New Precision Health Care Course Focuses on a Fast-Growing Industry

When it comes to his new course, Precision Health Care, Professor Dan Benjamin acknowledges an important give and take. “I’m sure I’m learning more than the students,” Benjamin says. “The guest speakers know about many different things that I know nothing about. And when I teach the cases, there are no right answers. It’s figuring things out and hearing from the students about their ideas that are what make the class so much fun for me. I’m learning everything along with the students.”

The course was developed in 2022 with input from one of the school’s student organizations, the Healthcare Business Association. The result is a cutting-edge class presenting the latest findings in the industry, while designed to address the students’ career goals and aspirations.

Q: Let’s begin with what feels like an easy question. What is “precision health care”?

Precision health care includes precision medicine but is broader. It’s about tailoring the kind of health care that people get based on the specific characteristics of the person. It could be giving a particular drug treatment or preventative care regimen based on the outcomes of someone’s genetic test, or it could be giving diet or exercise advice based on an individual’s personal psychology of what motivates that particular person. It’s broader than precision medicine because it’s not just about medical treatment, it includes things like diet and fitness that are part of health care more broadly.

Q: Why is it important for Anderson to include a class like this in its curriculum?

The whole health care sector — not just medicine — is moving in the direction of precision health care, and in some areas it’s happening very, very quickly. So, anyone who goes into the health care industry is going to interact with precision health care and will do so increasingly over the course of their careers.

The point of the class is to learn about the opportunities and challenges in precision health care from the perspectives of all the stakeholders in the industry. First, it is important for people working in the industry to understand the perspectives of doctors and patients. Mainly, though, the course covers how an understanding of precision health care is going to matter for health care entrepreneurs and investors, as well as managers of health systems and insurance companies. Indeed, the cases and guest speakers are drawn from all of those different perspectives. A number of students who have taken the class have come back to me afterward and told me just how relevant it’s turned out to be in their summer internships or the jobs they’ve taken after graduation — even if those jobs aren’t precision health care jobs directly.

Q: How does the class incorporate case studies, guest speakers and other material? Does your own scholarship inform the course?

The case studies are based on real decisions that business leaders have had to make when either encountering precision health care or the emergence of precision health care in their own industry. A case might be about creating a new company or navigating the regulatory environment for precision health care.

The guest speakers include doctors, consultants, entrepreneurs, private equity investors and bioethicists — people from many different positions and perspectives in the space. The goal is to help students figure out how precision health care is going to matter in their own careers and how they can best formulate their career strategy, taking into account industry trends.

The course doesn’t directly draw on my own research, but my background plays into how I teach the class. My background is in behavioral economics and genetics, and those are themes that run throughout the class and are extremely relevant to precision health care.

It’s a unique class. I’m not aware of any other class taught at any business school on this topic, despite the fact that precision health care is becoming a major part of the industry and matters a great deal for the kinds of jobs that our students get after graduating from Anderson.

Q: What is the genesis of its development?

This course is actually the result of market research among Anderson students.

I joined the Anderson faculty in 2020 and when I did, Dean Tony Bernardo and Faculty Chairman Sanjay Sood made it clear to me that a key thing we were missing at Anderson were health care electives. As you know, one of the strategic priorities for the school is increasing our strength in health care research and curriculum.

So I met with the Healthcare Business Association and talked with a number of their members, and I asked them what they were looking for in a course. What would be most helpful to them in terms of the kind of jobs they might want? It became clear to me from those conversations that we didn’t have a class that talked about precision health care, its growth, its emergence in the industry. And it was clear this was also something that intersected with my own expertise.

As I described what a class like this might look like, the students were excited about it. So I sent the Healthcare Business Association members draft descriptions of the class and potential syllabuses, and together with my TAs for the class I did even more intensive thinking about what would make the class most useful to the students.

Q: How is the class structured?

There are four components to the grade. The biggest component is our case write-ups. Students are asked to write up their answers to some of the cases that we discuss in class, and I leave it up to the students to choose which ones will be most relevant to their own careers.

There is a reflective paper, plus a short presentation about the paper, designed to make the class about the students’ own careers. The students reflect on what they’ve learned and what we’ve discussed in class, or things that the class has made them think about that are specifically relevant to their own career decisions, like what sort of job to apply for or decision they need to make at their company, or maybe a strategic plan that their company needs to make. Many students have told me that writing their own reflective paper and, especially, hearing other students’ presentations created a deeply meaningful experience that was a highlight of the class.

Twenty percent of the grade is class participation. Once during the quarter, each student finds a recent news article about some development in the precision health care space and briefly discusses the business implications of that news. Every week, we discuss a few of the news stories that the students have found. That keeps everyone up to date on what’s going on. It gives them a sense of just how relevant everything we’re talking about is.

Q: How will the class evolve next time you teach it?

First, I’m going to streamline the readings. Last year, I gave a genetics primer at the beginning of the class because I wanted to make sure that the students had enough background on the subject. But enough of the guest speakers also gave background on genetics, so I think I may cut that out of my introductory remarks and instead talk more about the economics of the industry. Overall, I think the course is going to be better because I’ve done it before and I’ve learned so much from the previous time teaching it.

Q: What are the main takeaways you hope students get from the class?

First, I hope they’re going to be able to evaluate the business challenges and opportunities in the space so when they face a choice in their own career that involves precision health care, they know they’ll have the tools to think through it. They’ll also understand how it affects all of the different stakeholders in the industry. Second, I want students to understand how the space is changing and how it is likely to look different over the next 5 to 10 years. Third, I want students to think through how precision health care is going to impact their own their own jobs and careers.