Shifting into healthcare strategy
In this special series, we’re talking with students and alumni who participated in Kellogg’s Healthcare Deep Dive, an MBA course that gives students an up-close-and-personal look at key players, trends and movements in this fast-changing industry. Held across three intense weekends in San Francisco, Miami and Evanston, this one-of-a-kind course enrolls students from across the across the Full-Time, Evening & Weekend and Executive MBA programs to learn and network together.
Federica Sidoti ’24, Evening & Weekend MBA, is a senior clinical operations manager at Northwestern University. She began her career as a physician and moved to the United States from Milan, Italy, 12 years ago. She began working in clinical trials, incorporating regulatory, finance and leadership into her job. In the summer of 2020, she gave birth to her son in the middle of the pandemic on a night when civic unrest raged outside the hospital. “I came out of it just saying, ‘I need to fix healthcare. I have the tools to do that. I need to figure it out.’”
She applied to the Evening & Weekend Program because she was interested in its healthcare offerings, including the Deep Dive immersive she ultimately attended. She was intrigued by both the curriculum and the perspective of the professors, like Griffin Myers, chief medical officer and co-founder Oak Street Health, who taught Managing Health Care Services in a Value-Based Setting with professor Craig Garthwaite. “I feel that they have the same vision but two completely different styles that make you think differently on the same issue.” The students she learned alongside, she said, “are from so many different programs. That enriched the experience, which I would not have had if I was just with Evening & Weekend students in the same class.”
Having had a transformative life experience at the intersection of crisis and healthcare also gave her an extra appreciation for a class taught by professor Peter Butler, a nationally recognized healthcare executive and former president of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Sidoti recalls how he discussed his experience at Houston Methodist Hospital, which flooded in 2001 during Tropical Storm Allison. “He was talking about the humility, the failures and the successes of their real-life crisis management, which is what I experienced as a pregnant woman in a shut-down hospital.”
The Deep Dives involved a lot of work, she said, but it also offered an “amazing” opportunity to put family and work commitments on pause for a weekend to solely focus on her own learning and career growth. Talking to alumni and students from other companies, she said, helped her understand better the unique challenges every leader in healthcare grapples with. “I may have changed my perspective on some companies after talking to some people. I think it’s grounding to have folks that are part of the company or have been part of the company to think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s not all flowers and golden like I thought, or, ‘I am not giving enough credit to this company.’”
She found ways to apply what she learned from the Deep Dives at work, from forecasting to decision-making to leadership. In Butler’s class, “We learned about a cross-functional communication style and way of putting everyone on the same page within a hospital — trying to understand how to have the inpatient people talk to my finance people talk to their regulatory people and all work towards the same goal,” she said. “That I could apply right away.”
Sidoti’s career has taken several turns over the years, from clinical to research to operations and leadership. There may be more ahead: She ultimately envisions a future role as a senior director addressing strategy for a provider. Since starting her MBA at Kellogg, she has a firmer grasp of where she stands in the professional landscape. “I see how many things that I’ve learned on the clinical, research, finance and regulatory sides could be tools for me to then apply in some kind of strategic role, whether it is in clinical trials, business development or expansion.” — By Claire Zulkey
More in this series
Healthcare at Kellogg: Four MBA students share their journey through the Deep Dive immersion
Understanding the big picture in healthcare