In early January, Wharton offered its first ever course in India: “Innovation and the Indian Health Care Industry.”  This three-day mini-course, held at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, covered the full range of health care issues in India - hospital management, medical tourism, pharmaceuticals, and more.  Nine executive MBA students attended, joining 21 full-time MBA students, and three undergraduates.  The course was directed by Wharton health care professor Lawton Burns, but lectures were given by eleven executives and leaders in Indian healthcare, many of whom have ongoing ties to Wharton.

Dr. Prasad Kilaru was one of three medical doctors in the EMBA program to take the course.  “From a physician’s standpoint, there was really great information on hospitals, non-profits, pharmaceuticals, and more,” he said. “I also really enjoyed the lectures on medical tourism, including the presentation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”  

Rajani Veeramachaneni, a first-year MBA Exec student who runs her own strategy consulting firm claims it was “one of the best academic courses she has ever taken, as it approached the issue from so many angles.”  Veeramachaneni enjoyed not only the lectures on hospital management and medical tourism but the presentations on cutting-edge technologies, including e-Help, mobile health, and wireless medical technology.   “I was impressed by the low-cost structure of India’s healthcare system,” she said, “from which the U.S. can learn a lot.”

Robert Zwolinski, a second-year EMBA student in San Francisco, took the course with the aim of applying his findings to his current job.  As the Director of Operations of a small pharmaceutical company in the Bay Area, Zwolinski wanted to explore the possibility of outsourcing development work – including formulation development, clinical development, and clinical trials.  “The course provided me an excellent opportunity to find out what I need to send work over there,” he said.  “India is not just a low cost option.  India offers many advantages – the education, talent, and intellectual capacity for specific activities - all of these advantages combine to make India a high quality option that can facilitate speed to market for products in development.”

When first-year Wharton EMBA student Frank Edwards, a group manager of IT Infrastructure at PepsiCo in Dallas, heard about the workshop on the Development of Web-based Services (OPIM 654) offered at Wharton | San Francisco he knew it was an opportunity he didn’t want to miss. Not only would the workshop apply management science to a creative topic like innovation, but it also would provide a chance to interact with first- and second-year Wharton EMBA students from both the East and West Coast programs as well as full-time Wharton MBA students.

The intense four-day workshop, led by Prof. Karl Ulrich, was structured as a tournament in which all students submitted ideas for online products or services that were whittled down by votes each day until six finalists remained. Edwards’ idea for Appmyself.com, a site which creates custom mobile applications, not only made it to the final round, but Edwards and several Wharton Executive MBA students from both coasts are now developing a business plan around the idea.

“The workshop showed how there are a lot of really good ideas out there and after just some small tuning and development, you can make great improvements within a couple of days in terms of understanding the customers’ needs and what your product can and should do,” he says. “The amount of opportunities that exist that are within reach is somewhat surprising.”

Edwards, who attends Wharton’s EMBA program in Philadelphia, says he also was pleasantly surprised by how much he got out of interacting with such a diversity of Wharton Executive MBA and full-time MBA students. “It was a chance to hear their perspectives and see the differences and similarities between our classes. And it was nice to validate all that you hear about how the executive program is indeed the same as the full-time program. You see that we really mirror the work that they do.”

As for the Wharton | San Francisco facility, Edwards was “amazed” by how similar the East and West Coast classrooms are. “Being from Texas, I could have applied to the Wharton program on either coast because they are equidistant to me. At the workshop, I saw that it really is the same experience in San Francisco as in Philadelphia in terms of the same professors and classrooms even down to the details like the same lights and ceiling tiles! The learning experience was very consistent, and I’m now planning to do a semester at Wharton | San Francisco to broaden my network,” he says.

Second-year Wharton EMBA student, Christina Todasco, who attends the program at Wharton|San Francisco and is a finance director at Johnson & Johnson in San Jose, agrees that the opportunity to interact with so many other types of students was a highlight of the workshop. “My team in the workshop was well balanced with folks from every single class and that made it really enjoyable because we learned a lot about their experiences.  We’ve all been staying in touch,” she says.

