The start of a new year is a symbolic clean slate. It’s a chance to embrace fresh opportunities, set ambitious goals, and imagine what lies ahead.

It’s also a great time to pause for a moment of reflection. Before diving headfirst into the demands of work, school, or life’s daily rhythm, we can appreciate the journey we’ve traveled over the past year. It’s a chance to celebrate our achievements, reflect on the lessons learned and challenges faced, and carry forward the wisdom we’ve gained.

So, before we launch full steam ahead into the new year, let’s take a look back at some of the most compelling and memorable stories that defined 2024 on EmoryBusiness.com.

Welcoming Impressive Inaugural Classes to Two New Programs

Meet the Inaugural Cohort of Goizueta’s New Master in Management Program

One of Goizueta Business School’s newest additions is the Master in Management degree, a program for recent college graduates with liberal arts and science majors. Spanning 10 months, the program acts as a “fast track” option for students to gain business skills to complement their undergraduate work. Among the inaugural cohort, 38% graduated from an Emory University program, with a total of 84% of the class graduating from their undergraduate programs in 2024.

Meet the First Cohort of Goizueta’s New Master in Business for Veterans

Goizueta Business School launched a new graduate degree last year, and the first cohort of students started in May. The Master in Business for Veterans program is led by Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and Associate Dean for Leadership Ken Keen. The inaugural cohort of this working professional program includes 31 students. Among them are two Air Force, 19 Army, five Marines, and five Navy veterans and active duty service members. These men and women have decorated and accomplished backgrounds, including several careers of service to the United States.

Experiential Learning Opportunities Abound

MBA Students Explore Denmark’s Model for Work and Well-being

This summer, more than 25 MBA students from Goizueta Business School ventured out of the classroom and across the globe, traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark to explore how the Danes approach their short work week (standard 37 hours), while having some of the most productive companies in the world. The immersive experience is part of a new course at Goizueta, Life Design for the Modern MBA, focused on helping Goizueta students—who are passionate, ambitious, and often working in overdrive—to find meaning and fulfillment in both career and life.

Team Building with Taste: Lessons in Leadership from the Kitchen

At first, Yaqi Liu 26BBA wasn’t keen about getting up early on a Saturday to cook. But over the course of the day, Liu changed his mind. “It was a really good experience,” he says. That experience is called “Team Building with Taste.” It’s a cooking competition in the style of Bravo network’s “Top Chef,” except with the ultimate goal of improving team dynamics. The challenge is a part of the undergraduate BBA program’s Team Dynamics and Leadership class. Over multiple weekends this fall, student teams were given a $50 budget, a set time to plan and shop, and one hour to cook and plate their meals. The teams then presented their dishes to a panel of judges.

How HackATL Fosters Future Changemakers

A lot can happen in 48 hours. For Selina Kao 27BBA, that was the turnaround time afforded her team at this October’s HackATL competition. Their mission? Transform a fledgling business idea into an actionable plan. Hosted by The Roberto C. Goizueta Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation of Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, this year’s event—powered by a dynamic collaboration between InnovATL, the City of Atlanta and the center—brought together more than 300 students from across the Southeast. After two days of frenetic brainstorming, building, and pitching transformative start-up initiatives to a panel of judges, the top teams took home over $13K in prizes.

Accomplished Alumni Create Meaningful Impact

Goizueta’s Veterans: Meet Matt Smith

In February 2025, Matt Smith 01MBA will retire as a two-star major general for the U.S. Army. His story is unique because of its many twists and turns. Smith joined the Army in college, before heading to the corporate world in Atlanta in the late 90s and enrolling in Goizueta Business School’s MBA program. However, it wasn’t long before Smith realized that the military was where he was meant to be. He resumed active duty for the Army in 2019, and in December 2022, he stepped into his current role as commander of the Joint Task Force – North. His team has helped federal agencies with interdepartmental coordination and assisted U.S. Border Patrol when they needed additional observation help. Smith says the skills he gained from earning an MBA have helped set him apart as a military leader. Now he’s he’s giving voice to Goizueta’s veterans as part of the advisory board for the new Master in Business for Veterans program.

Meet Marnie Harris: Building Hotels with Purpose

When Marnie Harris 20MBA was an undergraduate biomedical engineering student, she dreamed of building a more accessible world. Harris helped found The Excel Program at Georgia Tech, a certificate program for students with intellectual disabilities. When Harris graduated, she stayed on to welcome the first cohort of Excel students. But she soon came to believe that creating meaningful employment for this demographic must begin inside business, where the jobs are. So, Harris enrolled in Goizueta Business School’s MBA program, where she received the Woodruff Scholarship, Emory’s most prestigious named scholarship, awarded to Emory applicants who want to make a positive social impact. Now, Harris serves as the director of business and marketing strategy at Pavilion Development Company. There, she’s developing and franchising the Shepherd Hotels brand, which focuses on employing staff with intellectual disabilities.

