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Successful Harvard Business School Essay

Growing up as a competitive dancer, I sought to deeply understand my teammates’ personalities in order to improve communication, build comradery, and perform our best onstage. I enjoyed learning about the specific choreography pieces that spoke to them and including those components in our routine, enabling each person to find joy in their performance. Although I’m no longer choreographing, I’ve continued to emphasize the importance of strong communication channels in my professional endeavors. Until my grandfather’s passing, I thought my professional passions were rooted in retail’s digital disruption. I was fascinated with how technology improved the holistic retail experience. However, as my grandfather battled dementia, I witnessed the information asymmetries that plague the U.S. healthcare system. Due to a data miscommunication amongst his physicians, he endured an erroneous resuscitation, which resulted in a great deal of preventable pain and his subsequent passing.

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The jarring realization that an industry worth 18% of our GDP was so technologically behind shifted my professional focus towards addressing the communication inadequacies besieging healthcare. Many doctors aren’t given the data they need and are often rushed to the next patient, fostering an error-prone environment that pushes for the quickest, rather than the best, care. After observing my grandfather’s complications, it became my mission to challenge the information and communication inaccuracies of the U.S. healthcare system, refusing to believe that an industry worth so much could let patients down so frequently. Thousands of patients die annually from preventable errors and nearly 5% of diagnoses are incorrect altogether. As hospitals purchase independent medical practices and leverage more at-home services, the need for streamlined communication will only increase.

In order to help tackle the communications issues that providers face, I aim to work as a VP of Product at a leading hospital system. I will focus on making information more actionable by developing products that better integrate data from patient health records. Leading my consulting team through the launch of a Medicare business, I discovered a niche curiosity for the challenges providers face when communicating internally; unfortunately, the status quo is adversely affecting patients. As our team designed a hospital discharge workflow, we observed doctors transitioning responsibilities to the discharge team, who sometimes didn’t have the right information to discharge patients. Concerningly, patients often left the hospital without the best care plan or equipment to promote a healthy recovery. We saw how providers are stretched thin, burned out, and left without the right tools and data to provide high-quality care.

Additionally, hospitals’ antiquated processes, such as lack of technology adoption and excessive regulatory restrictions, hinder rapid transfer of information, often impeding the smaller, innovative companies who want to not only send information quickly, but make it more actionable. Recalling my grandfather’s experience, I knew this issue wasn’t restricted to just insurance. The internal communication problems affected doctors’ offices, hospitals, and other facets of the industry. An opportunity remains to disrupt the provider’s experience by bridging this communication gap. I want to streamline provider workflows by developing better internal communication products that leverage patient health records. I will draw upon my experience in healthcare technology roles to enable more efficient product implementation, especially as it pertains to increasing the speed and accuracy of effective information transfer. My time at this company has allowed me to grasp a deeper understanding of the industry, enabling me to see that this communication problem is systemic and affects other stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare ecosystem.

Furthermore, I continue to witness the issues that startups endure given the slow implementation rate that legacy organizations face, specifically hospitals. Confronted with this issue early on, I led the team through a strategic pivot of our business model. I executed the cost-benefit analysis that moved our focus away from hospitals and towards independent medical practices, which also experience various information asymmetries due to their smaller size and budgets. While this has proven beneficial for our growth, I question how often this happens with smaller players in the industry and what hospitals, providers, and most importantly, patients, are missing out on as a result. My experience has shown me that I want to bridge this information and communication gap at a broader scale by working with a hospital system that has bought independent medical practices and has started to enhance their at-home services. I seek to prepare myself to be an executive in the space, one that leads with passion and fortitude to tackle the industry’s greatest communication challenges in a way that appeals to business, provider, and consumer stakeholders. In transitioning to a product management role at a hospital, I will use the skills learned in my consulting and operational roles to drive change in an environment that hasn’t, until fairly recently, been on the cutting edge of technology.

However, I understand that developing certain technical skill sets will be imperative in order to deeply understand the intricacies of the healthcare system and drive decisions alongside minds from business, clinical, technological, and political backgrounds. I will immerse myself in areas that challenge my perspectives with regard to formulating strategy, analyzing unstructured data, and managing technological and operational change in order to best position myself to lead within my organization and further my healthcare career. A HBS MBA will give me the technical skills required to analyze prior market decisions to inform future strategies and challenge this convoluted healthcare system alongside innovative thinkers. While my grandfather’s experience is in the past, I’m committed to reducing miscommunication errors within hospitals and increasing information sharing amongst providers to alleviate these issues for other patients. Drawing upon my learnings as a young dancer, I’ll enable my teams to develop products that bridge the communication gap and put joy back into care delivery for the provider. I will continuously seek to be at the forefront of healthcare innovation where I can launch products that invert the communication status quo of an archaic model – one that no longer meets the needs of the 21st century provider or patient.

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Professional Review by MBA Ivy

Though disjointed in the beginning with the applicant's almost non-sequitur discussion of dance team and choreography in what feels like a very forced example to highlight her background in "teamwork" (i.e. it would have been better to instead discuss a more professional work example), this essay does however quickly shift to a very solid and meaningful discussion of the problems and issues within the US healthcare system, alongside the applicant's passion for addressing the serious problem of inadequate technology and data organization within the current system and her desire to create change.

Drawing from her own background in healthcare technology and using examples that describe this background in a level of detail admissions will understand, the result is a very strong personal essay that shows admissions her awareness of the existing problems in this niche that she wishes to solve, as well as the "how" and "why" of how her interest originated and is very much rooted in her own personal values and motivation.

As the essay further progresses, the applicant then elaborates on how she intends to execute this proposed focus in both her MBA study and her career moving forward -- again, not just speaking abstractly, but utilizing her strong, relevant, past experience and examples in the field to build solid connections to her desired future work: seeking to bridge the data and communication gaps she's identified with her own past expertise. Overall, a very solid essay, outside of the beginning few sentences, which still managed to get her in.

How to Adjust for the Newly Released HBS Prompts:

HBS doesn't just have new prompts, they are now expanding the personal statement into three separate essays that seek to discover how you are 1. Business-minded, 2. Leadership-focused, and 3. Growth-oriented. The most important point here is to not repeat yourself as you work your way through these essays and expand on each point. Each essay should discuss different examples and experience from your background and, when taken as a whole in terms of your overall personal narrative, show you as a very multi-faceted and interesting MBA applicant who is very well qualified to succeed.

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