Jordan Bohnen

Home town: Toronto, Canada
Undergraduate education: University of Toronto, Harvard College

"It's about affecting populations, not just individuals."

Jordan Bohnen is no stranger to either the case method or to leadership. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he served as site administrator of improvehealthcare.org, a student-run website that uses cases to promote discussions about care quality, access, and disparities. At one point, he helped organize a multischool collaborative project in which representatives from 17 colleges and universities met to discuss the website and spread its use. "We encouraged participants to return to their schools and teach their fellow students by using the cases on the site," says Jordan. "This one-day event helped set up new chapters across the country."

From collaboration into management
Though he grew up with an attraction toward medicine, Jordan's understanding of its meaning changed as he pursued his studies at Harvard. Initially a biology major, he shifted his major into one of his own creation, health policy. "I gradually saw medicine as part of a larger system that means more than providing care to specific patients," Jordan says. "I realized that it's about affecting populations, not just individuals."

But an interest in health care management, Jordan understands, "means learning a new set of skills you don't learn in medical school. To improve the health care system you have to learn to manage it—not just learn policy and make appeals to Congress." Jordan hopes the joint MD/MBA program will help him acquire new abilities. "I don't have much formal business training or experience," he says. In addition to developing his business talents, HBS will enlarge his network of contacts. "I'm exposed to smart people who interact with health care in different ways, through medicine, economics, private enterprise, nonprofit institutions. Here, we can create partnerships that expand our individual abilities to make a difference in the health care system as a whole."

Practicing medicine and policy
Under the direction of Don Berwick, MD, Jordan fulfilled a summer internship at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston. A nonprofit think tank, the Institute conducts research on health care collaboratives, examining multihospital projects targeting specific areas for improvement. That experience, Jordan says, "exposed me to the higher-level aspects of care management." The joint degree will prepare Jordan for even greater management challenges ahead. "The MBA will give me a different lens for viewing medicine, a way to evolve toward management within a hospital or a local/regional care system."