For over a dozen years, Dr. Claudia Emami (B.S. ’01, MPH ’10, ’24) served as a pediatric surgeon, first in Montreal and then in private practice in Los Angeles. She also spent time in Las Vegas as an assistant professor of pediatric surgery at UNLV and conducted medical research.
Then, Emami decided, it was time for a change. But that required revisiting some familiar territory.
Emami returned to UCLA, her undergraduate alma mater, where she had also earned her Master of Public Health. But now she would pursue an executive MBA at UCLA Anderson, with an eye to shifting her career from practicing medicine full time to managing hospital administration.
“I think the vision of the Easton Center is fantastic. There is so much changing and growing in healthcare because of what AI can do and provide. Anderson could be the premier school for teaching artificial intelligence and healthcare.”
“I practiced intensely for over 10 years. I was in a two-person private practice and we covered multiple hospitals in the greater L.A. area. For me, personally, it reached a point where there was really no growth opportunity. In the world of surgery, at the end of the day, you’re doing the same thing over and over again,” Emami says. “That led me down a path thinking, ‘OK, what if I wanted a second career, what would it look like, what are the resources required, what do I need to do?’
“I’d always thought about going to business school and learning about operations and finance and the other things that go into managing a business, and I was especially interested in large systems. So, enrolling at Anderson made sense,” Emami says. At the same time that Anderson is expanding its healthcare business curriculum, somewhat ironically, Emami appreciated the fact that her coursework wasn’t healthcare-specific. She already had that background and preferred to broaden her knowledge in other managerial areas. “I wanted to learn business, I wanted to learn entrepreneurship,” she says. “If you go back to school later in life, you want to expand your brain and do things you never did before.”
Upon completing her degree at Anderson in 2024, Emami became associate chief medical officer for HCA Healthcare’s South Atlantic division in Savannah, Georgia. Founded in 1968 and headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, HCA Healthcare Inc. operates a large network of 190 hospitals and approximately 2,400 ambulatory sites of care across 20 states in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Most recently, Emami became associate chief medical officer at Memorial Health, which includes Memorial Health University Medical Center, part of HCA’s Southern Atlantic division.
Emami devoted her Anderson studies to two specialties, tech management and corporate governance. Her capstone project pitched a startup. Now, as CMO, she’s able to put these varied interests into practice.
First and foremost, Emami says, her focus is on the quality agenda of the hospital. It includes a myriad financial implications of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ reimbursement metrics associated with medical care. The CMO, along with the medical staff, seeks to provide high-quality service that these metrics benchmark, allowing for comparisons between hospitals. Emami is also responsible for Memorial’s regulatory and compliance efforts. She works with the hospital CEO on physician relationships and with the other C-suite administrators on their specific agendas.
Emami’s pivot to administration meant discontinuing practicing medicine, though she says, “I’m never going to stop being a surgeon or a doctor, but my responsibilities are a lot different now as opposed to when I had clinical responsibilities and I was primarily focused on my patients.” According to Emami, there are hybrid versions of administrative and clinical work, but she believes that if she weren’t fully committed, she wouldn’t be as good an administrator. She says being CMO is akin to having two boats, with one foot in each. This means connecting and communicating with the physicians and the executives overseeing administrative functions that include finance, human resources, IT and marketing. In some ways, it’s not unlike serving as leader of an academic institution like Anderson, where the dean works with faculty on teaching and research while also managing the school’s administrative side. “I work for a Fortune 500 corporation, which owns the hospital, hires the C-suite and manages the hospital. It’s very matrixed and hierarchical,” Emami says.
“What I learned at Anderson is truly useful,” Emami says. “I don’t necessarily run finances, but I understand them and appreciate other facets of what goes into managing a big hospital. I learned to manage different aspects of the hospital as well, like the supply chain piece.”
Emami’s relationship to UCLA Anderson remains ongoing, as she is a board member of the school’s Easton Technology Management Center. She credits Easton’s faculty director, Terry Kramer, with bringing her on board. Kramer, not incidentally, is one of her favorite professors.
“Terry’s fantastic, one of a kind,” says Emami. “It’s just the way he teaches, the way he engages the expectations, the accountability, and what you get from him. He has high expectations and pushes his students to also take the work seriously.
“I think the vision of the Easton Center is fantastic,” Emami says. “I know that the board is trying to support the overall mission of the school by getting more engaged in healthcare. Right now, there is so much changing and growing in healthcare because of AI and what AI can do and provide. It’s fantastic to tag along and assist in that pivot for the Easton Center because Anderson could be the premier school for teaching artificial intelligence and healthcare.”
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