Stanford’s MCiM: Where Healthcare Meets Technology [Episode 610]
In this episode of Admissions Straight Talk, host Dr. Valerie Wherley sits down with Dr. Kevin Schulman, professor of medicine at Stanford University and faculty director of the Master of Science in Clinical Informatics Management (MCiM) program. Together, they explore how Stanford’s innovative MCiM degree is preparing the next generation of healthcare leaders at the intersection of medicine, business, and technology.
Dr. Schulman shares how the MCiM program was created to address one of healthcare’s most pressing questions: how to use technology to improve cost, quality, and access. He explains the program’s unique cross-disciplinary model – drawing on Stanford’s Schools of Medicine, Business, and Engineering – and describes how students collaborate across diverse professional backgrounds to solve real-world challenges.
Listeners will learn how MCiM students gain marketable, hands-on skills through weekend classes, applied practicum projects, and mentorship from leaders across healthcare sectors. Dr. Schulman also discusses ROI for mid-career professionals, how design thinking shapes the curriculum, and why understanding healthcare’s complexities is key to building scalable, ethical solutions in the digital age.
Tune in to hear these key takeaways:
- How Stanford’s MCiM program bridges clinical practice, data science, and management
- What types of professionals thrive in this one-year, in-person master’s program
- The role of design thinking, ethics, and AI in shaping healthcare innovation
- What makes a strong MCiM applicant and how to stand out in the admissions process
Show Transcript
Let’s jump right into our questions today. For our new listeners, can you provide a brief background of when the Clinical Informatics Management Program was started? And was it started in response to seeing a particular gap in healthcare?
Yeah, well thanks. Our program is now five years old. So it’s actually a management degree. The question about the gap in healthcare was how do we understand how to use technology to improve cost quality and access our triple A. You know there are very few other tools available for us to really do that. And so we’ve focused on technology. But the issues are kind of interesting. We’re here at Stanford. And Stanford’s all about needs-based innovation. And so the question is not technology. It’s how do we understand how to apply technology to our business processes in healthcare? Because what we want to do is improve productivity, improve patient outcomes, improve patient access. So our program is half business, most to the core of an MBA, and the half about technology, and then it’s wrapped with a year-long ethics program.
Okay, very interesting. That actually brings me right into my next question. So next question and a follow-up. What I found very interesting was reading your program’s description and the cross-disciplinary approach. And the cross-disciplinary approach talks about this lovely intersection between healthcare, business management, and technology. So not only do I imagine you must have faculty from all of those different disciplines, but can you describe how that cross-disciplinary approach appears in your classroom and also how it appears in an applied setting for the students?
Sure, that’s a great question. So start with the faculty. So our faculty are drawn from the schools of medicine, business, and engineering. And what’s really interesting about our program is almost all of our faculty are senior faculty or senior leaders at Stanford. We have an executive vice president who is a former L.E.K. consultant and the CFO of our hospital that co-teach our strategy class. But our business school faculty that teach several of our classes actually have won teaching awards. Our engineering faculty, again, come at this from a technology perspective, like how do we build businesses around technology? So all that’s very, very exciting from the faculty side. We mirror that on the student side. So we deliberately recruit a cohort that’s a mix of people and backgrounds in business, medicine, and technology. And so we design a classroom so that people have different experiences and different perspectives. And then we mix, create teams for the students in the program where you’re rotating with people from these different perspectives. So you’re learning all these different ideas from the faculty, but you’re also learning all these different ideas from the people on your teams when you’re doing your homework assignments or your projects.
That’s great. And I also read that this program can be completed in 12 months and is ideal for the working professional. Both items seem very appealing. And so with that, what types of students are you attracting to this program? And what are you finding these students have for career aspirations? Are they also interdisciplinary in their focus? Or are they landing in business? Or are they landing in healthcare? Talk a little bit about that.
You know, I’ll say at the end of the day, what unites every one of our students is they’re passionate about making a difference.
And for some, that means going back to the clinical environment. For some, it means starting up a technology company. So really different ways in which people are using this program. Some of the people stay. So I should go back. It’s a one-year program. It’s a full Stanford master’s degree. It’s all in person. You have your homework assignments in between classes. All the teaching, all the classes are here in person every other weekend for a year. And the same number of class hours if you were a full-time student, but because we have classes on the weekends, working professionals can participate. And that was my goal from the beginning, to help people really accelerate their careers. So once you’ve had some experience in healthcare, and healthcare is an incredibly complicated sector. So once you’ve had experience in your disciplinary part, how do we accelerate your career into leadership? If you come from a clinical background, a technical background, a business background. And so mid-career professionals, really, this is a key leverage point for them. And then also learning from mid-career professionals adds a lot. So that’s always been a very exciting part of this.
Absolutely. Well, we know people like to know that they are going to get a return on their investment with anything, with anything that they invest in. So if students are going to invest in this master’s degree program, can you talk a little bit about the marketable skills they will have upon graduation?
