Healthcare @ Kellogg
- Zohaib Akhtar MD MPH
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 28
Good ideas don’t always make it. Bad ideas don’t always fail. In healthcare we talk a lot about innovation, outcomes, systems improvement, and most of the time, it feels like we’re building things without fully understanding what makes them survive… or stall.
The Healthcare Strategy and Deep Dive are easily been the most important courses for me @Kellogg and hard to put that in words why its so great for anyone in healthcare ecosystem. In the business of healthcare, nothing else comes close.
I have been a physician with a broad background, someone who’s worked in clinical care, public health, policy, research, innovation, investments, there felt there isn't much to deep dive for me. I’m glad I was so wrong.
This course isn’t lectures. It’s not theory. I think it’s not even a “course” in the usual sense. It’s like being in a room with the people who make the hardest calls in healthcare industry, CEOs, investors, economists, regulators, lobbyists, and just watching them think. It moves fast. It’s unscripted. It’s deep without trying to be.
Professor Craig Garthwaite moderates the teaching like it’s a talk show, but one where you leave each session with a clearer understanding of how the system really works.
You have phenomenal leaders from industry teaching what they do best. Take value creation in biomedical for example in which Adam Koppel, managing partner Bain Capital Life Sciences, walked us through investment he led.... what worked, what he missed, how it changed. Then the CEOs involved came in and shared their side of the story. Adam runs a fund managing billions. If that’s impressive, you should see him teach value creation. It was a masterclass.
The deep dive was a walk through the timeline of so many cases and how they connect in the healthcare ecosystem. You feel the uncertainty. You see how easily good intentions, good people........and even good ideas......can go sideways.
And then there’s another session. And another. The whole thing moves quickly and with energy, ten hours a day, and somehow it still feels short. It’s rare to get access to people like this. It’s even rarer to get it in a format this well-structured. It just works.
You have to be willing to sit with some uncomfortable truths about how healthcare really operates; how incentives actually work, how deals are made, how power moves through the system. It is intense.
Some courses teach you skills.
This one changes how you see.
And that changes everything.
((Z))
