Medical, Business Joint Conference Set

UC Irvine wants to be the place where the movers and shakers come to learn about managed care.

It’s trying to accomplish that by teaming its schools of management and medicine in cooperative programs aimed at educating both business types and medical students about each other’s world. Though two such schools would make strange bedfellows in traditional academia, that’s not the case at UCI, where the combination of a young school, university and faculty provide the flexibility to try new things, says Margaret Wong, director of marketing for the Graduate School of Management. “We don’t have faculty with feet stuck in the cement,” Wong says.

In the latest joint effort, the two schools on Feb. 6-7 will sponsor the university’s sixth annual conference on health care for economists, business honchos and national policy wonks. The topic? “Winners and Losers Under Managed Care II,” a follow-up on issues laid out at last year’s conference.

Among other things, the conference will give UCI the chance to crow about its specialty MBA program for mid-career health-care executives and its joint MD-MBA program for medical students--both launched last year.

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Barbara Marsh covers health care for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7762 and at barbara.marsh@latimes.com