We have had a very exciting semester here at Trinity. As always, we have two great new cohorts of students in the On Campus and Executive programs. The faculty is enjoying getting to know them – we think they will live up to the great reputation that all of you have established for Trinity.
Things are going very well with the program. Our Second Year On Campus students are getting ready to go off on their residencies. They have been engaged in a number of “real life” projects in both their capstone and finance classes this semester. These projects included case studies around the decision to build a new hospital for a local health care system, a consulting project for a health care system in a large metropolitan area for how to expand their spine business, a deep dive into the analytics of physician compensation and productivity along with strategies for how compensation models need to change in a value-based world, and a marketing project for a large system to help them understand how to allocate resources to digital vs traditional marketing methods. I am very proud of these students and how much they stretched themselves. As an alumnus/a of our program, you should be very proud of the quality of students coming out of our program.
This summer, the faculty met to examine our goals and strategies for the program. We examined our mission, vision, and values statement. Our mission statement remains:
To enhance the practice of health care administration by preparing individuals for management and leadership roles in the health care field
We decided to change our vision statement. Our new vision is:
We strive to be the number one program in preparing leaders who will transform health care
I am very excited about this new vision for our program. It captures well the spirit of the faculty and staff.
- We are striving to be number one. Note that this implies a continual improvement attitude – even if we reach “number one” we need to continue to strive to maintain that status. There will always be ways to improve the program.
- We want to prepare leaders, not just managers. Whether they end up in the C-suite or not, we want all of our alumni to be leaders.
- But not just leaders of the status quo; we want our alumni to be the leaders who transform health care. Our alumni need to be agents of change who are creative thinkers willing to take the risks required to transform our health care system. In, say 20-30 years, when the U.S. health care system is the best health care system in the world, we want to be able to say that Trinity University alumni were at the forefront of bringing about that change.
We recognize this is a tall task and it will stretch the program in a lot of ways, but that is what a vision statement should do. Over the next year or so, we will be working with our Advisory Council and our Preceptors to evaluate our curriculum with respect to this vision to make sure that the content of our classes is what our students need in order to become transformational leaders. This will require us to get out of our comfort zones as teachers and be willing to bring alternative ideas into the classroom. The fact that we have faculty and staff who are willing to take on this challenge is one of the things that makes being a part of this program so rewarding.
So there are many exciting things happening here. I would love to talk further with you about these and all the other happenings. Thank you for your support of the program: our alumni are a key component of what makes Trinity special and is critical to our future success.
Edward J. Schumacher
Professor and Chair
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