Douglas King has worked near the intersection of business and health care for more than half a decade. As an analyst in an informatics role, he serves as a liaison between the clinical and business operations for Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

“I work to understand the wants and needs of the business, and then I work to create an IT solution, either by developing it in-house or finding vendors that already have created a product,” explains Douglas, who served previously as an operations system engineer and implementation specialist.

While Douglas believes he had a good grasp on his areas of focus, he says he “struggled with understanding how other areas of health care interacted and what roles they played.” When he learned about the MMHC, and that the commitment was for only one year, he says the decision to join the program was easy.

The work, he says, was anything but. “It has been one of the hardest but most enjoyable years of my life,” he says. “You come in overwhelmed by working a full-time job and going back to school, but by the middle of the program you see how much you have adapted and changed with others.

“The program has given me the tools to manage in healthcare. It has also opened doors and created connections for me. And I think the most important skill I have gained is time management. To balance life, work and school is very difficult. But once you master that, you can apply it to other things in life."