Todasco, who signed up for the workshop to try something “really different,” adds that she learned a lot about the importance of coming up with a lot of ideas. “If it’s just you and two other people trying to come up with the next big thing, you are limited to the purview of just three people. So you need to start with as many ideas as possible and then vote to whittle them down, getting as much feedback along the way as possible. You may think you have an awesome idea, but when no one votes for your idea, it may not actually have been that awesome.”

Emilio Maldonado, a first-year EMBA student at Wharton | San Francisco and manager of software development at Cisco Systems in San Jose, says that he learned a lot about the importance of feedback as well. “Instead of jumping in and defining the product features, you need to step back and refine the thought process and get more input in order to get to something more refined with a better chance of success,” he says.

Second-year East Coast Executive MBA student Tanya Andrien, who is a director at Duff & Phelps in Austin, says that the workshop exceeded her expectations. “Many of our classes are theoretical, but this was all about practical information you would use in starting and running a business. Prof. Karl Ulrich has a lot of experience running businesses and was really frank about successes and failures,” she says. “There were a lot of things I learned in the workshop that I wish I had known when I was working in a start-up. It was fascinating!”

In her first year in Wharton’s EMBA Program, Sarah Sullivan, a program analyst at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC, heard about the social impact projects in Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum (GCP). They sounded like a good fit with her growing interest in social enterprises in developing countries, but she wanted to finish her core courses before signing up.

So after completing her first year courses as well as an independent study over the summer for a small beeswax producing company in Cameroon, she and five EMBA classmates signed up for the GCP. The course typically pairs teams of Wharton full-time and executive MBA students and faculty with teams from partner universities in countries such as China, India, Peru, and Israel to consult with a client company interested in entering or expanding its position in the U.S. market. However, their social impact project was a bit unique in that it involved working with a partnership between the University of Pennsylvania, government of Botswana, and the University of Botswana to build capacity in Botswana in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Having recently returned from a visit to Botswana for the GCP project, we asked Sullivan and her teammate William “Willy” McColgan to share some of the highlights of their trip with us. Here’s what Sullivan had to say:

“Since we left at the end of December, everything was still closed for the holidays in Botswana so we spent the first four days in South Africa and went on safari. It was a great opportunity to get to know my classmates even better and build a stronger foundation for our group.

When we went to Gaborone, Botswana, we first met the University of Botswana business students who were working with us on the project to hammer out our goals and what we would be doing for our client. We then met with a lot of people in Gaborone – doctors, people from the Center for Disease Control, the Ministry of Health, and a few business leaders and citizens. We even got a tour of the capital and a neighboring village, which was a chance to see more of the country and get a better feel for the culture.

We were blown away by how developed Botswana is compared to many other African countries. Yet despite their development and healthcare infrastructure, it has the highest prevalence of HIV with 25% of the population infected. There is not enough capacity in terms of beds, space, medicine, and number of hours with doctors and staff. Seeing that was really hard. And it made coordinating the work really challenging because you could spend hours on this fascinating project.

While there, we did identify a lot of issues that the partnership is facing. We’ll now conduct more research on the partnership and what needs to be done to sustain its funding with a long-term strategy. Our goal is to have specific recommendations in place by May.

This experience has confirmed my interest in doing business development and strategic planning for social enterprises in developing countries in the future. It also made me realize what an incredible opportunity I’ve had at Wharton that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I’ve travelled to new places, met a lot of great people, seen other organizations in different environments, and gotten a world view of society. This was a capstone experience for me!”

McColgan agrees that the GCP trip was a wonderful experience. Here’s what he said about the project:
“When I first heard about the GCP’s social impact projects, I thought that no matter what else I do in the EMBA program, this is something I would look back on years from now and say it was really worthwhile and made an impact.

Once we arrived in Botswana, we headed straight over the border into South Africa for a safari to get adjusted to the time difference and prepare for the week ahead. What I remember the most from those days was getting stuck in the mud as it started to get dark and imagining all the things moving around you as well as a toga party on the game reserve on New Year’s Eve.

When we got to Botswana, we spent a lot of time planning and discussing our project and meeting with hospital staff, government representatives, and our University of Botswana counterparts. Later in the week, we went on the medical wards and met with residents from Penn’s Medical School as well as a Penn School of Nursing faculty member doing research on sabbatical. The University of Pennsylvania has certainly made an impact in Botswana. Hopefully our Wharton EMBA GCP team can help this continue.

