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Fall 2019

We have had some exciting times here at �԰�����, and I am very excited to give you some of the highlights.

As you will read elsewhere in this newsletter, we have a new faculty member who joined us this year. Seongwon Choi completed her PhD from UAB over the summer and joined the �԰����� HCAD faculty in August.  She will be teaching our strategic planning and management courses. Her research focuses on access to care for underserved populations. We are very excited to have her join us and think you will be very impressed with her when you get to meet her. We have no doubt that she will fit right into our student-centered culture at �԰�����. She is also an avid Spurs fan, so she is loving life here in San Antonio!

A year ago we had our CAHME site team visit on campus for our reaccreditation. This went very well, and we have received the full seven-year re-accreditation. This was the result of a great team effort of all the faculty and staff, as well as contributions from our students and alumni. Among the strengths identified in the site visit report were our approach to experiential learning and the way we integrate our curriculum directly into the field of practice. Additionally, they were impressed with the way we assign students projects that span multiple courses and make connections across what are typically siloed subjects. Note that these program elements are only made possible by our close relationship with you, our alumni. Without your input to the faculty and time spent with students and other alumni, we would not have the ability to make our HCAD Program what it is. So thank you.

Our On Campus second year students have transitioned onto their residencies. One of the recent changes to our curriculum that I am most excited about is how we have developed the capstone course. Each student is placed into two separate groups, and each group works on a “live” project for a health care organization. Because of your generous donations to the HCAD Annual Fund, we have the resources  to allow students to travel to Houston, Austin, Dallas, or wherever their organization is located, to spend time there as they develop their deliverables. All of these projects are open-ended by design. Each project has a faculty adviser, but the students work directly with the organization. At the end of the semester, they travel to their organization and present their findings directly to senior leaders in that organization. Typically, this organization is where one of the students on the team will be doing his or her residency, so as you can imagine, this ups the ante in terms of how the students approach their projects as compared to something they are simply doing internally.

We recently competed in the Robbins Institute for Health Policy and Leadership Case Competition overseen by Baylor University’s MBA program. Each year, twelve schools are invited to participate. Teams of three students arrive on Wednesday evening and, on Thursday morning, are given the case. They then have until 11 p.m. to turn in their deliverable.  Students are sequestered into a room and are allowed only one hour with their faculty coach in the evening and may only discuss presentation style. All of the strategy, financial analysis, and other content is generated by the students on their own. Then, on Friday morning, the teams present in groups of four, and the top team from each group advances to the finals.  This year, not only did we advance to the final (ahead of St. Louis, George Washington, and Ohio State) but we won the competition (ahead of UAB and the University of Pittsburgh). Obviously, we are very proud of our student team: Andi Fernandez (headed to Children’s Health for her residency); Sabrina Gill (headed to Baylor Scott & White); and Justin Glenney (headed to Memorial Hermann). They were awesome. This was the fifth year of the competition, and we have been in the finals three of those years and are the only two-time winners. And again, note that this is funded, in part, by alumni donations to the HCAD Annual Fund. So, thanks to you, we are able to participate in these competitions!

We also have two great cohorts of executive students working with us. It is always impressive to see how our executive students manage to balance their time in the program with their normal lives at work and at home.  Yet the quality of their work continues to exceed our expectations. If you have identified any “up and coming” leaders in your organization who would benefit from our degree, please send them our way.

 I would love to talk further with you about these and all the other exciting happenings, but I hope you are able to see from this report how critical your involvement is to the success of our program. Without your gifts to the HCAD Annual Fund, we could not compete in the case competitions that give our students such a great learning experience. They also provide valuable external exposure to our program. We could not offer our capstone course that allows our students to travel to visit and present to their sponsoring organizations on site. Furthermore, we would not have the extra funds needed to help us in our efforts to recruit top faculty to join our team. Without your time and energy spent with students, faculty, and other alumni, we could not offer the applied experiential learning experience that sets our program apart from and above other programs. We could not make sure that the content of our courses remains dynamic and up to date. Thanks to you, our students receive the skills they need to be successful moving forward in their careers, and, frankly, the faculty would not have as much fun as they do teaching and learning with our students. So thank you for your support of the program: we could not do it without you.

Edward J. Schumacher, Ph.D.
HCAD Professor and Chair
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