Starting in fall 2027 this brave new baccalaureate will get students into critical healthcare careers more quickly
By Erica Noonan
Next fall Suffolk will welcome a unique group of academic pioneers: undergrads who are ready to embrace an accelerated on-ramp to a career in healthcare administration, with the aim of joining the workplace as soon as possible.
They will be the inaugural class of Suffolk’s new Applied Bachelor’s Degree in Healthcare Administration & Innovation, a 94-credit, three-year pilot program that won approval from the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education earlier this year. Suffolk’s pilot has already piqued the interest of the healthcare industry for its potential to help alleviate workforce shortages and provide fresh talent and viewpoints to a system undergoing major technological shifts, economic pressures, and reinvention.
The program will leverage Suffolk’s location in the heart of the Commonwealth’s healthcare ecosystem, one of the most concentrated markets in the country for healthcare-management professionals, employing more than 17,000 medical- and health-services managers.
Launching a new vision for a college degree—especially one that shortens traditional matriculation time by a year—represents a significant step for the University, says President Marisa Kelly, who stresses that a three-year degree is not for everyone. But the opportunity to serve students seeking more focused, affordable bachelor’s degree options, while also making a direct investment in the Massachusetts healthcare-management pipeline, made advancing into new frontiers worth it, she said.
News of the three-year degree drew attention from media outlets nationwide and garnered editorial-board support from The Boston Globe. “Innovation in any sector, including higher education, is incredibly important,” President Kelly said in an interview with the newspaper. “Some innovations work well, other innovations don’t, so we have to measure, assess, make sure that these programs are successful—but we won’t know if we don’t try.”
The three-year program maintains rigorous academic standards and learning outcomes comparable to Suffolk’s existing Bachelor of Science in Business Administration.
State education leaders see it as a welcome addition to the higher education landscape in Massachusetts. “Many students need to launch their careers sooner to support themselves and their families, and these pilots explore how we can grow options for being career-ready in a way that reduces costs and time to degree,” said then-Commissioner of Higher Education Noe Ortega of the board’s favorable vote on the program.
The curriculum was initially spearheaded by faculty from the Sawyer Business School’s Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) Program who were already researching how to expand offerings to undergraduates, using previously conducted outreach with external stakeholders—including alumni of the MHA program and employers. Then, faculty and staff from all three schools contributed to the degree design.
Graduates of the applied bachelor’s degree program must demonstrate mastery across six integrated competency areas and complete a 120-hour supervised healthcare-administration internship in approved settings such as hospitals, community health centers, behavioral-health organizations, and biotech start-ups. They will leave Suffolk with a better understanding of the structure, financing, and delivery of the US healthcare system and be able to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge to solve complex challenges. They will also be better equipped to navigate healthcare’s legal, regulatory, and policy environments, drive operational and systems improvement, and advance patient-centered and equitable care.
Graduates can expect to enter a robust healthcare job market, one projected to continue growing in scope and opportunity. State figures show healthcare administrative occupations growing 30% between 2022 and 2032, and Rams—two-thirds of whom are from Massachusetts, and 60% of whom remain in the greater Boston area after graduation—are well positioned to meet this crucial workforce need.
New Pre-Health Advisor Dr. Matthew Pittman helps students examine all their options
When it comes to choosing the right healthcare career, it’s best to get a second opinion. Committing to a specialty can mean years of additional training, often requiring personal and financial sacrifices.
Suffolk’s new pre-health advisor, Biology Professor Matthew Pittman, MD, MPH, MBA, knows that better than most. Taking time to recover from a serious illness during his first year of medical residency made him pause and reconsider the path he’d been on since childhood. Now, he wants to make sure students know how many rewarding career options there are in the field, and how to prepare for the ones that best fit their talents and life goals.
What’s the difference between premed and pre-health?
A: Pre-health is an umbrella term for everything health related. It includes medical-school preparation, but also things like dental, physical therapy, occupational therapy, nursing, and even [related fields such as] public health and clinical informatics. We present all these options to students so they can judge what aligns with their personalities and the lifestyles they want.
Does pre-health advising offer the same services as Suffolk’s Center for Career Equity, Development & Success?
