When Fahima Zahar relocated to the US from her native India in 2015, she was already a rising star for Emids Technologies, a premier provider of health care IT solutions. As General Manager-Operations, she heads the company’s business process outsourcing practice, supporting both payer networks and provider organizations in initiatives ranging from claims adjudication and processing to medical coding.

Though she has 15 years of experience in health care IT, Fahima wanted to learn more about the business of health care. “I thought it would be a good idea,” she says, “to complete my Masters in Health Care and gain additional skills with regard to marketing, operations, finance and strategy. I also wanted to build a network of health care leaders and get to know the challenges of the industry from them in class and to work and study with them.”

The program is enabling her to do all that and more, putting new skills into practice with team members in a group capstone strategy project. Fahima’s team — which includes leaders from BlueCrossBlueShield (BCBS), Maury General Hospital and Medicon on Demand — is developing an approach that will enable BCBS Tennessee to use telemedicine services to serve the needs of its members and in-network providers. The project (and the overall MMHC program), Fahima says, “has given me new insights that can help my organization to improve operational efficiencies for clients.”

Vanderbilt, she adds, “is the right place to be if you want to learn new concepts, shed your inhibitions and doubts and do things you always dreamed of.”