As the old saying goes, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Working together, a team of graduate students from Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, School of Medicine, and Whiting School of Engineering proved that adage true by winning November’s AstraZeneca National Healthcare Case Competition. The Care Continuum team, as they call themselves, beat out a dozen other groups from many top universities, including groups from Cornell, Duke, Ohio State, Rice, Rutgers, and Yale. Two other Hopkins teams also finished in the top five.
A winning combination
The Care Continuum team credits the divergent business of health ecosystem at Hopkins for bringing them together. Students Jacob Blum, Andy Charlorin, Sarah Graham, and Vania Wang all met through Carey’s entrepreneurship finance course and the Commercialization Academy at Johns Hopkins Tech Ventures. Joanna Yang, a PhD candidate in the biomedical engineering program at the Whiting School of Engineering, didn’t take the finance course, but joined through friendships in other classes.
“This was the best group project we've ever worked on,” said Wang, who is a fifth-year PhD candidate in the cellular and molecular medicine program at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “Just having all of these different perspectives, and ambitious people working really hard on something that we all cared about, that was just a really amazing experience for me.”
Making a case
For the competition, AstraZeneca representatives asked the student teams to devise a strategy for rolling out a new breast cancer therapy. Part of the challenge was convincing doctors to use the new therapy, which requires doctors to change traditional treatment plans for the drug to be most effective. While details of the case were fictional, much of the information reflects real medications in development at AstraZeneca.
“Our approach focused on trying to mitigate barriers to their main concerns. Everything that we said and everything that we proposed was focused on what makes this transition and this drug rollout as seamless as possible, even if that meant maybe not scaling as rapidly,” said Blum, an MD/PhD candidate in cellular and molecular biology at the School of Medicine. “We were really careful and critical about what
would make the most sense, and what would be the easiest way for AstraZeneca to roll this out efficiently and effectively.”
“When it came to diving into the sciences, it was really a great time to learn about oncology, the kind of medications that are out there for second-line treatment, those are things that were a little bit foreign to me,” said Charlorin, a former nurse and MBA candidate at Carey Business School. “Really diving into the granularities of breast cancer and its treatments was what I took away from the competition.”
Crowdsourcing innovation
“I think partnering with someone like the Carey Business School, we get a really diverse set of perspectives from medical folks, MBAs, public health,” added Kevin Diehn, innovation lead for AstraZeneca’s U.S. oncology business. “If we can crowdsource ideas from a broad set of really smart people like that, that's going to set us up for success.”
AstraZeneca’s Director of Strategy and Operations Abhay Kakde agrees that the case competition is beneficial for the company and students alike. “We want to use this opportunity to showcase AstraZeneca's thought leadership, which would then enhance AstraZeneca's reputation and equity, and to attract the best of talent from these business schools into joining AstraZeneca,” Kakde said.
AstraZeneca sponsored the case competition and helped develop the scenario details.
“I thought it was a really good experience just meeting these leaders at AstraZeneca and chatting with them about how this would actually look in the real world,” Yang said. “I guess we got a cash prize out of it, too,” she joked.
The winning team receives $8,000. Carey Business School has been hosting the National Healthcare Case Competition for more than a decade and received sponsorship from AstraZeneca in the last few years.
