patient outcomes. This is one reason for the growth in healthcare-related MBAs since 2015, rising from 6% to 15% of business students globally and up to 19% in the U.S. in 2023.
Preparing Leaders: Mohamed Movahed, the graduate programs director for the Harley Langdale Jr. College of Business Administration at Valdosta State University and an assistant professor of Healthcare Administration. Photo credit: David Parks
A small set of colleges and universities in Georgia are among those responding to industry needs. These healthcare-related MBAs are programs in which core business knowledge and the business of healthcare take equal billing. They are focused on healthcare management or administration and include courses in healthcare strategy, policy formation, finance and data analytics. Whether in person or online, the program is meant for working professionals to take classes part-time and to complete in 18 months to two years.
Valdosta State University has offered an online MBA program with a concentration in healthcare administration since 2011. It expanded after COVID-19, as leaders recognized a greater need.
“The people who already trained in the healthcare background also needed the leadership,” says Mohamed Movahed, the graduate programs director for the Harley Langdale Jr. College of Business Administration at Valdosta State University and an assistant professor of Healthcare Administration. “They had that healthcare background, the healthcare skill, but they were not prepared for the leadership and management, like strategic planning or [how to use] the data. Now they have this knowledge that they can use in [providing] healthcare.”
A Regional Resource
Movahed says most of their healthcare administration MBA students are already working in the field, on the business or practitioner side, so the average time to complete the degree is a year and a half. There are 164 students enrolled in the MBA program for spring 2026, of whom 34 are pursuing the healthcare administration concentration. Although VSU is still collecting the most recent placement figures, Movahed says the university directly educates the local and regional workforce.
“We have so many students going into nursing school, for example, but they’re burned out in three to five years. It’s often a very short time, and they want to do something different from hands-on nursing. By considering an MBA in healthcare management, a student can do some of both. It leverages both skill sets.” – Chad Holloway, assistant professor of healthcare management, Brenau University
“About 20% of our healthcare students are coming from South Georgia Medical Center [in Valdosta],” he says. “Most of [the students] end up in jobs in South Georgia or the north Florida or Jacksonville area.”
Albany State University, a historically Black college and university (HBCU) in Albany, began offering an MBA in healthcare management in 2012 to meet the growing demand for continuing education among physicians and other healthcare professionals at Phoebe Putney Health
System.
“The program started in-person, meeting after 5 o’clock,” said Edgars Patani, director of MBA Programs at ASU, via email. “It now operates mainly online. Our students are mostly healthcare professionals, some are upper management, others are [in] lower management, trying to gain promotion. We also have business majors trying to get into the healthcare area with an MBA in healthcare management.”
Scholar Practitioners: Shatrela Washington-Hubbard, dean and program director of human resource management programs for the College of Business and Communication at Brenau University. Photo credit: Woodie Williams
Patani says the program’s differentiator for students is its affordability and accessibility – with rolling enrollment, highly qualified professors and a graduate assistantship available to residential students.
In Gainesville, the growth and development of the Healthcare Management MBA program at Brenau University over the past 25 years was greatly influenced by its proximity to Northeast Georgia Medical Center Gainesville, part of the Northeast Georgia Medical System. The medical center is a teaching hospital, and several administrators hold MBAs from Brenau. The university has a strong bent toward experiential learning and experiential instruction.
“One of the main things we’ve done is ensure that as we bring in faculty, we are bringing in not just academicians,” says Shatrela Washington-Hubbard, dean and program director of human resource management programs for the College of Business and Communication at Brenau.
“We want to bring in scholar practitioners. In addition to being academically qualified, [they] have industry experience. They’ve actually worked in that field.”
Aligning Instruction, Gaining Experience
Washington-Hubbard and the faculty also regularly meet with local business and industry to elicit feedback, align programs to solve real problems and co-create content that reflects industry needs.
“This allows students to get real-world experience, working on projects that are implemented in some of the organizations that we work with,” she says. “That’s an important piece to us: making sure that 100% of our students have some form of industry-related experience prior to graduation. … Because we’re implementing applied learning projects in class, students are working hands-on with an organization. That means the whole class gets that opportunity, not just one or two students. It’s one of the great things about having a smaller class size, too. Students get one-on-one interactions with executive leaders in the organizations. This is in-person and online.”
“Our MBA program students are typically a little older,” says Chad Holloway, assistant professor of healthcare management in Brenau’s MBA program. “They have a different maturity level than undergraduate students would have. They’re really committed students, and some of them have great ideas, especially those with some experience.”
Great Ideas: Chad Holloway, assistant professor of healthcare management at Brenau University’s School of Business. Photo credit: Contributed
Like many of his students, Holloway worked in the healthcare industry, including large hospitals, insurance companies and consulting, before pivoting to teaching. He sees great value in practitioners seeking an MBA. In his experience, some of the best hospital administrators were practitioners with MBAs.
“I used to work at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, a hospital licensed for 1,200 beds, though back then we had 850,” Holloway says. “But we had a new president come in, a young guy, Peter Slavin [now with Cedars Sinai Medical Center and Health System], with a Harvard MBA. But he had this clinical side that let him talk to high-end researchers, to researchers in their fields, transplant surgeons, whatever the case may be, with such credibility. He also managed the hospital with great skill. He could speak to both worlds.”
Holloway thinks one benefit of practitioners pursuing healthcare-related MBAs could be that it helps address the high turnover in the healthcare labor force.
“We have so many students going into nursing school, for example, but they’re burned out in three to five years,” Holloways says. “It’s often a very short time, and they want to do something different from hands-on nursing. By considering an MBA in healthcare management, a student can do some of both. It leverages both skill sets.” 
Just One More Year: Brenau University’s Tiger Tracks MBA
This year, Brenau University unveiled a new MBA program, a five-year degree dubbed the Tiger Tracks MBA. The T-MBA offers students the opportunity to graduate with a bachelor’s degree and an MBA in five years.
“We’re following the trends in higher education as well as in industry,” says Shatrela Washington-Hubbard, dean of the College of Business and Communication at Brenau University and director of its MBA programs. “We’re aware of the skills and knowledge they need. They’re looking for higher levels of education and more experience. This was one way to ensure our students can compete for positions … when they leave us.”
Students will finish their undergraduate degree in four years and move directly into the MBA program, for a fifth year.
“We’ve designed the program so that in that fifth year, students are taking courses in the evening, not during the day, which allows them to pursue either internship opportunities or to work either part-time or full-time as they’re pursuing that final year of the MBA program,” says Washington-Hubbard, who also points out that the academic standards for inclusion are high.
“These are definitely our students who know where they’re trying to go in their career,” she adds. “They are working with faculty advisors to not only map out their educational goals but [also] are already talking about career goals. We want to ensure that what they want to do in the workforce is aligned with pursuing this program.”
Washington-Hubbard says they have started working with juniors and sophomores interested in the T-MBA to begin offering on-campus evening courses in the fall of 2027 for students entering their third and fourth year of college at that time.
