From Clinic to Classroom: How Two Physicians Are Rethinking Healthcare Through Business
Published April 5, 2026
What drives a practicing physician to step away from medicine and pursue an MBA?
For Samuel Nathan, a doctor from Ghana, and Dan Menéndez, a U.K.-trained physician, the answer lies in a shared realization: improving healthcare often requires more than clinical expertise.
As students in the Wharton MBA and Lauder Institute MA in International Studies joint-degree program, they share the turning points behind their decision, the dissonance of bringing a medical background into a room full of MBAs, and how they hope to apply their training to improve healthcare in the long run.
The turning point for Samuel Nathan was stark. A patient needed a CT scan, routine, lifesaving, and unaffordable. “You cannot treat them, not because you don’t have the skill but because the system is flawed” he recalls. Insurance gaps, pricing barriers, and infrastructure constraints dictated outcomes long before a doctor could intervene. “A lot of medical doctors in Ghana feel very helpless,” he says. Nathan began to realize he could be more effective not as a clinician treating individual cases, but as a problem-solver confronting structural failure. He decided his next step should be a degree program that would train him to tackle problems at scale and lead change. “And that was a business degree,” he says. He didn’t set out to choose Wharton. In fact, he resisted it. “My idea of a Wharton person was a ‘finance bro.’ That wasn’t the kind of image I was trying to build.” What changed his mind was Lauder’s MA in International Studies, paired with the MBA. “It was actually Lauder that put me over the edge.” The program’s emphasis on regional expertise, culture, and policy aligned with his ambition to work across Africa to improve healthcare.
At Lauder, through immersion experiences and coursework, his perspective on healthcare solutions has deepened. “I’ve realized there are so many stakeholders shaping outcomes – five, six, seven different layers beyond patients,” he says, “but culture is key.” He points to informal savings systems across African communities, where groups pool money and distribute it to those most in need of treatment, as a blueprint for designing health insurance adoption. “If you want to introduce a health insurance model, you need to approach it from a cultural perspective.” Such solutions are inseparable, he says, from the broader economic opportunities in Africa. He challenges a persistent business narrative that has long prioritized investment in extractive industries across the continent (such as oil, gas and mining), instead emphasizing the investment potential in sectors like healthcare and manufacturing. “It’s in these areas that you can create jobs and raise living standards” he says. “It’s in the interest of the private sector that people are taken out of poverty. Once they are empowered, they become your next market.”
At Lauder, he is exploring these ideas through the Politics and Policy Program, researching how African countries can align regulations to strengthen local pharmaceutical manufacturing.
Nathan’s original ambition to use his joint-degree training to advise governments has shifted toward working more directly within government. “Ultimately, if I want to see those changes made, I know now that I need to step in,” he says.
Although his decision to leave medical practice shocked his family and colleagues, he has no regrets and maintains that the transition was a necessary trade-off between short-term certainty and long-term impact. “I had to decide whether I wanted to continue feeling helpless every day or get the skills to come back and be more useful.”
As a resident doctor inside England’s National Health Service, Dan Menéndez encountered a quieter but persistent friction between those delivering care and those managing it. “A lot of the time, it felt that the managers didn’t quite understand the lived experiences of doctors,” he says.
Trained in medicine at King’s College London and in “One Health” – a lesser-known, multidisciplinary master’s jointly run by the Royal Veterinary College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine – Menéndez was taught to think across human, veterinary, and environmental health, from public health systems to infectious disease dynamics. In theory, it was an integrated view of how health actually works. In practice, he found fragmentation and systems operating in parallel rather than in sync.
“I wanted to understand all the sides of the system,” he explains. An MBA in management and finance, paired with Lauder’s cultural and international MA, offered that bridge. Having lived across multiple countries, Menéndez says, “I’m a big believer that people need to understand each other’s cultures to find real solutions.” At Lauder, he chose the Europe track with a focus on France, drawn to a country whose healthcare system is known for effectively balancing universal access with optionality and cost discipline.
Now surrounded by MBA students rather than healthcare practitioners, Menéndez says, “I don’t have the same understanding of accounting and finance [as they do], there’s still a lot to pick up.” But his clinical training has also given him an edge. “It taught me to think holistically about challenges. You learn very quickly you need to understand feasibility,” he says.
His immediate goal after graduation is to move into healthcare consulting, a natural next step for someone interested in how incentives drive performance in the private sector, and how similar approaches could be applied in the public sector. “I think they’re two very different animals,” he says of public and private systems. “But each could learn from the other.” For Menéndez, building credibility in the business space also matters. The additional training is not just about knowledge, but about gaining the tools and the legitimacy to influence complex systems.
For both Nathan and Menéndez, the transition into business school has revealed a shared tension, and a shared advantage. In medicine, they agree, precision is non-negotiable. Answers must be grounded in evidence, and uncertainty is handled with care. “In the medical field you dare not talk when you are wrong. You are judged for being correct all the time,” explains Nathan. In business school, by contrast, ambiguity and experimentation are baked in. Rather than abandoning one mindset for the other, both have learned to navigate between them, using their time in the program to test ideas, iterate, and challenge conventional thinking. As Nathan puts it: “In business, you’re incentivized to take risks. Failure isn’t final – it’s part of the process.” ■
Story and Photo by Lauren Treutler
