Here's what's happening at the Fleming Center for Healthcare Management
Director's Message
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, we have much to be thankful for at the Fleming Center, after quite a rough start to the semester. Hurricane Harvey hit the Houston area hard, flooding thousands of businesses and homes (my home included), and delaying the start of the fall semester for a week. But the School of Public Health stayed dry, thanks to the efforts of our amazing safety and operations team at UTHealth.

That brings me to the second item on my, “I’m thankful for…” list. I’m proud to announce that the Fleming Center’s healthcare management program is now CAHME accredited .

Considered the benchmark that ensures the integrity of healthcare management education, CAHME accreditation is highly sought after by students and employers. Students who select CAHME accredited programs know they will have access to high quality content, great teaching and a network of healthcare professionals that will help them secure jobs in their field.

To achieve this honor, the Fleming Center went through a rigorous three-year peer review process, which substantially strengthened and improved our program. Now, we are one of only  five  MPH programs in healthcare management in the country accredited by CAHME. We are also accredited by the  Council on Education for Public Health  (CEPH.org). That means we are recognized for excellence in  public health  and  healthcare management .

What a great way to end 2017! Looking forward to 2018, we’ll continue to build on our dual accreditation to attract the best and brightest students, and tap into our active network of healthcare professionals in the Texas Medical Center to offer new opportunities for learning, leadership and fellowships.

Read on to discover more about how the Fleming Center is creating leaders in public health and healthcare management. Have a great holiday season!

Best,
— Lee

Lee Revere, Ph.D., M.S.
Program Director
Program News
Healthcare management program earns CAHME accreditation
The Healthcare Management Program at UTHealth School of Public Health has earned accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME).

For almost 50 years, CAHME, the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education, has worked with academic programs and healthcare practitioners to ensure that graduates entering the healthcare field have undergone an educational process meeting rigorous, measurable standards for effectiveness. The process includes formal academic training plus practical experiences enabling new graduates to quickly add value to an organization and grow into future leaders.

Read more about CAHME accreditation here.
New certificate in healthcare management
The Fleming Center now offers a certificate in healthcare management, to prepare students to meet the challenges of the modern healthcare workplace. The five-course program provides rigorous training in healthcare management paired with a one-of-a-kind focus on population health. Program leaders include researchers, consultants, former executives and current administrators of major healthcare organizations.

Program at a glance
  • 5 courses/certificate (non-degree) program
  • In-person classes available at Houston campus and via ITV across other UTHealth School of Public Health campuses
  • Most courses taught in evening hours
  • Designed to be completed in one year
  • $1,000 per course/$5,000 certificate (approximate cost for Texas residents)

Who should apply
  • Health practitioners and students wishing to increase their healthcare management knowledge
  • Individuals considering an M.P.H. in Healthcare Management
  • M.D./M.P.H. and M.D./MBA students wanting healthcare management expertise

Click on our Healthcare Management Certificate flyer for more details, or contact, Lee Revere, Ph.D., M.S., Frances.L.Revere@uth.tmc.edu, 713-500-9199.
Training improves interprofessional communication
Picture this. You’re a health care manager overseeing patient care. In the next room, a sick, elderly woman and her angry spouse await. Because of an error recorded in the patient’s electronic medical records, she received a drug overdose that seriously injured her kidney, and she needs additional hospitalization. Now you and the rest of her medical team must break the news.

Do you know what to do?

Healthcare management students practiced how they might respond to a scenario like this, as part of a summer interprofessional training pilot program involving more than 100 UTHealth students from the School of Public Health, School of Biomedical Informatics, School of Dentistry, McGovern Medical School, and School of Nursing.

Members of nearly all healthcare professions use electronic health records in their day-to-day jobs, but few students train in this technology as a team.

