Quality and patient safety are areas of healthcare that Andrew Jea, MD, MBA’21, feels passionately about.
As he completed the last year of the 21-month Physician MBA Program at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, Dr. Jea moved from Indianapolis to Oklahoma City, where he began a new role as chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital and eventually, chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. He immediately got to work on quality and patient safety.
“The biggest takeaways I used most from the Physician MBA Program were process improvement skills and Lean Six Sigma techniques,” Dr. Jea said. “It’s been incredibly useful. I have been able to help our team progress through various process improvement projects since my arrival at the University of Oklahoma.”
Using what he learned in the Physician MBA operations courses, Dr. Jea led his team to define, measure, improve, analyze, and evaluate several initiatives, including:
- Decreasing patient no-show rates in the pediatric neurosurgery clinic from a range of 15 to 20% down to a range of 5 to 10%.
- Decreasing the number of non-insurance-authorized surgeries, which resulted in a reduction in in write-offs.
- Decreasing the cycle time from referral to patient interaction from upwards of 45 days down to about 14 days.
- Increasing the rates of operating room utilization so cases are booked in appropriate time slots to make best use of available OR time.
“I think the most important step I found in these projects is the first one: defining key stakeholders and having the right people at the table at the very beginning,” Dr. Jea said. “I owe it all to Kelley.”
Dr. Jea also worked on reducing the number of surgical patients with deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a complication that can lead to life-threatening pulmonary embolisms. Using the same Lean principles, his team created a standardized protocol that provides patients with blood thinners before and after surgery to prevent blood clots in the legs.
“We’ve done well in neurosurgery to prevent DVT, and now, leadership may ask our team to be a role model for other departments with this issue,” Dr. Jea.
Dr. Jea has always been interested in the business side of medicine, which is often murky to clinicians. As a front-line physician, he knew how medical decisions were made, but he wanted to know more about how administrative decisions were prioritized and how strategies were determined for an entire health system. At Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, he earned the Evans Fellowship in Health Care Leadership to complete the Physician MBA Program.
Dr. Jea says he uses the healthcare-focused business skills from the Kelley School every day. And the successes he’s achieved in improving processes, quality, and patient care may have gained Dr. Jea recognition and invitations to chair committees to expand this work, such as the value analysis committee for neurosurgery and spine surgery.
“Because of a fundamental knowledge in the business of medicine, I’ve been asked to chair committees in the health system, gaining recognition for the department,” Dr. Jea said. “On committees like a capital core group, we’re working to prioritize money for reinvestments in capital equipment. I’m able to use my Kelley finance training to perform or interpret investment analyses and ask, ‘If we invest in device A versus device B, what gives the system the biggest bang for the buck?’”
Training from the physician-only MBA program also focuses on the human side of leadership. With leadership self-analysis, peer learning, and one-on-one leadership coaching, the Physician MBA Program helps doctors better understand their leadership styles and ways they can improve how they lead teams.
Dr. Jea’s department of neurosurgery includes 17 surgeons, 10 research faculty,12 advanced practice providers, 13 residents, one fellow, and upwards of 40 administrative, finance, and clinical staff members. It’s a lot of people to manage from a wide variety of backgrounds, job descriptions, and perspectives. Dr. Jea says the Physician MBA Program helped him think about how to introduce and manage change while winning people’s hearts and minds.
“If you had to put a label on it, I learned servant leadership from the MBA classes. Kelley helped me recognize that it’s not about me; it’s about the team. I’ve learned to listen to others and find middle ground more than being unilaterally declarative,” Dr. Jea said. “Also, a leader is often accountable to a group of individuals above, while responsible for the team below; managing up is just as important as managing down. I think that perspective is really important.”
The Physician MBA Program combines a high-quality business education with dynamic and evolving lessons focused specifically on the healthcare industry. Physicians are encouraged to bring their own experiences and challenges to class so the entire cohort can learn actionable solutions through real-world lessons. It’s not simply a degree, but a skill set physicians can return to long after graduation. Cohorts are often tight knit, staying in touch with peers and Kelley faculty alike for years to come.
More than three years after graduation, Dr. Jea uses trainings and videos from the Physician MBA in his own department-wide meetings to drive home lessons on topics like empathy and the basics of Lean Six Sigma in healthcare. He says earning the degree was not only transformative for his career, but his professional trajectory.
“This has been one of the most valuable experiences in my professional life. I say that with absolute authenticity and conviction,” Dr. Jea said. “It’s valuable to step away from your practice to gain a 30,000-foot view on the big picture of healthcare. And to do it with like-minded colleagues and discussing concepts with expert faculty in a meaningful way you can apply to your everyday job. It was an exceptional opportunity.”
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