Mini Kahlon talks about the Dell Medical School in terms that should be familiar for small business owners, startup founders and business executives.
As vice dean of strategy and partnerships, she is responsible for guiding the overarching mission of the medical school at the University of Texas at Austin, which welcomed its first class of students in July. She also works with outside companies to pioneer new models of health care delivery.
“We'll have a strategy articulated in a way that no other medical school does," she said. "It'll be articulated in a way that's more familiar to a business: who are our customers, what value do we provide and what are the unique approaches that we take to provide it?"
That should come as no surprise. While Kahlon has spent the last nine-plus years in medical education, her career has also included stops at Silicon Valley startups such as WorkSpot Inc., a developer of virtual desktop software.
Kahlon worked with Clay Johnston when he was associate vice chancellor of research at the University of California, San Francisco, then followed him in August 2014 to Austin after he took the top Dell Med job.
Outside of educating future physicians, Dell Med plays an important role in shaping health care technologies and treatments. That includes partnering with outside groups — but not just the traditional medical organizations that are used to working with medical schools. That could include sectors from logistics to software, for example.
Those novel relationships are aimed at moving the conversation about fixing health care beyond finger-pointing and onto the solutions needed to make the system more accessible and equitable.
"The business model of health and health care needs to be reframed so that we are incenting the kinds of behaviors and activities that actually improve health," she said.
Additionally, Dell Med's intense focus on commercialization sets it apart from many traditional medical schools, Kahlon said. That includes the Texas Health Catalysts program, which funds research completed in UT labs that shows promise of being turned into viable products.
Kahlon is also helping create the so-called "Innovation District" that is envisioned springing up around the medical school, where academic research will meet market forces to spawn a life sciences and health care industry hub.
Kahlon, who was born in India, was one of the honorees in the 2016 Profiles in Power awards program by Austin Business Journal. She arrived in the United States in 1987 to pursue her dream of attending college in America.
Now at the forefront of innovation in health care and medical education, Kahlon wants other leaders in her field to take a holistic view of reforming the industry.
"We have to step back and really ask: What does it mean to focus on health and being healthy rather than on health care and intervening for the sake of intervening?" she said.
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