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Bridging Healthcare and Business: How an EMBA Transforms Careers

28.2.2025

In the fast-evolving landscape of healthcare, professionals increasingly recognize the need for business acumen to complement their medical expertise. Given the diverse roles within healthcare, professionals often question how an EMBA can enhance their careers. We spoke with two accomplished healthcare professionals – Dr. Sahlya Djebbar, an MD specializing in medical imaging, and Olivier Page, Regional Business Unit Manager at Olympus – who pursued the ESSEC Weekend Executive MBA to enhance their leadership capabilities and broaden their career prospects. Their experiences highlight the transformative impact of an EMBA in bridging the gap between clinical practice and business strategy.

 

 

Why healthcare professionals pursue an EMBA

With a background in radiology and medical imaging, Sahlya sought an EMBA to gain business training that medical school did not provide: “I quickly realized that I needed additional skills to build a bridge between clinical care and business in healthcare, and the pandemic helped me to realize it through the EMBA.” During the EMBA, she acquired a wide range of business skills that perfectly complement her technical medical skills. “Almost every business skill! Finance, management, strategy – I started from scratch.” 

For Olivier – a seasoned professional in the MedTech industry with experience at major corporations like Johnson & Johnson and Olympus – more than gaining business knowledge, the decision to pursue an EMBA was a strategic move: “Willing to evolve to a general manager position or to an EMEA Director position, I came to the conclusion that I needed to refresh a few skills and also to develop new ones to be well prepared for the next step. My value has significantly increased thanks to the EMBA, especially because ESSEC is a brand known worldwide.”

Olivier emphasizes the increasing necessity of this type of diploma in today’s global context for those looking to climb to the top of the ranks of the healthcare industry: “The world and our environment is often called VUCA. And if you want to fight, reduce or resolve the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, the best weapon is to increase our adaptability and our ability for change management. With its good mix of practice and theory, an EMBA is the right answer.”

From radiology to business strategy: a physician’s perspective

As a practicing physician with limited prior business knowledge, the EMBA and its environment was a new discovery for Sahlya. One of the most significant challenges and takeaways was learning to work in her Multi Competency Team (MCT), an assigned group of diverse individuals which is a unique feature of the ESSEC Executive MBAs. “Being a physician is a solo job to start with, even if we have colleagues, but it's based on hierarchy. It needed some adjustment at the beginning.” These groups, made up of participants from different functions, industries and cultural backgrounds aim to recreate the diverse realities of a board of executives and push them out of their comfort zones, as was the case with Sahlya. 

Balancing the day-to-day of a demanding career in healthcare with the rigorous coursework and group projects also required discipline and resilience. Sahlya emphasizes that staying focused and committed made the process manageable. “It was sometimes challenging to juggle between the program and real-life duties, but nothing unachievable. I made my decision by enrolling, and it helped to have a clear and focused mindset all along the way.” The advantages of balancing this part-time program with her career? She was able to apply her learnings directly to her job. The EMBA reshaped her approach to decision-making, particularly regarding medical technology investments. “It changed my vision on equipment and medical devices, giving me new criteria and negotiation skills when buying equipment for my practice.” 

A MedTech executive’s path to strategic leadership

Coming from corporate healthcare, Olivier had a strong prior understanding of doing business in the healthcare industry. However, the EMBA gave him that extra boost in areas like finance and marketing but, above all, allowed him to take a step back and gain a 360° strategic vision of a company: “With full responsibility of my P&L [profit and loss account], I changed my way to look at it and to manage it. I feel much more comfortable playing with financial KPI and with new Marketing strategies and tools. Even if I remain hands-on, I’m now able to take some distance and apply more strategic thinking and planning”.

Beyond technical knowledge, the program instilled in Olivier an entrepreneurial mindset thanks, among other things, to the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Project, a collaborative team project designed to foster innovation through the creation of a new business or the development of a product in an existing company. “We covered the creation of a new device, a new company, integrating design thinking. We have been trained to maximize our chances of success.” The entrepreneurial dimension is so present in the program that Olivier has come out of it with new ambitions: “I left ESSEC with a personal project in mind : bringing intrapreneurship to Olympus, and sooner or later becoming myself an entrepreneur in Healthcare. Dozens of future Unicorns already exist and new ideas come every day, thanks to AI and digitalization”. 

Last, but certainly not least, the program reinforced the importance of collaboration. “Through collaboration in a multicultural environment, I learned to support, contribute and sometimes lead key projects across a wide variety of markets, brands and products. This is easily applicable to my market”.

The intersection of ethics and business in healthcare

While Sahlya is directly involved in patient care, medical diagnostics and clinical decision-making, Olivier’s job in corporate healthcare means he focuses on the business side of healthcare – sales, marketing, strategy and product development. This duality is a specificity of the healthcare industry, bringing with it particular questions around balancing the ethical responsibilities of the healthcare industry, which prioritizes human well-being, with the business goal of maintaining profitability.

Both professionals highlight this delicate balance between responsibility and profitability in their industry. “Regulation, compliance, and ethics are part of the healthcare industry, no matter where you are in the value chain. We are all here for the same reason: treating patients and providing the best care we could possibly achieve,” Sahlya emphasizes. Olivier Page echoes this sentiment. “Those objectives do not oppose each other. A bad, wrong, unsatisfying device, product or drug couldn’t last long. Each successful and profitable launch will generate R&D budgets which will be used to create future solutions to support well-being, improve patient safety, enhance early diagnosis, or cure more cancers.” 

The complex regulatory landscape of the healthcare industry, while presenting a world of opportunities, also brings a lot of responsibilities for key actors like Sahlya and Olivier. The EMBA helps healthcare professionals like them navigate those complexities and leverage business knowledge to drive innovation and ethical decision-making in the industry.

Looking ahead: a vision for the future in a fast-changing industry

The EMBA has profoundly shaped Sahlya and Olivier’s career trajectories and perspectives on the future of healthcare. “It brought changes in my vision of the industry in terms of digitalization, the soaring use of AI and its impact, and understanding how the market is rapidly evolving,” Sahlya notes.

For Olivier, the EMBA reinforced a long-term ambition of impact on a larger scale. “More than ever, I want to define company strategy, in collaboration with experts. Even if I still think that I’m more legitimate in sales (double-digit growth is a standard), I now focus on profitability and on cash (which is king, whatever your market).” 

The experiences of these two healthcare professionals demonstrate that an EMBA is more than just an academic credential. It equips industry leaders with the business skills, strategic vision, and adaptability required to navigate the complexities of modern healthcare. Whether in clinical practice or MedTech leadership, their stories underscore the growing necessity of blending medical expertise with business acumen to drive meaningful change in the industry.

Whether you're part of the healthcare industry or another, find out more about how an ESSEC EMBA can help you take you career to the next level.

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