Angela Humphreys, Chair of the Healthcare Practice at law firm Bass Berry & Sims, a 2014 Fellow, said the program reflects the commitment of Nashville leaders to foster the development of future leaders. “This is an intensive five-month programming that the Council has developed to provide collaboration among current and future leaders of the healthcare industry in Nashville and beyond.”
2015 Fellow Kris Joshi, executive vice president of products at Emdeon, said the immersive nature of the program is what made the experience valuable and worth the commute from his home base of Boston. “I think given the fact that the program itself has a lot to offer, I definitely think it was worth the travel,” Joshi said. “I think this is one of the unique experiences in healthcare that I would be very happy to recommend to anyone from across the country to participate in.”
Over the course of eight day-long sessions (one per week), Fellows encounter three foundational elements of a nationally unique curriculum: engaging in a forum for thought leadership, experiencing first-hand issues faced by healthcare organizations, and exploring personalized leadership development to prepare candidates for future growth. The objective of the program is to learn new ways to define problems and develop solutions, grow a deeper understanding of the specific challenges facing healthcare, and learn how to implement strategy to effect change in organizations.
An immersion component of the program exposes Fellows to in-the-moment insights and real-world scenarios. Joshi recalls a particularly impactful immersive experience at the Vanderbilt Simulation Center, which places participants in an operating room where a surgery is being simulated. “This allows you to really feel what it's like to be in that environment; how decisions are made, and how leadership emerges,” Joshi said. “That was an incredibly valuable moment—to expose people that don't have a clinical healthcare background, like myself, to see how things worked and how things can go wrong inside an operating room.”
Larry Van Horn, co-director of the Fellows program, said the program changes every year in order to remain timely. “We keep it lively, vibrant and topical, and use new and different examples to drive home common themes,” he said. “Any one of the prior Fellows classes could attend this year's, and it would be all new and all different.”
In May, the NHCC Fellows completed its third annual initiative by graduating 36 Fellows.
“In just three short years, we are already seeing the impact this program is making on our nation's healthcare industry,” said former Sen. Bill Frist, M.D., co-director of the initiative.