A: We work closely with the Career Center to make sure students are prepared to enter the field, but pre-health advising also focuses on helping students make academic and extracurricular choices during their undergraduate experiences that will build résumés that appeal to employers and graduate/medical programs. We also offer expert support for students applying to medical school and professional programs, including curated resources on our online Canvas platform, help preparing applications, and mock interviews.
How do you help students find the right fit?
A: I encourage every student to network and gain experience during research programs every summer, do volunteer work to gain insight into people and community issues, and shadow different medical professionals.
Shadowing is critical. I grew up wanting to follow in the footsteps of my family doctor. But when I started medical residency, I discovered very quickly that inpatient medicine was completely different and not for me. I want students to have those realizations early on so they can change their trajectories if needed.
Is it hard for students to find those opportunities?
A: Boston is a mecca [for healthcare]. There are so many research institutions and large hospitals close to campus where students can work and learn, as well as alumni to connect with in almost every aspect of the field.
Interview By Andrea Grant
Pursuing separate research pathways, Suffolk professors Sarah O’Dor and Maghnus O’Seaghdha are unraveling the mysteries of strep, the common but potentially life-altering bacterium
By Andrea Grant
Wake up, have breakfast, get ready, and rush out the door to school. The familiar rhythm of a family’s routine hummed along, until one morning everything changed. Their child now deemed their favorite foods “unsafe” to eat. They couldn’t bear touching their backpack. School was suddenly out of the question.
For most parents, the abrupt onset of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms in their child would be alarming and confusing. To Suffolk Psychology Professor and neuropsychologist Sarah O’Dor, it’s a red flag for possible pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections, or PANDAS, a condition she’s been researching and treating for almost a decade.
Group A Streptococcus, often shortened to “strep,” is a common bacterium responsible for infections like strep throat. Typically, strep responds well to antibiotics. However, in a subset of patients, the infection may provoke a more serious inflammatory reaction. There is growing acceptance among the medical community that strep can even cause an immune-initiated psychiatric response, triggering OCD and other symptoms, says O’Dor.
O’Dor was a trainee when she encountered her first PANDAS patient. “I was treating the child for obsessive-compulsive disorder through typical therapy that we would do, exposure response prevention, but their symptoms would change dramatically when they would get [a strep infection] again.”
The experience sparked her interest in PANDAS, and led to ongoing research and treatment collaborations with a network of related specialists and researchers in Boston, nationally, and internationally, including psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and rheumatologists.
They want to learn why some patients’ ailments wax and wane during the course of their lives, while others might present during a single infection and vanish just as suddenly, never to recur.
On the seventh floor of Suffolk’s Leonard J. Samia Academic Center, Biology Professor Maghnus O’Seaghdha is looking at the same bacterium from another angle.
“I tell my students the theme of my research lab is understanding how microbes that can colonize you harmlessly have the capacity to suddenly become dangerous—like Jekyll and Hyde,” says O’Seaghdha, who researches strep alongside his students in his Biosafety Level 2 lab. “Maybe they’ve always been there your whole life, but one day something triggers a switch. What triggers that switch, and why?”
The challenge of solving this “invisible puzzle” fascinates O’Seaghdha. Each semester he and his undergraduate students grow human cells and expose them to strep to learn more about the microscopic mechanisms of the complex bacterium. Since working with the pathogen requires enhanced safety procedures, students get hands-on experience with techniques valued by future employers, along with the opportunity to contribute to novel research with direct human applications.
One ongoing project explores how strep can lay dormant inside human cells, resistant to treatment, and later reemerge to cause infections. The students have made progress in re-creating the conditions and observing the bacteria coming back out of the cells, says O’Seaghdha.
This fall, he’s taking a semester-long sabbatical to work in the Malley Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, hoping to further the project by consulting with specialists in other disciplines and using high-powered imaging equipment to learn more about the bacterium’s behavior and open up further avenues of inquiry for his students.
O’Seaghdha is also excited to help the Malley Lab advance their research into a potential vaccine for Group A strep. Strep is a human-specific pathogen and has no other host organism, he says. “If we had a vaccine, we might not only significantly reduce acute disease but also tackle longer-term postinfectious immunological complications.”
As she works with Suffolk students in her newly established Child & Adolescent Brain & Behavior Laboratory on campus, O’Dor is hopeful for future discoveries that might increase the understanding of, and treatment options for, PANDAS. She stresses the importance of timely and accurate diagnosis so that treatments, such as anti-inflammatory medications, can be given during each new strep infection.
