During my time at Plan A Health, I worked on three main areas: partnerships, business model development, and mobile clinic procurement. For partnerships, I spent roughly two weeks compiling a suitable list of foundations and funders who work in our target demographic and areas through resources such as Inside Philanthropy and targeted outreach (including cold emailing, cold calling, leveraging my network for contacts, etc). For business model development, I reached out to other mobile clinics in the country for informational calls and interviews to better understand the operational aspects of running a mobile clinic and its finances, regulations, and local contexts so that Plan A Health has a baseline level understanding of what challenges we may face as we operationalize in 2021. For mobile clinic procurement, I worked with Caroline, the executive director, to develop a cost model to narrow down manufacturers by understanding the financial implications of different types of mobile clinics (e.g., RVs versus trucks), associated costs over its useful life, and clinical implications of different features.

For partnerships and business development, I was able to successfully network by leveraging my CBS network and the networking skills acquired during my time at CBS for the initial outreach email/call. Successful outreach required framing the interaction in a mutually beneficial way, and putting myself in the shoes of the other party allowed me attain a high callback rate. For mobile clinic procurement, I was able to develop a financial model to understand the NPV, interest rate, and associated costs for the mobile clinic in addition to the upfront purchase cost. This was then fed into qualitative aspects of the purchase to paint a complete picture of each potential manufacturer of the mobile unit.

Initially, the lack of background understanding of mobile clinic and health systems in general took some time for me to ramp up. Fortunately, during my last semester at CBS, I took the class Transforming the US Health Care System, which gave me crucial understanding of the US medical system, insurance, and policy differences at the federal and state level. I had my notes from my class that were useful when trying to understand implications of insurance on our mobile clinic unit. Also, when reaching out to other clinics and providers, it was difficult to build rapport as I do not have a clinical background, and by leveraging Caroline (who is an MD herself) as an added point of contact, I was able to gain trust to make the necessary introductions and calls.

Overall, I was able to witness the difficulties in operationalizing a medical operation without the necessary background business knowledge, and that passion and technical understanding can only help you execute once you are on the ground, but not necessarily in pre-operational stages. For any successful organization, a blend of passion, technical, and non-technical expertise is required. I believe for MBAs, there are myriad ways for us to add value to organizations that are on the frontlines of health care, social justice, environmental activism, etc. by contributing our business knowledge to add quantitative rigor to an organization’s operations. Throughout my time at Plan A Health and my interactions with similar clinics, there’s a general lack of quantitative understanding of how to sustain a business, and our contribution can help them avoid missteps and allow them to focus on what they do best.