Interview With Beaufort B. Longest Jr., PhD, FACHE, Professor of Health Policy and Management at University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

Beaufort B. Longest Jr., PhD, FACHE, is professor of health policy and management in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) in Pennsylvania. He is the founding director of Pitt's Health Policy Institute, which he led from 1980 to 2011.Professor Longest is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives and a member of the Academy of Management and the American Public Health Association. With a doctorate from Georgia State University, he served on the faculty of Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management before joining Pitt's faculty in 1980.Professor Longest's research on modeling managerial competence, issues of governance in healthcare organizations, and health policymaking has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, and he is author or coauthor of 11 books and 32 chapters in other books. His book Health Policymaking in the United States, to be published in its sixth edition by Health Administration Press in 2015, is among the most widely used textbooks in health policy and management graduate programs. He has consulted for health services organizations and systems, universities, associations, and government agencies on health policy and management issues, and he has served on several editorial and organization boards.Dr. Kash: You have written several books that cover healthcare strategy and managing healthcare organizations as well as health policy. How did your interests evolve to public policy from your beginnings in healthcare organization strategy?Dr. Longest: That is a good question, partly because it makes me remember very happy days in graduate school, where I found the most interesting subject by far, to be strategy. I enjoyed thinking about what organizations do as a whole and why they do the things they do. And then, as I got into learning more about strategy, I came to realize that you cannot think rigorously about what organizations, especially healthcare organizations, do or do not do without assessing the public policy environment in which they operate Consider the relevance of public healthcare financing programs, such as Medicare and Medicaid, to the strategies of contemporary hospitals and healthcare systems, for example.The realization that public policy is so relevant and so important to strategic decision making in healthcare turned out to be a critical juncture in my career. Making that connection has influenced much of the scholarly work I have done over my entire career.Dr. Kash: As a professor of health policy and management and with a secondary appointment as a professor of business administration, would you say that business schools or public health schools are the best homes for healthcare management education programs?Dr. Longest: That is an important question, as it has been of so much interest to so many people for so long. That said, 1 have come to the conclusion that this is largely a question that we do not need to worry too much about. You can mount excellent graduate education programs for healthcare management students in a business school, a public health school, or, for that matter, another type of school.Of course, any of these programs, no matter where they are based, must cover certain content in their curricula, and the accreditation process has heavily influenced content selection. Now, thanks to the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education's accrediting process, you can usually look at the curricula of fully accredited graduate healthcare management education programs and see essentially the same curriculum across them. Going forward, the shift to competencybased education will only make curricula more standardized.Some people do express preferences for graduates trained in particular types of schools, and hiring decisions are sometimes influenced by this factor. These inclinations often depend on where those expressing their views went to graduate school. …