When Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) reached an agreement to operate and provide clinical services at retail health clinics in 14 Walgreens locations across 11 communities in Middle Tennessee, they had just the person in mind to oversee the venture: Dr. Jim Fiechtl.

Jim, then a physician at Vanderbilt Bone & Joint, already had some experience with the new program before it even launched. As an MMHC student, he was part of a cross-functional team composed of operations and administrative professionals, advanced practice providers, and physicians. Their strategy project actually focused on the clinic initiative.

“My responsibilities were looking predominantly at strategy and development: how can we get clinics busy; how can we work on transitioning them,” Jim recalls.

When the agreement was formalized in 2017, a year after he completed the program, Jim was named president of the Vanderbilt Health Clinic at Walgreens. Switching from strategy to implementation, his new team finalized the structure of the clinic and put staff through orientation and training.

In his new role, Jim found himself using “just about every class” from the MMHC program: marketing to raise awareness of convenience care, economics to develop incentive plans, operations to figure out queuing at clinics, and strategy to grow through new service lines and other plans. “I hopefully ask better questions about financial statements,” he adds with a smile. “What I used the most is [the class] Leading Teams and Organizations.”

In a new position that he took on with the Bone and Joint Institute of Tennessee in 2019, Jim is still applying the lessons he learned at Vanderbilt. “I’d do it again,” he says of the MMHC program. “I really enjoyed it,” he says. “It’s really for people who want to get a good foundation, not just in the Vanderbilt system, but in systems around the country.”

It’s really for people who want to get a good foundation, not just in the Vanderbilt system, but in systems around the country.