Eight students took part in the fourth annual Wharton Undergraduate Health Management Conference and DaVita Case Competition in Philadelphia last weekend.
The two teams of four students each from Union competed against students from 18 other schools, including Bryn Mawr, Columbia, Drexel, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt and Yale.
Students gained real-world experience in the health care industry by solving a business problem and presenting their recommendations to a panel of four judges. Each team had to give a 12-minute presentation, followed by three minutes of Q&A.
Garnet Team II, consisting of Julian Mak ’19, Steven Maksymowych ’18, Sapan Shah ’19 and Virali Shah ’19, won second place, which carried a cash prize of $50 per person. A team from Penn took first, which carried a cash prize of $100 per person.
Garnet Team I included Sahil Khullar ’19, Marc Perlman’19, Ankoor Talwar ’18 and Kyler Wang ’19. Perlman took the lead in recruiting members and coordinating logistics for the Union teams.
“This was a wonderful experience for our students,” said Joanne Fitzgerald, director of the Leadership in Medicine and Combined Health Degree programs. “They worked really hard to prepare for this competition, and were able to successfully integrate their knowledge of medicine, economics and health care policy to formulate impressive presentations.”
The event is the nation’s largest undergraduate health care conference. Leading entrepreneurs, researchers and other panelists and speakers discussed health tech startups, bioethics, big data, the obesity/diabetes epidemics and related trends in the field.
DaVita, a Fortune 200 company, is a global provider of kidney care and one of the country’s largest operators of medical groups and physician networks.