To fill the gap, researchers from the five schools — including Lee Revere, Ph.D., M.S., director of the Fleming Center, and Alissa Chen, a healthcare management student and third year medical student at McGovern Medical School — developed two standardized patient simulations integrating electronic health records technology. Students were assigned to multidisciplinary teams and participated in case studies using actors portraying patients.

“It showed me the whole spectrum of what can occur when things go wrong,” says Shireen Haq , an M.P.H. student studying health services organizations, and a research coordinator at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “And it showed me what coordinated care should ideally look like. Everyone here is a stakeholder in the patient’s care. Everyone has something to contribute.”

After the simulations, participants showed an improvement in their interprofessional collaboration, with many stating that they found teamwork satisfying and would rather wait for input from others rather than acting alone.

Based on the pilot's success, interprofessional training integrating electronic records is now mandatory for undergraduate medical and nursing students.
Seminar series covers poisons, plagues and more
Just one more seminar is left in this semester’s The History and Culture of Disease and Healing a free 3-credit seminar-style course presented in collaboration with UTHealth School of Public Health's Southwest Center for Occupational Health and Rice University. Fleming Center faculty Trudy Krause, Dr.PH ., teaches the course, together with UTHealth School of Public Health faculty George Declos, M.D. and Sheryl McCurdy, Ph.D.
This semester’s theme is Poisons, Plagues, Potions and Portayals. There are 12 seminars in the series hosted at The Health Museum between September and November. 

Each lecturer discusses a topic and its application to present day health issues or treatment approaches. The seminar is followed by a separate classroom session at the School of Public Health, so students can apply critical learning methods to explore the seminar topic in relation to the focused discipline. 

Click on the link below to preregister for the following fascinating seminar.
 
Faculty News
New faculty roles
In June, Rigoberto I. Delgado, Ph.D., MBA joined the faculty of The University of Texas in El Paso as an associate professor. He continues to teach and conduct research for the Fleming Center. Gretchen Gemeinhardt, Ph.D., MBA has taken on leadership of our executive education efforts, as program director. Osama I. Mikhail, Ph.D., a founding member of the Fleming Center, is back teaching in Houston after serving as interim dean of the College of Health Sciences at The University of Texas at El Paso. He continues to be active at UTEP.
Lecturers join healthcare management faculty
Fleming Center lecturers Jennifer Tektiridis, Ph.D., and Florence McKelvey, Ph.D., are now part-time associate professors at UTHealth School at Public Health. Both are graduates of the school's healthcare management Ph.D. program. We're excited to count these talented healthcare management professionals as members of the Fleming Center team!

Tektiridis has served as faculty adviser for the School of Public Health’s case competition team and is executive director of research planning and development for the Duncan Family Institute in the Division of Cancer Prevention and Population Sciences at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She teaches courses on quality.
McKelvey  is director of administration for the Division of Cancer Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center. She has 25 years of broad, progressive service sector and health-care experience. McKelvey teaches courses on accounting and finance.
Student News
Students help sustain UT Physicians projects
Students in the healthcare management program’s quality and strategy classes learned sought-after research and management skills last year, when tasked to evaluate 22 UT Physicians projects funded through Texas’ Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment (DSRIP) program.

DSRIP projects are part of the state’s Medicaid 1115 waiver, and are designed with the “triple aim” of increasing access to care, reducing unnecessary costs, and improving quality of care and health outcomes at UT Physicians-affiliated community clinics. Projects focus on a variety of goals ranging from training community health workers to improving maternal health (pictured above).

The students worked closely with UT Physicians project managers to methodically examine each project’s successes and challenges, collected information from champions and stakeholders, and created a comprehensive sustainability plan. The final plans will help guide the projects for the next three to five years, says Sahar Qashqai, M.P.H., an alumna of the Fleming Center's healthcare management program and director of UTHealth’s Healthcare Transformation Initiatives. She oversees the projects.

“The students were incredibly helpful,” she says. “Most were unfamiliar with our projects and our department, so they offered a fresh perspective on what contributed to each program’s perceived successes and challenges. They were eager to really dive in and apply the theories they had learned in the classroom to real-world settings.”