“As psychologists, we get asked a lot by parents, ‘Why is this happening to my child?’ And we don’t have answers to those questions most of the time. PANDAS presents this really interesting opportunity to answer that question [and perhaps] actually cure what’s going on with the child, rather than just treating the symptoms.”
From state government to Big Pharma, hundreds of Suffolk Law grads are leading the way
By Michael Fisch
Doulas, trained nonmedical professionals who support a person through pregnancy and childbirth, have an image problem. The stereotype brings to mind yoga, essential oils, and laminated birth plans. In reality, a doula does hard, unglamorous work for months with a client—through pregnancy, labor, and the weeks after—offering continuous support that an overstretched hospital nurse usually can’t.
That effort cuts rates of C-sections, preterm births, and postpartum depression, outcomes plenty of medical interventions can’t touch. In 2024, Massachusetts’s Medicaid program, MassHealth, started paying for doulas, betting on the data over the stereotype.
The program just didn’t account for how doulas actually work: texting with clients at 2 a.m., knowing them by name and history, sharing birth photos on Instagram. That closeness became a liability the moment doulas turned into MassHealth providers, bound by HIPAA, the federal privacy law built for hospitals, not for the informality that makes doulas successful.
The problem landed at Suffolk Law’s Health Law Clinic, which specializes in helping low-income clients navigate daunting regulations and insurance-company denials. Students asked doulas how they actually practiced, then developed best practices that include HIPAA-compliant messaging apps and confidentiality agreements that kept doulas doing what works.
Early this fall, their work was featured in National Jurist, which gave Suffolk Law an A grade as one of four law schools nationwide on its Health Law Honor Roll.
A similar kind of problem-solving took place this year at the Legal Innovation & Technology Clinic, when students built a TurboTax-style app to help people appeal insurance-coverage denials. Other students fought to restore in-home nursing hours for a client whose family caregivers hadn’t slept through the night in years.
Some of these students eventually go on to help lead the systems they once successfully maneuvered through during their Suffolk Law days. Take Deputy General Counsel Kate McCann, JD ’13, a former Health Law Clinic student attorney who now works at the state’s Division of Insurance alongside Commissioner Michael T. Caljouw, JD ’91. This year their office became the licensing authority for pharmacy benefit managers like Optum and CVS Caremark.
Lauren Peters, JD ’15, served as the state’s undersecretary for health policy under then-Governor Charlie Baker, and later ran the Center for Health Information & Analysis, the Commonwealth’s primary hub for healthcare data and a primary source of healthcare analytics to support policy development. This spring she became president of the Massachusetts Payer-Provider Partnership, an initiative backed by the state’s hospital association that puts competing hospitals and insurers in the same room to test cost-cutting ideas.
The goal, as she told The Boston Globe in March: “Let’s break through the traditional silos . . . [that] have often stood in the way of real progress.”
An extra-deep bench in health law
Today, more than 800 Suffolk-trained lawyers work in some form of healthcare, health law, and life sciences.
They lead legal departments at institutions like Maimonides Health, the largest independent healthcare system in Brooklyn. They oversee compliance and privacy at Fenway Health, Mass General Brigham, and Beth Israel Lahey Health, and hold senior privacy counsel roles at insurers like Cigna. They serve as health-law partners at firms like Choate, Hall & Stewart and Foley Hoag. They patent the science: More than a quarter of Greater Boston’s patent law partners are Suffolk graduates, including in-house counsel at Pfizer and Moderna.
They lead organizations of every size, from the CEO of the state’s official biotech trade association to executive director of the legal aid nonprofit Health Law Advocates. And some have built companies themselves, including the world’s second-largest independent provider of dialysis services.
Some of these alumni studied under Professor Renée Landers, director of the health and biomedical law concentration, which offers practical courses from pharma regulation to Medicare and Medicaid law and mental health law. Landers worked on some of the earliest HIPAA policies herself, as deputy general counsel at Health & Human Services (HHS) during the Clinton administration, back when the healthcare system had no federal privacy rulebook to follow. She was inducted into the Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly Hall of Fame last year.
Students who focus on health-law courses and programs “graduate with a sophisticated understanding of the healthcare and life sciences sectors, along with strong foundations in basic fields such as corporate and administrative law that are important to law practice,” Landers says. “The contributions of Suffolk alumni to business, public service, and advocacy for the vulnerable in health law–related fields make the institution proud.”