This will definitely be a highlight of my time at Wharton. And I certainly strengthened my relationships with my classmates during that time, which is lasting. We’ll always have Africa!”

Many thanks to Sarah and Willy for sharing their GCP experiences. Learn more about the GCP.

Related blog: Wharton's Global Consulting Practicum EMBA Students Build International Teams While Working and Having Fun

Chris Dickey had a Doctorate in Public Health, but his job as general manager of a health services company in Manhattan wasn’t fulfilling his goal of making a real impact on a large number of people’s lives. To change that, he enrolled in Wharton’s MBA for Executives Program in 2006 where he seized the opportunity to brainstorm with classmates whenever he could about possible business plans. Soon after he graduated, he and a partner had a plan in place to create Healthpoint Services, a market-based approach to meeting the health needs of consumers at the base of the economic pyramid. In addition to providing clean water, the business also provides medical clinics in remote villages that connect patients to doctors via videoconferencing technology and remote diagnostics.

It’s been about 18 months since he graduated so we asked Chris to share some of the highlights of his unique entrepreneurial experiences with us. In addition to sending us a video video from a recent trip to India, here’s what he had to say:

“Poor people in the developing world typically don’t have access to clean water and affordable, high-quality health care. We set out to change that through a village-based unit called a Healthpoint that combines a Reverse Osmosis plant attached to a raw water source with the latest in telemedicine technology, approved drugs, and 65 diagnostic tests (and counting) that cover a range of common illnesses.

My partner, Allen Hammond, and I are convinced that we are among the pioneers of this new market-based approach to meeting the health needs of this vast group of consumers making and spending less than about $3 per day. We believe that a commercial venture focused on delivering high-quality care at an affordable price will create efficiencies, economies of scale, and a profitable, scalable company that will transform health outcomes for millions of people.

We officially launched the first three Healthpoints in India last October to some fanfare – both the Punjab Governor and Finance Minister were there as well as the national media. The politicians were so impressed with the operation that they asked us to build 600 more units in the next three years!

I recently returned from a visit to the Healthpoints, which are in Mallan, Doda, and Kotbhai, and also to our new call center based in Bathinda. I’m delighted to say that the units are all thriving, even after such a short time. The waiting rooms are full, people are lining up with 20 liter jugs to purchase clean water, and the staff is thrilled to be part of a revolutionary effort to provide access to health care for rural villagers.

During that trip, I watched a follow-up visit to the Healthpoint in Mallan by a woman who had been treated by us for joint pain a week before. She came to review her progress on the prescribed medicines and to get further instructions. She appeared to be very content with her treatment, which cost her 30 rupees (about $0.65) plus the cost of the medicines. Her doctor, too, was happy with the outcome. The fact that the doctor and patient were looking at one another through video screens seemed not to register to either of them.

The next morning, we drove to Doda, a village of about 1,500 families, nearly all of whom make a living from the vast farmland that surrounds it. When we arrived at the Healthpoint, several men were packing their 20 liter jugs full of water (which cost them 2 rupees) on the backs of their bicycles. One of the amazing aspects of this company is that getting the water has become a man’s job in these towns, replacing a traditional woman’s chore. We think it’s because the Healthpoints are also high tech gathering places and getting the water is now a cool thing to do for the men!

Inside the Healthpoint, I joined a consultation in progress. A farm worker was suffering from pains in his shoulder and side. He had been to the local government clinic where he was given vitamins and a pain killer without any real discussion. Our clinical assistant took the man’s blood pressure, temperature, pulse, and weight, carefully entering it into his electronic medical record. During the examination, our doctor was present via a large screen monitor and was asking lots of questions. It turns out that the patient had experienced several episodes during his life that appeared to be epileptic seizures. The doctor ruled out an immediate threat to the man’s health and then asked whether the patient could afford 500 rupees to get an EEG in Bathinda to check for epilepsy. The patient said yes, he had saved enough over the past year to cover the expense.

