Vanderbilt’s Health Care MBA Program provides students with opportunities to learn from and collaborate with researchers and innovators at the cutting edge of health care and biotechnology. Representing a combination of distinguished academic researchers, leading health care practitioners and business leaders, Owen faculty work closely with students to address this rapidly growing industry from strategic, economic, ethical and operational perspectives. These snapshots offer a glimpse into the program’s renowned faculty:
Research Faculty
Larry Van Horn, PhD
Associate Professor of Management
Faculty Director for Health Care Programs
Professor Van Horn is an expert, research and frequent national speaker on health care management and economics. His research on health care organizations has appeared in leading academic and business publications. As faculty director for the Vanderbilt Health Care MBA program, Van Horn takes great pride in getting to know each student personally and helping each discover his or her niche in the health care marketplace. "what we're doing here in health care is special," he says. "By combining your unique experience with business fundamentals and health care knowledge, you will leave here a completely differentiated, inimitable product."
Michael Lapré, PhD
Associate Professor of Management
Professor Lapré is an internationally recognized authority on organizational learning curves. A paper he authored with Professor Gary Scudder on paths to performance improvement in that field won the Wickham Skinner Award for Best Paper at the annual conference of the Production and Operations Management Society as well as the Stan Hardy Award for best paper published in a set of four operations management journals. Lapré is also a recipient of the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence.
Bruce Cooil, PhD
The Dean Samuel B. and Evelyn R. Richmond Professor of Management
In collaboration with leading scientists and medical practitioners, Professor Cooil developed the statistical foundation for a groundbreaking method of diagnosing and tracking the treatment of arteriosclerosis and coronary heart disease (CHD), the single greatest cause of mortality and morbidity in the U.S. By providing a more accurate measure of coronary calcification, this approach reduces CHD-related deaths and the costs of diagnostic procedures and treatments.
Bart Victor, PhD
Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership
Professor Victor encourages and guides students to consider the ethical consequences inherent in any health care or biotech enterprise, and oversees the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions, dedicated to the discussion and promotion of moral values relevant to the professional schools, including the Law, Divinity, Medical and Nursing Schools. In addition, he is chairman of the board of BH1, a non-profit entity that operates two specialty hospitals and a temporary nurse staffing agency, and has consulted for several leading health care institutions nationwide on a variety of ethics-related issues.
Nancy Lea Hyer, PhD
Associate Professor of Management
Professor Hyer has conducted a multi-year study – in partnership with Vanderbilt University Medical Center – on how the principles of cellular manufacturing can be applied in a trauma unit to eliminate downtime, increase productivity and bring cost-efficiency. Hyer has also conducted a mission and culture assessment for a major medical institution to determine the degree to which employees are aligned with the stated mission in their patient interactions.
Timothy Vogus, PhD
Assistant Professor of Management
An expert in the areas of human resource management and organization theory, Professor Vogus has investigated how health care organizations can build a culture of safety so as to minimize medical error and other sources of harm to patients. His research studies focus on how managers' human resource practices (e.g., hiring, training and performance evaluation) enable higher quality interactions among the professionals delivering health care as well as better organizational processes (which he refers to as mindful organizing) that enable errors and potential errors to be detected and corrected before they cause harm. He has published this work in leading organizational and health care journals and has attempted to implement these principles through a consortium of hospitals in Minnesota and the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement (ICSI).
Clinical Faculty
Jon Lehman, MBA
Associate Dean of Students
Associate Dean for Health Care
Jon Lehman serves as Associate Dean of Students, responsible for admissions, student life and career placement, in addition to his role as Associate Dean for Health Care, with responsibility for the health care management programs. He serves on the Executive, Core Curriculum and Teaching Effectiveness Committees at Owen. An entrepreneur and private investor focusing on health care, technology and education-related companies, Lehman previously served as president and CEO of Evolved Digital Systems, a leading provider of digital-based image and information management systems for the health care industry.
Keith Gregg, MBA Adjunct Professor of Management CEO of JRG Ventures, LLC Keith Gregg is president and CEO of JRG Ventures, LLC, a multinational business development and growth strategy firm specializing in Life Sciences, Healthcare Services/Systems and Information Technology with a client portfolio encompassing start-up ventures to multinational firms. Gregg's 22 years of industry experience includes key positions at multiple biotechnology and high-growth pharmaceutical companies, where he was responsible for corporate development and licensing, operations, marketing, product launches, financing and mergers.
Michael Burcham, MBA
Professor for the Practice of Management
Michael Burcham provides strategic consulting to a variety of firms and venture funds involved in health care start-ups. He is a highly successful entrepreneur-most recently president of ParadigmHealth, a $300-million disease management firm. Prior to joining ParadigmHealth, Burcham was president of Theraphysics, a venture-backed, specialty rehabilitation firm he founded in 1992. Burcham has published numerous papers and is a frequent national speaker on health care strategy and entrepreneurial thinking in health care.
Jim Cooper, JD
Adjunct Professor of Management
Congressman for Tennessee’s 5th District
Jim Cooper is a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Tennessee's Fifth Congressional District and serving on the federal Armed Services, Budget, and Oversight and Government Reform Committees. In 1992, Cooper authored a comprehensive national health reform plan, the chief rival to the Clinton health care plan. Cooper also has significant experience in private business, including law, investment banking, and serving as board member for several public and private companies. He has taught health care policy to Owen students since 1995.
Harry Jacobson, MD
Vice Chancellor for Health Affairs, Vanderbilt University
As CEO of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Dr. Jacobson imparts to Owen students unique insights related to running one of the nation’s premier medical treatment and research institutions. VUMC includes the Schools of Medicine and Nursing, four hospitals and a large faculty group practice. Elected to the prestigious Institute of Medicine, Dr. Jacobson is an accomplished entrepreneur who has started three health-related companies.
Roberta Goodman, MBA
Adjunct Professor of Management
Principal, Health Care Analytics LLC
Roberta Goodman brings more than 20 years of experience as a financial analyst, investment banker and health care consultant to the classroom. Goodman is a perennial favorite on lists of top analysts in financial publications including the Wall Street Journal and Institutional Investor, and is a principal with Nashville-based Health Care Analytics, a strategic consulting firm specializing in the health care services industry. Goodman is author of the white paper "Healthier, Wealthier, and Wiser? Consumer-Driven Health Care" and she recently testified at a congressional briefing on consumer-driven health care. She is a regular participant in the Center for Studying Health Systems Change's annual "Wall Street Comes to Washington" events, intended to provide the Washington health policy community with insights into market developments in health care that are relevant to policy-makers.
Paul H. Keckley, PhD
Adjunct Professor of Management
Executive Director, Deloitte Center For Health Solutions
Paul Keckley is a health economist, researcher and policy expert whose 30-year career includes leadership roles in the private sector and in academic medicine. Prior to his current position as executive director of Deloitte Center for Health Solutions in Washington D. C., he was executive director of the Vanderbilt Center for Evidence-based Medicine and taught in the School of Medicine. He is widely considered an expert on applications of evidence-based medicine to health system transformation in pay for performance programs, consumer directed care and assessments of practice variation. He has written books and articles and is a frequent speaker for national health care organizations and the national media.
Gregg Tarquinio, PhD, MBA, CPA
Adjunct Professor of Management
Vice Chair for Finance and Administration, Vanderbilt Department of Medicine
Gregg Tarquinio not only shares his expertise with students, but also has responsibility for Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s revenue and expense financial management and management of extramural research and teaching funds. In 1999, he assumed a projected operational deficit and turned it into a profit of $1.6 million.