Thomas Barker, JD ’98, served as acting general counsel of HHS in 2008, overseeing hundreds of attorneys as President George W. Bush’s top in-house Medicare and Medicaid policy hand. He now returns to Suffolk to teach a course on legal issues in Medicare and Medicaid.
Down the hall from Barker’s classroom, the Health Law Clinic is still doing what it’s always done. As Clinic Director Kate Gannon and her students take on the next MassHealth appeal, they’re tackling challenging cases for clients who lack resources and learning the law well enough to win them anyway.
Our Bodies Ourselves helps cut through a tangle of monetized misinformation
By Andrea Grant
As recently as a decade ago, people struggling with menopause symptoms often faced social stigma and silence from the medical community. Now they’re contending with a “gold rush” of social media influencers cashing in on gaps in medical care to sell supplements, creams, and courses backed by misleading, and sometimes completely fabricated, scientific claims.
Women seeking information about their health from other women is nothing new, and is not inherently harmful, says Suffolk University Sociology Professor Amy Agigian. In fact, that’s how the iconic resource Our Bodies, Ourselves, now housed in Suffolk University’s Center for Women’s Health & Human Rights, began—through conversations among women seeking accurate, evidence-based information about their bodies.
“It’s very hard for people today who didn’t live through it to realize the magnitude of the silence about women’s health and women’s bodies prior to the women’s health movement of the ’60s and ’70s,” says Agigian, who serves as director of the Center for Women’s Health & Human Rights and executive director of Our Bodies Ourselves.
Our Bodies Ourselves began including content addressing the then-taboo topics of aging and menopause in 1973. The late Paula Brown Doress-Worters, BA ’62, one of the organization’s co-founders and a Suffolk alumna, co-authored an Our Bodies Ourselves book called Ourselves, Growing Older: Women Aging with Knowledge and Power with Diana Laskin Siegal in 1987.
Today, many women share their lived health experiences on social media, which Agigian says can be both incredibly valuable and potentially problematic, depending on the context of the information and any bias behind it.
Many people aren’t getting the treatment they need due to an often inequitable and dysfunctional healthcare landscape, Agigian explains. “That shortfall in knowledge and care can be filled with noise on the internet—most of which I want to believe is in good faith, but a lot of which is aimed at selling snake oil.”
That’s why every piece of information shared by Our Bodies Ourselves—from scientific research from trusted partner organizations to first-person essays—comes with a disclaimer detailing their rigorous vetting process, nonprofit status, and mission.
“When it comes to menopause, or any other topic, we want people to know that we are not selling anything,” says Agigian. “Our goal at Our Bodies Ourselves is to be a place where anybody can go to get unbiased, medically accurate information throughout their lives.”
Learn more on the Our Bodies, Ourselves website
Students from fields across the University work with pediatric cancer support organization Christopher’s Haven
By Andrea Grant
Not far from campus, Christopher’s Haven provides temporary housing and community to families who travel to Boston seeking innovative cancer care for their children. For more than a decade, Suffolk students have helped the nonprofit support these families through some of their hardest days.
Students from majors as disparate as English, radiation science, and graphic design fill Biology Professor Jessica Mak’s, MS ’13, Intro to Cancer Care service-learning course each year, using their diverse skills to help the organization fundraise and function. Last spring, Advertising, Public Relations & Social Media Professor Rosalynn Vasquez’s public relations capstone students developed campaigns marking the nonprofit’s 25th anniversary. Working directly with Susan Kagan, executive director of Christopher’s Haven, gave then-public relations student Dana Watson, BA ’26, a preview of what it means to maintain a professional client relationship. “It was,” she says, “one of the most valuable hands-on experiences I’ve had at Suffolk.”
Kagan says Christopher’s Haven has already implemented some of the students’ recommendations, including incorporating their designs onto merchandise like T-shirts and totes. The collaboration will expand even further this semester as Christopher’s Haven works with the Sawyer Business School’s student-run integrated marketing agency, Suffolk in the Hub.
Sawyer Professor Mona Al-Amin develops new framework to assess AI effectiveness
By Ben Hall
Artificial intelligence is becoming a daily fact of life in American healthcare. But how does it benefit patients? And when is it suitable for specific clinical or operational tasks?
