Carey and Johns Hopkins Health System Launch New Internship

Five Carey Business School MBA students were named Johns Hopkins Health and Business Interns this summer.

The twelve-week, paid internship which began in June, is a new collaboration between Carey Business School and Johns Hopkins Medicine.

The business and health care interns are introduced to the management of the health care delivery system and challenged to optimize business operations across the Johns Hopkins Health System. Each intern was paired with a preceptor, a Johns Hopkins Medicine executive who is mentoring the student and oversees their internship project.

Changing roles due to COVID-19

Each student project solves a problem or capitalizes on an opportunity in the business of health or a health care innovation. While the internship was conceived before COVID-19, student projects have evolved to address timely new challenges arising from the pandemic.

Catherine Boyne, senior director of strategic operation initiatives at Johns Hopkins Medicine, helps oversee the internship. She credits the interns with being flexible given the transformation of health care due to COVID-19.

“The interns have come into health care at a time of crisis,” Boyne said. “Johns Hopkins Medicine was caring for significant numbers of patients, bringing up new intensive care units weekly to meet the demands of our community.  We needed to transform our delivery system overnight to support ICUs and virtual visits.”

Boyne says the interns enable Johns Hopkins Health System faculty and staff to take on projects that they otherwise would not have had the bandwidth to address, especially due to COVID-19.

Making an impact across Johns Hopkins

Internship assignments include modeling surgical capacity to handle the back log created by COVID-19; analyzing the new patient process in oncology; creating communication plans for patient education; expanding remote patient monitoring for home care patients; and developing the financial plan for the employee call center for occupational health.

While the Carey Business School Career Development Office is recruiting students and funding the intern stipends, Johns Hopkins Health System then selects the students. And both entities work closely together to intentionally pair students with projects and embed them in departments reflective of the interns’ career goals and skill-sets.

Ali Godfrey, associate director of employer relations, who manages and developed the internship for Carey, says the internship is a valuable opportunity for Carey students to better understand the U.S. health systems and gain experience working with the unique Maryland insurance payment model.

"This is a unique and exclusive Carey Business School MBA opportunity that really leverages the health care ecosystem at Johns Hopkins,” Godfrey said. “Students gain exposure to leadership and decision making at a world-renowned health system.”

But the internship extends beyond the individual projects and also includes cohort learning. The interns meet weekly as a cohort for additional training which has ranged from guest speakers to tours of health care facilities.

Allison McGrath, a second-year MBA student and Johns Hopkins Business and Health intern, credits the internship with giving her unprecedented access to Johns Hopkins Health System leadership.

“It keeps surprising me,” McGrath said. “I’ll sit down and have a cup of coffee with the CEO of the hospital or sit in on a meeting with the COO. It’s nerve-wracking because you don’t want to say the wrong thing. But due to COVID, you’re also hearing everyone navigating it together and saying, ‘I don’t know the answer to that, but I will find it out.’”

Varun Venkatraman, a second-year MBA student and Johns Hopkins Business and Health intern, is forecasting operating room bed availability for both same-day admission elective surgeries and extended surgical recovery elective surgeries. He is trying to determine how many backlogged elective surgeries Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center can accommodate on a given day of the week.

He credits the internship with helping him continue to develop his skills as a healthcare consultant.

“I knew this internship was the right next step for me. It would give me that chance to work closely with [Johns Hopkins] leadership, use real data to tell a story, and make meaningful connections along the way.

Refer to this webpage for more information about the Carey Business School - Johns Hopkins Health System MBA Summer Internship Program.

About Our Experts

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Mario Macis

Mario Macis, PhD is an Associate Professor of Economics. He is also Affiliate Faculty at the JHU Berman Institute of Bioethics, Associate Faculty at the Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality at JHU Medicine, and Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA, Bonn).  Between 2016 and 2019, he served as Academic Program Director of Carey's MS in Health Care Management.

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Brian Gunia

Brian Gunia joined the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in 2011. He is an Associate Professor in the research track. Brian studies three ways that people commonly jeopardize their careers: by acting unethically, negotiating ineffectively, and sleeping insufficiently. Instead of focusing on self-defeating choices themselves, however, he focuses on simple, theoretically-motivated measures that might enable individuals to act more ethically, negotiate more effectively, and sleep longer or better. Brian is the author of a negotiation blog called Life's Negotiable and a negotiation book called The Bartering Mindset. Brian founded the Johns Hopkins Business in Government (BIG) Initiative, and he currently serves as Academic Program Director for the full-time MBA program.