How to Build a Center of Healthcare Excellence
Inside the Cox School’s mission to fill a growing need for Dallas-Fort Worth’s healthcare leaders of tomorrow.
In the last decade, the business of healthcare in Dallas-Fort Worth has gone from big to bigger. Driven by a perfect storm of growth and population dynamics, the industry has become a cornerstone of the North Texas economy.
There’s the obvious reason: More people mean more healthcare, and the region’s development has been undeniable. With corporate relocations leading the charge, more than people now call Dallas-Fort Worth home. North of 152,000 people here last year alone—more than any other metropolitan area in the United States.
The sheer numbers are compounded by the effects of an aging population and the increasing prevalence of chronic disease. Today, people can live much longer lives with conditions that were previously fatal, increasing the overall medical spend. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes are “leading drivers of the nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare costs.” More than half of Americans—six in 10—have at least one chronic disease, the CDC says, and four in 10 have two.
But it’s not just population dynamics that have amplified the economic impact of healthcare in the region. Massive corporate players like drugmaker McKesson Corporation and staffing company AMN Healthcare, among many others, now call the region home.
And Dallas-Fort Worth’s health systems have grown to become some of its biggest employers. McKesson has the region’s largest public company, and of the area’s 13 largest employers, according to the , five are in healthcare: Texas Health Resources, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Medical City Healthcare, Parkland Health & Hospital System and JPS Health Network.
Dallas-Fort Worth’s health systems have grown to become some of its biggest employers.
All in all, the industry’s economic impact reached $38.4 billion in 2022, according to a by the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council (DFWHC). That’s up $7.7 billion (roughly 20%) since the organization’s previous analysis just five years prior. DFWHC’s hospital members employed 372,988 people in 2022, up from 295,138 in 2017.
All that growth means the momentum exists to turn North Texas into a leading healthcare hub. Getting there, however, will require major investments to educate the industry’s future leaders, and the èƵapp Cox School of Business is setting out to fill the rising demand.
“An industry growing this fast also has fast-growing people needs,” says Vishal Ahuja, an associate professor and Corrigan Research Professor at the Cox School. “Not just for frontline workers like nurses, doctors and medical technicians, but also for industry leaders who need continuous training and upskilling.”
Sarah Way, chief medical and quality officer at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas, speaks at a Cox School healthcare consumer experience conference along with Amy Goad (managing partner, Sendero) and Seth Toomay (UT Southwestern’s VP and chief medical officer).
Investing in the future of healthcare
Around two years ago, Cox School leaders began to recognize the need to strengthen its healthcare-focused offerings and better prepare its students to enter the burgeoning industry. Such an investment would align with the school’s broader beliefs around creating value at the intersections of industry and education, being a catalyst for innovation, developing tomorrow’s leaders, and enabling prosperity on a global level.
“That elixir spells out a couple of areas where we can play well,” says Shane Goodwin, associate dean of graduate programs and Executive Education. “And healthcare was one of those.”
The Cox School started by convening a who’s who of existing leadership in the area. With the help of McKesson Corp. CEO Brian Tyler and former Baylor Scott & White Health CEO Jim Hinton, èƵapp Cox pulled together 25 people who head or serve in the C-suite at healthcare organizations across the region and asked two key questions.
The first was simple: Do we want North Texas to be a healthcare center of excellence? Is that something the healthcare community should aspire to? The answer came back quickly: Yes, of course.
The second question: How can the Cox School help them achieve that goal? What did the present organizations feel was missing from the current landscape? The answer: Collaboration.
“We left with the idea that èƵapp Cox could serve as an action-oriented convener where we can create and build on these partnerships,” Goodwin says. “They wanted us to drive and pull this together—the leadership side, intellectual capital, content and thought leadership, and how we can fill in those skills gaps through development, training and upskilling.”
At one point, Texas Health Resources CEO Barclay Berdan and Ahuja discussed why a central point for the involved players was so crucial. As Ahuja recalls, Berdan told him that, although he could call up other leaders like Tyler or Hinton, it was rare that the folks in the room would come together in a setting to network and discuss strategy without worrying about competition.
“In some sense, the answer was an emphatic yes—that èƵapp Cox fulfills a key role in the community by serving as neutral ground,” Ahuja says.
Meeting ever-evolving needs
Healthcare is changing—and fast. That is perhaps one reason why so many of the industry’s top leaders are willing to collaborate.
For example, the telemedicine trends of the pandemic are proving they’re here to stay, and patient preferences are evolving accordingly. Most people don’t want to spend more time in a hospital than they need to. That means healthcare providers not only must offer virtual care, but also make more procedures available on an outpatient basis (hence the boom in outpatient or ambulatory surgery centers).
To become trailblazers who can tackle some of the industry’s biggest challenges, North Texas healthcare organizations will need forward-thinking leaders.