Absent a referral by our doctor, who is known in Bathinda, that EEG might have cost the worker several thousand rupees, a sum that he would have to borrow from a local loan shark, thereby ensuring that neither he nor his young family would ever escape the economic and health consequences of his illness.

I saw several other patient visits that day, not only in Doda, but also in Mallan and Kotbhai, and I was impressed by the warmth and care provided by our staff and also by patients’ ease in being seen by a doctor on TV. It’s incredible that most of these individuals have never seen a real doctor before and now they interact with one as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. The video and sound quality is so high, the lighting is so good, and the care with which the employees treat these poor patients is so genuine that the exchange of information is excellent. I’d gladly trade some of my experiences with the medical system in New York for ones like this.

When I think back on all those hours spent at Wharton discussing business ideas that would  make a difference, we owe a significant debt of gratitude to my Wharton EMBA colleagues, including Sarabjit Singh, Vikas Khurana, Mike Parker, and Rittik Chakrabarti.  I really believe that there is a tremendous demand for services like ours, not just in Punjab but in many other Indian states and other developing countries.”

Thanks to Chris for sharing those highlights and good luck to Healthpoint Services in its future growth!

To learn more about Healthpoint Services, contact Chris Dickey at: chris.dickey@e-healthpoint.net

After working as a pediatric surgical nurse and then at a small medical company, Shelley Boyce wanted to formalize her business education in Wharton’s EMBA Program. However, going back to school after working “in the trenches” for 10 years was a bit daunting.

During the weeklong orientation known as “boot camp”, a professor announced that if the students could survive his microeconomics class for the next six weeks then they would be fine. As challenging as that sounded at the time, she quickly realized that she would indeed be fine. “Wharton does a great job at selecting students who will succeed and giving them the skills they need to be successful – of course that doesn’t make it any easier that first week,” laughs Boyce.

That same week, another professor made an equally impactful announcement. She recalls, “He stood in front of our class and said, ‘There are three types of people: bean counters, gear heads, and poets. Figure out who you are and connect yourself to each of the other two groups and that will help you be successful.’”

Not only did that advice prove useful at Wharton, but it also rang true as she launched her start-up, MedRisk, the following year with fellow Wharton Executive MBA student Jerry Poole. The two, she explains, were very different. “Jerry is very bright, detailed, and structured and really knows how to build and sustain a well oiled operating machine where I am much more loose and creative. I work with a crayon and he works with a mechanical pencil,” says Boyce.

While working with others with diverse management styles can be challenging, Boyce maintains that it also is critical. “You need the thinking of people unlike yourself to make the business grow,” she says. “When hiring, we look for skills and talent, but also that type of diversity. When our professor said there are three types of people and each has his or her own skill set and contributions to make, that applies in business as well.”

During her second year at Wharton, Boyce says she was more relaxed and confident as she found her groove. However, that calm didn’t last long because not only did she deliver her first child that year, but she also started MedRisk. She credits the support from her classmates with helping her stay in the program despite the many demands on her time. “Wharton was where I needed to be. If I had taken a leave of absence, I would have lost out on a lot of opportunities and learnings that helped me in real time as I launched the business,” she says.

 “I’d be sitting in accounting class learning about financial statements and then go home and build a P&L for the new business. I’d sit in negotiations class learning how to buy a car and then go home and figure out how to negotiate getting money from an investor. Or in an operations class, I’d read these great case studies about the successes and failures of companies. And I still have Prof. Richard Shell's book about entrepreneurship which sits on my shelf and still gets pulled down twice a year – and this is 15 years later!”

Today, the company that she launched in 1994 with just six employees and a bank loan has grown national in scope, employing over 250 people and generating $120 million in sales. In addition to running her business, she and her husband, Dan, are busy raising their three daughters.  Boyce also spends time mentoring young entrepreneurs. “I feel extremely passionate about entrepreneurship. It’s one thing to start your own company and live through the successes of that, but equally rewarding is to pass it on and share some of that wisdom with others,” she says.

Boyce credits Wharton with many of those successes. “I didn’t have plans to become an entrepreneur when I undertook my Wharton MBA, but while here I gained the skill set, toolkit, and confidence to become an entrepreneur so when the opportunity came, I felt well prepared to take a risk.”

Read more about Shelley Boyce.