Holistic Health Starts at Home: Meet Kyle Brown

After enrolling in the One-Year MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta Business School, Kyle Brown 20MBA became interested in holistic living and the various ways cannabidiol (CBD) could improve one’s health. Brown soon teamed up with his aunt, an expert gardener and advocate of natural medicine, who had long been growing her own herbs for healthful teas. The duo developed a series of CBD tea formulas, and ultimately launched their brick-and-mortar cannabis bar Bookstore Gallery. While its products assist in pain management on an individual level, Bookstore Gallery leads the charge of healing on a community level. Brown’s holistic healing mission comes to life through diverse events, including therapy-focused happy hours, game nights, tailgates, spoken word poetry, men’s mental health meetups, and creative outlets like “Puff and Paint.”

Groundbreaking Research from Goizueta’s Brightest Minds

Mitigating Bias in AI: Sharing the Burden of Bias When it Counts Most

From directions on Google Maps to job recommendations on LinkedIn, by now, we’ve all grown accustomed to AI systems’ integration in nearly every aspect of our daily lives. But are AI systems fair? The answer to this question, in short—not completely. Fortunately, some dedicated data scientists are working around the clock to tackle this big issue. One of those data scientists is Gareth James, who also serves as the Dean of Goizueta Business School as his day job. In a recent paper titled “A Burden Shared is a Burden Halved: A Fairness-Adjusted Approach to Classification” Dean James—along with coauthors Bradley Rava, Wenguang Sun, and Xin Tong—have proposed a new framework to help ensure AI decision-making is as fair as possible in high-stakes decisions where certain individuals—for example, racial minority groups and other protected groups—may be more prone to AI bias, even without our realizing it. 

Hiring More Nurses Generates Revenue for Hospitals

Underfunding is driving an acute shortage of trained nurses in hospitals and care facilities in the United States. American nurses are quitting in droves, and that’s bad news for patient outcomes. For beleaguered administrators looking to sustain quality of care while minimizing costs (and maximizing profits), hiring and retaining nursing staff has arguably become something of a zero-sum game in the U.S. But could there be potential financial losses attached to nurse understaffing that administrators should factor into their hiring and remuneration decisions? Research by Goizueta Professors Diwas KC and Donald Lee, as well as recent Goizueta PhD graduates Hao Ding 24PhD (Auburn University) and Sokol Tushe 23PhD (Muma College of Business), would suggest there are.

Training Innovative AI to Provide Expert Guidance on Prescription Medications

A new wave of medications meant to treat Type II diabetes is grabbing headlines around the world for their ability to help people lose a significant amount of weight. The two big names that come to mind are Ozempic and Wegovy. However, both medications come with a host of side effects, and are not suitable for every patient. Many clinics and physicians—particularly in smaller communities—do not have immediate access to expert second opinions needed to make decisions about prescription medications such as these. That’s one of the reasons Karl Kuhnert is using artificial intelligence to capture the expertise of physicians like Caroline Collins MD through the Tacit Object Modeler, or TOM. By using TOM, Kuhnert and Collins can create her “decision-making digital twin.” Though there are a number of ways TOM could be useful to the healthcare industry when prescribing medications, not least among them is the potential to expand access to the expert opinions of medical specialists to rural areas experiencing significant health disparities.

Help keep the great Goizueta stories coming with a gift of support to Emory’s 2O36 campaign.

The post The Best Stories of 2024 from Goizueta Business School appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.

American nurses are quitting in droves, thanks to low pay and burnout as understaffing increases individual workload. This is bad news for patient outcomes. Nurses are estimated to have eight times more routine contact with patients than physicians. They shoulder the bulk of all responsibility in terms of diagnostic data collection, treatment plans, and clinical reporting. As a result, understaffing is linked to a slew of serious problems, among them increased wait times for patients in care, post-operative infections, readmission rates, and patient mortality—all of which are on the rise across the U.S.

Tackling this crisis is challenging because of how nursing services are reimbursed. Most hospitals operate a payment system where services are paid for separately. Physician services are billed as separate line items, making them a revenue generator for the hospitals that employ them. But under Medicare, nursing services are charged as part of a fixed room and board fee, meaning that hospitals charge the same fee regardless of how many nurses are employed in the patient’s care. In this model, nurses end up on the other side of hospitals’ balance sheets: a labor expense rather than a source of income.

For beleaguered administrators looking to sustain quality of care while minimizing costs (and maximizing profits), hiring and retaining nursing staff has arguably become something of a zero-sum game in the U.S.

The Hidden Costs of Nurse Understaffing

But might the balance sheet in fact be skewed in some way? Could there be potential financial losses attached to nurse understaffing that administrators should factor into their hiring and remuneration decisions?

Research by Goizueta Professors Diwas KC and Donald Lee, as well as recent Goizueta PhD graduates Hao Ding 24PhD (Auburn University) and Sokol Tushe 23PhD (Muma College of Business), would suggest there are. Their new peer-reviewed publication* finds that increasing a single nurse’s workload by just one patient creates a 17% service slowdown for all other patients under that nurse’s care. Looking at the data another way, having one additional nurse on duty during the busiest shift (typically between 7am and 7pm) speeds up emergency department work and frees up capacity to treat more patients such that hospitals could be looking at a major increase in revenue. The researchers calculate that this productivity gain could equate to a net increase of $470,000 per 10,000 patient visits—and savings to the tune of $160,000 in lost earnings for the same number of patients as wait times are reduced.