Yeah, so let’s do the ROI. That’s great. So first off, you don’t have to quit your job. So if you were thinking about doing a full-time, say, an MBA program, and I’m a faculty member at the business school. I love the MBA program. But my students don’t have to give up their full-time employment. Now, some of them do, but it’s not a requirement. So that improves the ROI right there. It minimizes your investment. We get done in a year. So when you have class on the weekend, this happens all the time, you learn something new, you bring back to work on Monday. Yeah, your performance during the year is going to change. And we see lots of people getting promoted, changing jobs, and having new opportunities while they’re in the program. And then the marketable skills when you go out, again, we have a really rigorous core business curriculum. And so moving up in terms of management is a great opportunity for our students.
And then the technology piece, you know, it depends where you want to go if you want to start your own company or to do entrepreneurship within organizations. We have a Biodesign for Digital Health, which Stanford’s very well known for their design school and this kind of new approach to innovation. So we start with that as a core of our technology side. I do a class now called digitally enabled care. Like how do we rethink the way in which we use technology in healthcare? So it’s no secret that you are using technology in every other aspect of your life to provide services that we don’t do in healthcare. You know, and how do we change that? And then, you know, we have this magic now. When we started the program, Like, LLMs and foundation models were just a dream. And now it’s an everyday reality. So we have a really robust data science course with one of the thought leaders here at Stanford. We have a very robust informatics and data architecture class.
Our ethics program is taught by the former head of our bioethics center here at Stanford. Everyone loves this. You know, it’s a separate class, like, you know, there’s, we’re facing a field that’s fraught with ethical challenges. Like, do I deploy an LLM to take care of patients today? How do I protect the privacy of your data when I feed it through an LLM model? You know, it’s just no shortage of issues that we have to face. Everyone really enjoys having a chance to deliberately focus on those issues and have them called out, as well as providing a core framework of how do I deal with this for tomorrow’s challenge.
And then finally, everyone has a practicum project, a kind of capstone. And we’ve divided it up into four different deliverables. You could do a research project, you could do a case study, you can write a business plan, or you could do an experiential learning opportunity working. You’ve always wanted to figure out what some industry is like or what some job is like, well, there’s a great chance to do that, to try something out. And so in terms of skills, that’s a really broad set of, I would say, palette that you get out of this that you can apply.
Now, we come at this with a business philosophy, a business school philosophy. And one of the great things about business schools compared to public health schools is business schools say, I don’t know the answer to your problem, but I do know the tools that you’ll need to solve it. And I think we add to that the idea of Stanford’s emphasis on design thinking, like focusing on the problem and not the solutions in order to develop a solution that can scale. And then really give you an understanding of what technology is, that at a really fundamental level. Now you don’t become a programmer. You don’t get scared that you have to code. But you’re working with data scientists and people who really understand the technology.
Right. I’d like to ask a follow-up question. When you talked about a final project, it sounds like students really have a choice in terms of a business plan, or you talked about a capstone project. So I love that thought of students having a choice in what best fits either their career plan or what’s next for them. When they’re thinking about that choice, are they working with a career advisor or a mentor or a graduate of the program? Who helps them sort of craft that choice?
The answer is yes. all of the above. We, since we’re a relatively new program, we built this cadre of mentors that are leaders in healthcare from across the country. And so they’re available for speed dating. know, what’s this career like? What’s a career like in the provider side or in the payer side or in pharma? And so that’s available.
When the practicum’s a formal course with a faculty member, Kavita Patel, who was in the Obama White House, it leads that together with one of our graduates. So you have to meet with Kavita to talk about your ideas and to move things forward. The other faculty of the program are available as a resource as well. Then you have the students in the class. And then the last couple years, one of the ideas here at Stanford is this idea of research-based innovation. Scott Brady, who runs Innovation Endeavors, which is Eric Schmidt’s family fund, said, made an observation that we bring amazing students to Stanford, and then they work on the wrong problems. And they waste their time. So one of the things we’ve been doing for the last couple years now is we feed problems. Here are problems from the delivery side that need to be solved. And so they do that as class projects, but they also can extend those into the practicum if they want.
That’s wonderful. I like that concept of longitudinal problem thinking, not necessarily problem solving, like you said, but problem thinking.
I mean, again, the business school perspective, you know, there’s a lot of canned solutions out there, especially in healthcare. You know, there’s a lot of concepts of people floating around. One of my favorites is this idea of value-based healthcare, which people talked a lot about. It’s failed. We’ve done it for 15 years. It hasn’t worked. Like, healthcare costs are going up at double digits. We need something different. So our idea is not to sell a solution to the problem. Our idea is to, you know, the Stanford thing that’s really unique is how do I dig deep into having a fundamental understanding of what the problem is? Because then I could have the courage to really tackle big problems and try and solve them. So one of the projects that’s a collaborative project between the med school and the business school here right now is looking at administrative costs in healthcare. So the U.S. spends about a third of healthcare spending, or $5.6 trillion in healthcare spending on administrative costs. We spend more to manage the healthcare system in the United States than France, Germany, and Italy combined spend on healthcare. But we’ve been talking about that for a long time. In fact, HIPAA, when it was passed in 1996, was supposed to reduce administrative costs. But people haven’t really dug into why. And so we’ve spent the last two years digging into the why. And now we’re kind of coming forward with ideas about here’s why and we published this. And with our students from MSIM and the business school. We had a paper in JAMA earlier this year on highlighting some of our work. And now we’re trying to move forward. Can we bring our solutions out to market, either as public entities or as private entities? But it’s an illustration of this very deliberate approach that we’re taking to focus on the problem, and that gives you a chance to really design solutions that could work.
