Cici McNamara, an assistant professor in the School of Economics, received a Jim Pope Fellowship from Georgia Tech's startup incubator CREATE-X.
She will use the funds to integrate entrepreneurship into her Health Care Consolidation Project VIP, expanding the project’s real-world applications and aligning the work with students’ interests.
Project Overview
The Health Care Consolidation VIP team is building a data set of hospital merger activity that will be the first to document the differences – such as true mergers, clinical affiliations, or management agreements – across the record-breaking number of transactions in recent years. Analyzing the data will help McNamara and co-advisor Danny Woodbury, a lecturer in the School of Economics, better understand the market outcomes of each type.
“The dramatic increase in concentration in hospital markets over the past two decades has raised prices and lowered healthcare worker wages, while there’s very little evidence that it’s lowered operating costs,” McNamara said. “This project will help the Department of Justice and antitrust officials better prioritize which merger cases to oppose.”
Shifting Focus
However, when McNamara challenged her students to come up with more research ideas for the data set, many returned with business ideas instead, comparing the work to market research they had done in other courses and internships. She realized she may have been thinking about the data too narrowly.
“We’re doing market research in the sense that we’re creating a data set that identifies which hospitals are affiliated with one another, which is valuable because these affiliations can be really opaque,” McNamara said.
Collaborating with Startups
With the Jim Pope Fellowship, McNamara will connect the students in her VIP with those working on related startups in CREATE-X so they can pitch the data set or discuss tweaks to make it more useful.
“You can get kind of a skewed perspective if all you do is engage with academic literature. When you’re talking to entrepreneurs or people who work in the real world, they can also tell you what’s important," McNamara said. "Understanding how what we’re making could be of use to the startups will help widen the net of possible uses for this work.”
Entrepreneurship in the Classroom
McNamara will also attend workshops with the other Jim Pope Fellows and receive guidance on incorporating entrepreneurial themes into her economics courses. She says the new perspective will help make her a better teacher.
"Students get excited when what they’re learning feeds back into what they want to do. Framing it in terms of research helps, but aligning the work with their interests like business and entrepreneurship makes it much more engaging.”
