Students take second place in national health care case competition

Photo, (L-R) Borrelli, Geiger and Harmon, with presenter, Dr. Ray Watts

Three graduate students from the UNC School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Administration took second place recently in a national health care case study competition hosted by the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The UNC team included master’s students Leslie Geiger, Christina Borrelli and Robert Harmon.

Twenty other colleges and universities competed in the event, including Johns Hopkins University, Arizona State University, University of Florida and the University of Minnesota. Business students from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University also participated.

“This is a great accomplishment for our students,” said Peggy Leatt, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Health Policy and Administration. “The competition was excellent, and our students just did a fantastic job with their case study. We are all thrilled with their second-place finish.”

Geiger, Borrelli and Harmon analyzed a case study based on improvements suggested for a hospital emergency room. They also were asked to develop a set of practical recommendations about leadership, staffing issues, operational efficiency, design challenges, finance and marketing.

The team made oral presentations about their work and fielded questions in front of a nationally-recognized panel of health administration professionals. Five teams selected as finalists, including the UNC team, made a second presentation in front of a larger group.

Each of the participants praised how the UNC master’s of health administration program had prepared them to do well in the competition.

The program “teaches us to approach situations balancing business and public health,” Geiger said. “Our recommendation [in the case] focused on making appropriate business decisions while keeping the community in the forefront.”

One of the team’s strengths, Borrelli believes, “was our recommendation to focus upon engaging the community [in the case study], including suggesting such innovations as an Emergency Department Steering Committee and the importance of addressing the needs of the Hispanic population in the area.”

The department prepared the team for the case competition, Borrelli said, “because it taught us to look at the community as opposed to just focusing internally on a program.”

Harmon agreed. “Maybe what set us apart more than anything else,” he said, “was that our recommendations covered all the issues in a balanced and sequential manner. The outcome of this competition was a testament to me of how well the department and faculty prepare us to resolve the difficult issues we will surely encounter in our careers.”

“This really validates the strength of our master’s program,” said Bruce Fried, PhD, associate professor and program director of the residential master’s program. “It also reinforces our core mission – to prepare students for both the business and community side of health care, which they ably demonstrated in their presentation.”

This is the second year in which students from the Department of Health Policy and Administration have won awards in national health care case competitions. In 2007, a three-person team took second place in the annual Everett V. Fox Student Case Competition, sponsored by the National Association of Health Services Executives (NAHSE) and held in Dallas, Texas. Another group won first place in an international competition held at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business in Tempe, Ariz.

Ohio State University won first place in this month’s event at the University of Alabama, and third place was awarded to Arizona State University.

School of Public Health contact: Ramona DuBose, director of communications, (919) 966-7467 or ramona_dubose@unc.edu.