Well, for any listener out there who is also interested in digging further into the why, I know your application submission date is upcoming. Would you like to tell the listeners about some of those important application dates so they could take note?
So I think our first round of applications is open now. We have two rounds. So our first round is open now, and then we’ll have the final applications due, closes in January. So we have one round in the fall, especially for clinical folk. They need, you know, their schedules, they need to know if they’re in the program or not because they’ve got to adjust their schedule six months out. And so we give you a chance for that.
Right.
If you apply during the fall, Stanford has this amazing scholarship program, the Knight-Hennessey program, that actually funds graduate students. So you have a chance to apply to that program in round one of admissions. So that’s an opportunity for folks as well. But the applications, pretty standard web-based application. I would say, and I’m jumping ahead in some of your questions, you know, what really distinguishes people are the letters of recommendation. And people come to our program with lots of different backgrounds. You know, think about what technology background people are that drop out of school and, you know, are hackers, all the way through to really distinguished, you know, physicians, senior physicians. But we want to, again, our program’s about people with passion that really want to solve a problem. And that comes through in their letters of recommendation. So I would think we asked for three. I would think really carefully of people who really know you and know your interests and your commitment to making a difference.
Okay, you’re right, that was gonna be my last question. What are you looking for in terms of a competitive applicant? So it sounds like you’re looking for someone interested in digging deep into those questions with strong letters of recommendation. Anything else you could add?
You know, I think it’s an exciting time because at one level we’re facing a crisis. Healthcare is an evolving crisis right now with lots of changes that are being made at the federal level. There’s an evolving crisis in terms of what’s happening to private health insurance. We’re approaching double-digit increases in costs again. So this, you know, our triple aim of cost, quality, and access, this set of challenges, unfortunately, is getting worse, not better. And the question is, what do we do about it? And the reason why we have this program is, unfortunately, one of the only answers is technology. The cool thing is with LLMs, you can actually see ways to build solutions that could get us through this. And so to me, I think it’s a really exciting opportunity.
I guess the other question is, do you even need to do a master’s degree? And I would say, you know, the other thing that complicates, especially for people who are outside the healthcare system, is that healthcare is littered with failures. Lots of people think they can tackle a problem. Look, this thing doesn’t exist in healthcare, it exists everywhere else in the world, why can’t I just build this thing for healthcare? And they don’t realize, like, phone-based glucometers are a medical device regulated by FDA. They don’t realize that you need a code to get paid for reimbursement, you know, for your technology.
And so there’s all these things that really are hidden in healthcare that make it a very complicated environment for you to be successful as an entrepreneur or making a change. And so I think there are a couple of things that, you know, we have that give you an advantage in that. One is that we spend a year focusing on those questions. It’s only a year, but it’s a year. The second is you get to try things out because you get to ask people questions, not only the faculty and guest speakers and everything else, but you get to reach out and say, well, I’m a grad student at Stanford. Can you help me understand this a little bit? That you would never be able to do if you’re the new co-startup or somewhere else in the field. Or if you’re not in healthcare and you want to see healthcare more, we just had somebody from manufacturing that just didn’t like manufacturing, wanted to apply their skills to healthcare. And what’s it like to work in hospital? And so that’s what they chose to get more experience in.
So Stanford’s an amazing environment. There’s amazing opportunities. You know, again, since we’re collaborating with most, you know, the three of the biggest schools around campus, there’s just amazing students, amazing people here. One of the things that we find, even though it’s a, I told you it’s a part-time program for working professionals, but the number of people who took a leave from their jobs just to stay on campus for six months, you know, just to get more, to get the most possible out of that of the program. So it’s an exciting time, it’s a challenging time, but you ask great questions about value.
Well don’t stub your toe building a business that you can’t scale because you didn’t know something fundamental about healthcare. So that’s another piece of the ROI. Will I be smarter about how I do it? I mean startups are always hard, there’s always a hard failure rate, but at least I can get through the first couple of hurdles of pretty obvious things that are going to cause you to fail.
Right. Well, I think your cross-disciplinary approach, your ability to have students sitting in a classroom from all of these different backgrounds and having conversations from these varied perspectives sounds intriguing to have these in-depth conversations. So thank you for talking about your program. We will link all of the information in our show notes for people who are interested. And thank you so much today for your time.
No, thank you, and thanks for the great questions and for your interest in our program. And very excited to chat about it.
Show Resources
- Dr. Kevin Schulman biography
- Stanford MCiM program information
- Stanford University Knight-Hennessy Scholars program
- Five Tips for Applying for Stanford’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship
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