Plus, there are trends driven by emerging technology. Wearable tech and remote monitoring are playing an increasingly important role in patient treatment. AI and machine learning can create personalized treatment plans, help healthcare providers diagnose patients and expedite back-end processes such as billing; AI can take in and analyze data on a scale providers couldn’t previously imagine. It also has a role to play in making doctors’ and nurses’ lives easier by, if nothing else, taking away some of the heavy paperwork burden.
As always, dollars and cents are an underlying driver for many of these changes. Healthcare costs have ballooned over the last five decades, from $353 in 1970 to $13,493 per person in 2022, according to Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker. Even controlling for inflation (adjusted to 2022, the 1970 figure becomes $2,072), per-capita healthcare costs are up roughly 550% during the period. Using technology as something that can both improve outcomes and reduce costs will be a top priority for any health system.
“The costs are rising, and it’s almost unsustainable,” Ahuja says.
To become trailblazers who can tackle some of the industry’s biggest challenges, North Texas healthcare organizations will need forward-thinking leaders.
McKesson Corp. CEO Brian Tyler is among the major healthcare leaders collaborating with èƵapp Cox to develop North Texas into the next big healthcare capital.
Training tomorrow’s healthcare leaders
“The Cox School’s healthcare initiative is grounded in rigor, relevance and impact: three values that define the school’s commitment to preparing exceptional leaders in an evolving healthcare landscape,” Goodwin says. With a rigorous approach to curriculum and program development in executive education, èƵapp Cox ensures that students gain deep expertise in critical areas, from AI in healthcare to strategic leadership and technology integration. This rigor is matched by a focus on relevance, as the school actively collaborates with industry leaders to address real-world challenges and trends shaping healthcare today.
Ultimately, the goal is to transform North Texas into a hub of healthcare excellence, producing skilled, agile leaders who are prepared to drive innovation, improve patient outcomes and meet the complex demands of the region’s rapidly expanding healthcare sector. By aligning academic excellence with practical industry needs, èƵapp Cox aims to set a new standard in healthcare leadership education.
Serving as a point of connection within the North Texas healthcare ecosystem, the Cox School of Business offers future and current leaders the ability to build their capabilities through training—including an annual conference and Executive Education programs—and through thought leadership as the school forms research partnerships between faculty and local healthcare organizations.
The trick will be training not just for leadership, but specifically for modern healthcare leadership. The latter is a very different animal, requiring the unique individual who can balance considerations rangingfrom cost management to technology integration, quality of care, equity, patient experience, data security, workforce shortages and so much more—all while staying in line with a complex web of regulation.
As with the Cox School’s approach to any new initiative, the gaps identified by corporate partners informed the development of the school’s new healthcare programming.
To bring the North Texas healthcare community together, the Cox School organizes its annual healthcare conference, which focuses on a central theme and features key leaders from various healthcare organizations in panels, keynote presentations or live interview formats. For example, the second conference, held at èƵapp Cox on October 10–11, 2024, focused on consumer experience in healthcare.
The Cox School’s forward-thinking approach was also evident during its first AI for Healthcare Leaders Executive Education course, convened in spring 2024, which brought together 30 industry leaders representing 11 organizations. The program was designed to help senior-level healthcare professionals improve business performance and patient outcomes by introducing AI.
The first rendition of the two-day course went well enough that a CEO of a health system reached out to inquire about having a training session in-house. The second offering of the AI course took place in October.
“You need to first learn to crawl, then to walk, then to run,” Ahuja says. “We have to be intentional and thoughtful about where we take our program next.”
With healthcare coming to a crossroads, èƵapp Cox is positioning itself to enable the sort of collaboration that can steer the industry down the most innovative and prosperous path.
“If we want to seize opportunities in healthcare such as commercialization, consumer services, digital tools, health at home and new lab discoveries, we need to collaborate as an industry and consider the broader impacts,” says Tyler, the McKesson Corp. CEO who also serves on the Cox Executive Board and èƵapp Board of Trustees. “It’s important that we build a healthcare system that prioritizes patients and places them at the center of our innovations.”
It takes a holistic view, Tyler says—a belief that has spurred the Cox School to plant a stake in the industry.
“Companies know the skills gaps that exist in their talent pipeline, and by creating strong and trusted partnerships, we become a trusted educational partner to help develop their current talent or recruit future talent,” says Lisa Tran, managing director of corporate engagement and strategic partnerships at èƵapp Cox.
Why, as a business school that is not attached to a medical school or nurse training program, should the Cox School care about healthcare? That goes back to the fundamental idea of what a business school should be. Says Goodwin: “Our fundamental mission is really to develop agile, principled leaders who can navigate this uncertainty in an interconnected, complex world.”
