Walter Dunajick, MBA, Ph.D. (Public Administration)
CEO and Worldwide Senior Director, Health Investment Analytics
Teaching focus: Public Administration

Where I come from

As an undergraduate in the 1970s, I planned to become a doctor. I never expected to end up on the financial and administrative end of healthcare, as I did for the State of Florida, or as the CEO of Value Health Investments, as I am now. I supported myself during college by working as a clinical lab technician in a hospital lab. During slow times I read newspapers and magazines. The articles that most interested me were written for the business and investment community; they seemed to understand the events shaping our lives. Though I started college in pre-med, I graduated with a bachelor's degree in economics. Then to escape the cold winters in Boston, I went to the University of Miami for my MBA.

I went to work at a county health department. My job was to convince the community to accept the diagnostic, preventive, and treatment services of the health department. I had to combine everything I knew about practical healthcare, economics, sales and marketing to progress in our mission. After a few promotions I was in the Florida Agency for Healthcare Administration as a Program Operations Administrator in the Miami Area Medicaid Office. During my tenure there, I earned my Ph.D in Public Administration.

Because of our demographics, Florida has led the nation in planning for and providing eldercare, and piloted the plan to demonstrate that Medicare recipients would be better off in assisted living or at home than in nursing homes - better for the individual's quality of life, and better for the taxpayers. I came in at the beginning of the statewide rollout and helped organize the educational campaign, promotion, and assessment of the program. It was a great success and became the model for many similar programs around the country.

Healthcare for job security

I believe that some of the best employment opportunities will be in the healthcare industry. The hardest jobs to outsource or even to move out of town are in healthcare. At the same time, technology is moving in such a direction that some of that can be done, allowing for both a local and a global expansion of opportunities.

I am now researching a company that is a broker putting together a global partnership of diagnostic radiologists - some in North America, some on other continents. The radiologists read x-rays transmitted over the Internet, providing 24/7 service in rolling shifts. If a patient comes in with a broken bone in the middle of the night here in the US, a foreign doctor reads that x-ray and interprets it. It works in both directions. On their shift, US doctors cover for foreign doctors. All the doctors get to go home on time, patients don't have to wait to be seen, and hospitals can control their staffing costs.

Time-shifting into class

I have taught at Keller since 2001 in the classroom and online. The anytime, anywhere aspect of the online environment liberates both teachers and students. The kind of time-shifting that the asynchronous environment enables has been an enormous help in allowing us to work in teams and cooperate with people we would never run into at the same time and place. In addition, practically all the information resources in the world are available online.

Reaching adult learners

My teaching style is to let the lesson unfold as a dialogue between the students, myself, and in a virtual way, the author of the textbook. Graduate level students often know more than I do about a given topic or situation. They want to discover the lesson for themselves and apply their own experience.

My favorite class exercise is to take a general principle and bring it into a current situation. For example, we may start out with a discussion of the importance of public policy on the budgets of healthcare organizations - a very nebulous and global sort of concept - and then examine the healthcare policies proposed by the presidential candidates.

I've been influenced by the continuing education that we, the instructors, get from Keller. We have conference calls every session as well as on-ground meetings or online learning sessions where we learn more about how to reach adult learners. They have experience with accomplishing things for themselves, and that's the way they look upon education: as another job that they have to do for themselves. You want to give them the support they need, and let them do it through their own initiative.

The next big thing-lifelong learning

Retirement is not the thing anymore. Lifelong learning is the thing. No matter what age you are now, you need to think about continuing to learn. You just can't keep yourself alive and interested and interesting without it.

I have been an adult learner myself. I was over 30 when I received my bachelor's degree and 50 when I finished my Ph.D. I am taking an online course now because I am thinking of going into sustainable forestry.

Why Keller?

At Keller, there is the integration of theory and practice that you can only have if you work in a field for a while and also have an appropriate education. What I like about our Keller faculty is the combination of formal educational background and the real-world work experience. You do not usually find this at a traditional university with tenure-track professors; they have more theory than practice. On the other hand, there are career institutes where you can get hands-on experience but you don't learn enough about the larger principles that contribute to careers that go to a higher level in management and administration.

At Keller, the teaching emphasis is on making a course as useful as you can as fast as you can. Those of us involved with Keller, both students and faculty, want to see results sooner.