“A lot of the debate around nursing in the U.S. has focused on the loss of quality in care, which is hugely important,” says Diwas KC.

But looking at the crisis through a productivity lens means we’re also able to understand the very real economic value that nurses bring too: the revenue increases that come with capacity gains.

Diwas KC, Goizueta Foundation Term Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management

“Our findings challenge the predominant thinking around nursing as a cost,” adds Lee. “What we see is that investing in nursing staff more than pays for itself in downstream financial benefits for hospitals. It is effectively a win-win-win for patients, nurses, and healthcare providers.”

Nurse Load: the Biggest Impact on Productivity

To get to these findings, the researchers analyzed a high-resolution dataset on patient flow through a large U.S. teaching hospital. They looked at the real-time workloads of physicians and nurses working in the emergency department between April 2018 and March 2019, factoring in variables such as patient demographics and severity of complaint or illness. Tracking patients from admission to triage and on to treatment, the researchers were able to tease out the impact that the number of nurses and physicians on duty had on patient throughput. Using a novel machine learning technique developed at Goizueta by Lee, they were able to identify the effect of increasing or reducing the workforce. The contrast between physicians and nursing staff is stark, says Tushe.

“When you have fewer nurses on duty, capacity and patient throughput drops by an order of magnitude—far, far more than when reducing the number of doctors. Our results show that for every additional patient the nurse is responsible for, service speed falls by 17%. That compares to just 1.4% if you add one patient to the workload of an attending physician. In other words, nurses’ impact on productivity in the emergency department is more than eight times greater.”

Boosting Revenue Through Reduced Wait Times

Adding an additional nurse to the workforce, on the other hand, increases capacity appreciably. And as more patients are treated faster, hospitals can expect a concomitant uptick in revenue, says KC.

“It’s well documented that cutting down wait time equates to more patients treated and more income. Previous research shows that reducing service time by 15 minutes per 30,000 patient visits translates to $1.4 million in extra revenue for a hospital.”

In our study, we calculate that staffing one additional nurse in the 7am to 7pm emergency department shift reduces wait time by 23 minutes, so hospitals could be looking at an increase of $2.33 million per year.

Diwas KC

This far eclipses the costs associated with hiring one additional nurse, says Lee.

“According to 2022 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average nursing salary in the U.S. is $83,000. Fringe benefits account for an additional 50% of the base salary. The total cost of adding one nurse during the 7am to 7pm shift is $310,000 (for 2.5 full-time employees). When you do the math, it is clear. The net hospital gain is $2 million for the hospital in our study. Or $470,000 per 10,000 patient visits.”

Incontrovertible Benefits to Hiring More Nurses

These findings should provide compelling food for thought both to healthcare administrators and U.S. policymakers. For too long, the latter have fixated on the upstream costs, without exploring the downstream benefits of nursing services, say the researchers. Their study, the first to quantify the economic value of nurses in the U.S., asks “better questions,” argues Tushe; exploiting newly available data and analytics to reveal incontrovertible financial benefits that attach to hiring—and compensating—more nurses in American hospitals.

We know that a lot of nurses are leaving the profession not just because of cuts and burnout, but also because of lower pay. We would say to administrators struggling to hire talented nurses to review current wage offers, because our analysis suggests that the economic surplus from hiring more nurses could be readily applied to retention pay rises also.

Sokol Tushe 23PhD, Muma College of Business

The Case for Mandated Ratios

For state-level decision makers, Lee has additional words of advice.

“In 2004, California mandated minimum nurse-to-patient ratios in hospitals. Since then, six more states have added some form of minimum ratio requirement. The evidence is that this has been beneficial to patient outcomes and nurse job satisfaction. Our research now adds an economic dimension to the list of benefits as well. Ipso facto, policymakers ought to consider wider adoption of minimum nurse-to-patient ratios.”

However, decision makers go about tackling the shortage of nurses in the U.S., they should go about it fast and soon, says KC.

“This is a healthcare crisis that is only set to become more acute in the near future. As our demographics shift and our population starts again out, demand for quality will increase. So too must the supply of care capacity. But what we are seeing is the nursing staffing situation in the U.S. moving in the opposite direction. All of this is manifesting in the emergency department. That’s where wait times are getting longer, mistakes are being made, and overworked nurses are quitting. It is creating a vicious cycle that needs to be broken.”

Goizueta faculty apply their expertise and knowledge to solving problems that society—and the world—face. Learn more about faculty research at Goizueta.

*Ding, Tushe, Kc, Lee: “Frontiers in Operations: Valuing nursing productivity in emergency departments.” Manufacturing & Service Operations Management 26:4:1323-1337 (2024)

The post Hiring More Nurses Generates Revenue for Hospitals appeared first on EmoryBusiness.com.