Cornell’s Healthcare Leadership EMBA/MS was established in 2017, and is held on Cornell’s Roosevelt Island campus – a peaceful living experience compared to other parts of New York City that is well-connected to Manhattan, accessible to subway lines for students to commute into the city.
The program spans 22 months and is notably the only Ivy League program in U.S. that offers graduates a dual degree –an EMBA and an MS from a world-renowned medical college—Weill Cornell Medicine. Since the program has roots in both schools, students are taught by leading faculty from both.
“If you look at the Healthcare MBA programs, that’s a very fast-growing space. You see four or five players in this market. But all of them are standard MBA programs with a few courses taught by their business school faculty. What we are offering is very unique. We are offering an MBA/MS in Healthcare Leadership taught by faculty from both our medical school and our business school. The student population entails both physicians/clinicians, and people who are working in the healthcare space but not in clinical roles. I think that’s also a very, very unique opportunity,” Manoj Thomas, senior director of Cornell Johnson’s EMBA programs, tells Poets&Quants.
The program kicks off in July and meets in person on campus every other weekend on Saturdays and Sundays. There are around 55-60 students at any given time in the cohort, and around half of them are women. Class cohorts are typically composed of a mix of clinicians and non-clinicians in the healthcare field across the healthcare ecosystem which brings diverse perspectives.
“How do you put a group of professionals like us in one space that actually works? I think that the program has this figured out. With half of us being practitioners and the other half working in public health, IT, the payer side, and even community health, it speaks volumes to be able to engage on all of those levels, and we are able to discuss our challenges and realize we all play a part in coming up with a solution,” says EMBA Neiger Green in a YouTube video on Cornell’s website.
Built into the EMBA are four residential sessions – two at the Ithaca campus and two in New York City.
Signature events are open to EMBAs that feature business leaders and healthcare experts, such as the Luminaries in Healthcare Leadership, the Learning Table Series that take place during the class weekends, and the Healthcare Lightning Talks on trends and innovations.
“As a physician executive, I need to have a holistic view of the business in healthcare that the program instills. The COVID-19 pandemic shed a light on some needed improvements and inequities in healthcare delivery. Developing new healthcare delivery models and optimizing innovation will allow health systems to provide a more efficient service to patients. Johnson and Weill Cornell are the best schools to gain exposure to innovative ideas and the tools to drive innovation across a challenging landscape,” says EMBA LeWanza Harris on Cornell’s site.