UT Physicians has implemented some of the recommendations collaboratively developed by students and project managers, including initiating new community partnerships to increase community awareness and referrals to UT Physicians programs.

Rachel Yanowski, president of The Board: A Leadership and Management Student Organization, evaluated a maternal health project last spring as part of her quality improvement class. She says she enjoyed the chance to put her classroom knowledge to work.

“It was great to work with a project manager, and see all the different components involved in running a complex project, and what it’s like to be a project manager for a healthcare organization,” Yanowski says. “It was a wonderful opportunity and helped us sharpen our teamwork, data collection and analytical skills, which will be helpful as we embark on our careers.”

The real-world experience for students was invaluable, says Jennifer Tektiridis, Ph.D., who teaches classes on quality.

“Healthcare managers and leaders, and our students, understand the importance of providing the populations they serve with the evidence-based services appropriate to their needs,” she says. “But doing so in a resource-constrained environment is a reality students don't often experience firsthand. In these DSRIP projects, students could see the difficult trade-off decisions required to sustain programs and begin to think more deeply about what it means to be a manager in resource-constrained healthcare settings.”
Langabeer launches journal club for Ph.D. students
James R. Langabeer, MBA, Ph.D., professor of healthcare management and policy at UTHealth School of Public Health, has launched a journal club for Ph.D. students in Management and Policy Sciences.

The club meets two to three times per semester to review high impact journals in management and policy, including Health Affairs, Health Care Management Review, and many others.

“I want our Ph.D. students to be able to independently perform high-quality research that is publishable and novel. To do that, they need to know about current theories, models, and research. We will do all that in this journal club,” says Langabeer. He is also a professor of bioinformatics at UTHealth School of Biomedical Informatics.

Students seeking doctorates in Health Services Research or Health Economics are also will welcome to attend, Langabeer says.

The club’s next meeting is Nov. 29 at noon , in RAS E-335 in Houston. For more information, contact Langabeer at James.R.Langabeer@uth.tmc.edu.
Alumni News
New mentorship program offered
The Fleming Center’s Healthcare Management Alumni Advisory Committee and Student Leadership Board have launched a new mentorship program for students enrolled in UTHealth School of Public Health’s Healthcare Management program. Students are matched with alumni based on shared interests or backgrounds.

“Our idea is to give our current students support and a better understanding of the workplace in Houston and to better facilitate an understanding of the healthcare field,” says  Luis Garcia Morales, M.D., M.P.H. (’15), chairman of the Alumni Committee for the healthcare management program, and operations manager at Spring Branch Community Health Center.

Participating students and alumni make a one-year commitment to the mentorship program, and agree to meet at least once per semester face-to-face. The program also hosts meet-and-greets throughout the year to give mentors and mentees additional opportunities to interact. For more information about the program, contact Luis at luisjosegm@gmail.com.
More career workshops planned
Career workshops are back by popular demand! The Alumni Advisory Committee had such a great showing at last year’s workshops that they brought them back this year, to help students build essential workplace skills. In October, the committee hosted workshops on PowerPoint and Excel, and a workshop on Microsoft Word in November. Look for spring workshops on resume building and interview skills.

Fleming Center Fast Facts

50 M.P.H. students in Healthcare Management
42 Ph.D. students in Health Management and Health Policy
8 faculty members, respected leaders in healthcare management
85% of graduates completed the M.P.H. program within 3 years
85% of graduates reported being employed full time post-graduation
40% of enrolled students work full time 

Upcoming Events
Spring semester begins
January 8

Fleming Center Case Competition
March 31

Application deadline for Fall 2018 semester
March 1

Fleming Center Panel
Stay tuned for date and time
George McMillan Fleming Center for Healthcare Research | 713-500-9199
flemingcenter@uth.tmc.edu | https://sph.uth.edu/research/centers/fleming