Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellows Take Their Capstone Projects into the Real World
After completing Yale SOM’s MBA for Executives program, Alicia Hardy ’23, Amaziah Coleman ’24, and Steven Starks ’23 returned to their workplaces with proposals to make healthcare more equitable, and medical workforces and research more inclusive.
Eighteen months after completing her MBA, Alicia Hardy ’23 saw a healthcare equity initiative she had conceptualized as a project at Yale SOM come to life in the real world.
Hardy is a graduate of the MBA for Executives program, which she attended as a fellow in the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership. For the fellowship’s capstone project, she had proposed a strategic merger between two federally-qualified health centers in California. “I completed the merger a year and a half post-graduation,” Hardy says. “The goal was to create more strength and sustainability in the regional healthcare safety net system.”
The merger, between OLE Health and CommuniCare Health Centers, created CommuniCare+OLE, a primary care provider that offers services to more than 70,000 underserved patients and clients across California’s Napa, Solano, and Yolo counties. Hardy is now the organization’s CEO.
Created in collaboration with the Commonwealth Fund and endowed by a gift from Robert C. Pozen, the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship gives healthcare practitioners the leadership skills and business knowledge necessary to tackle healthcare system inequities. In their capstone projects, students draft actionable plans that integrate business tools and data to increase access and healthcare quality to underserved communities.
“As a leader, it’s my responsibility to seek the highest level of training and education in the equity area, and that’s what this fellowship offers,” Hardy says.
Fellows have focused on a variety of topics. In his project, Steven Starks ’23 explored how medical societies can be leveraged to create a more inclusive workforce in the medical professions.
“I evaluated the organizational structure of key medical societies to determine their resource allocations for equity and workforce inclusion programming,” says Starks, a clinical assistant professor at the Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine who also serves on the American Psychiatric Association board.
“Along with medical schools and residency and fellowship training programs, medical specialty societies play a key role in the development of the physician workforce,” Starks says. “My research revealed that meaningful change relies on institutional partnerships to achieve more diverse representation.”
Amaziah Coleman ’24 used her capstone project to address health inequities in National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical trials. Coleman is a medical officer in the NIH’s Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Transplantation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Building on the evidence of disparities in clinical trial diversity, my project used business school concepts to create organizational change that would better embed health equity within clinical trial networks,” Coleman says.
“The goals were to begin the strategic planning necessary to standardize equity frameworks across my organization’s clinical trial networks, to enhance diverse representation and address disparities in asthma and allergic disease, and to ground asthma and allergic research conducted within a health equity framework.”
At SOM, Coleman found the school’s librarians especially helpful. “They were a critical resource,” she says. “They directed me to resources for obtaining and analyzing crucial marketplace data, and I was then able to use the frameworks learned in courses to identify the stakeholders necessary for change.”
Hardy says that the skills gained in the classroom made it possible for her to complete the merger of OLE Health and CommuniCare Health Centers. At SOM, she learned how to conduct financial due diligence research on both healthcare centers; create multi-year financial projections of the proposed merger; and determine how to best invest projected revenue increases so that they would increase employee wages while expanding services to vulnerable populations.
“The fellowship gives us a healthcare framework that focuses on issues of equity and systemic change, particularly for the most vulnerable,” she says. “I wanted a program that was grounded in the values of equity and finding new ways to think about complex problems within our healthcare system.”
Prospective students can learn more about the Pozen-Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in Health Equity Leadership and submit a pre-assessment to get personalized feedback from a member of the admissions team.