Many hospitals and health systems are moving forward with AI initiatives before really knowing the answers to those questions. That’s a problem, according to Sawyer Business School Public Service and Healthcare Administration Professor Mona Al-Amin, who says health systems need a better way to determine when AI is suitable and when it’s not.
A growing body of evidence shows that AI adoption has outpaced rigorous evidence of patient benefit, a case made most directly in a recent Nature Medicine editorial, which pointed to the adoption of AI-powered tools “accelerating rapidly across all layers of the healthcare system”—from predictive modeling to decision support tools and large language models, from clinical note-taking to draft replies to patient texts. According to a 2026 study by market research firm Eliciting Insights, 75% of US health systems now use AI; a related survey by Sage Growth Partners found that only 13% of hospital executives say they have a clear strategy for integrating it into clinical workflows.
That can be costly, both in terms of dollars and effectiveness of care.
What’s needed, says Al-Amin, is a framework to help determine when AI is a suitable tool. Together with former Suffolk Professor Kate Li, she developed such a framework: AI SAFE (short for AI Suitability Assessment Framework for Effectiveness). Al-Amin and Li, who spent more than a year poring over published research on AI in healthcare settings, have just finished the final draft of an article that will introduce AI SAFE to the healthcare community, with plans to publish next year.
“With competing demands on healthcare executives to innovate and conserve resources, investing in AI requires a framework for determining what to prioritize in terms of AI use,” says Al-Amin. AI SAFE is designed to guide those decisions.
Improving effectiveness and equity
AI SAFE is a six-stage decision pathway that encourages healthcare executives to step back and, before resources are committed, ask one fundamental question: Is AI suitable for this specific clinical or operational task?
What “using AI” means can vary widely across healthcare organizations. For some, it can be as minimal as employees using Claude to create better PowerPoint slides. More ambitious uses include billing and scheduling of patients or even having AI serve as a clinical partner, assisting with emergency room triage or reading mammogram results.
“Many hospitals are exploring AI,” says Al-Amin. “But there’s a huge variation in how it is adopted and to what extent.”
Unlike most existing frameworks, AI SAFE doesn’t treat health equity as an afterthought. That matters because bias can creep in at every step: whose data the AI learns from, on whom it gets tested, and who is in the room when it rolls out. “AI SAFE incorporates health equity at every stage,” says Al-Amin. “Used that way, AI can actually help find and fix disparities instead of deepening them.”
Next, Al-Amin and Li want to assess the framework in practice, by “talking to healthcare executives to get a better understanding of where and when they decide to implement AI,” says Al-Amin. From there, she hopes AI SAFE will become an integral part of the planning process for healthcare organizations.
Psychology Professor Wesley Barnhart addresses the prevalence of disordered eating within the LGBTQIA+ community
By Andrea Grant
At the heart of Suffolk Psychology Professor Wesley Barnhart’s work is a troubling contradiction.
Research shows that forming ties to LGBTQIA+ communities has a protective effect on individual well-being, supports building a sense of representation, and is linked to less depression, anxiety, and even suicidality, says Barnhart.
But that same involvement is also linked to more disordered eating behavior.
“Queer folks struggle with eating disorders more than their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts,” says Barnhart. Within LGBTQIA+ spaces, relief from identity-specific stressors—like discrimination and concealment based on sexual orientation and gender identity—can also be accompanied by new intra-minority (or within-community) stressors, they explain, including competition for status and pressure to conform to body ideals.
As social and traditional media highlight the resurgence of a thin aesthetic (amplified by access to GLP-1 weight-loss medications), the issue becomes even more pressing.
Barnhart works with Suffolk students in the EMBRACED Lab—which stands for Elevating Minoritized Backgrounds in Research on Appearance Concerns and Eating Disorders—to better understand the causes of eating disorders and develop culturally responsive treatment tools, including a new smartphone application that allows patients to track real-time stressors that can later be mapped to eating disorder symptoms. They’re also piloting Project EMBRACED, a single-session, targeted intervention aimed at helping LGBTQIA+ people recognize identity-specific triggers to disordered eating and build resiliency.
In a system where inclusive mental healthcare can be difficult to access, providing targeted information and interventions like these can have great impact, says Barnhart. “Learning and identifying, providing a label, and being able to connect with something or someone can be life-changing.”
