MAGAZINE FALL 2026
Challenging
the Status Quo
Octavia Palmer’s Journey to Improve Healthcare
“I am always looking for a better way. Just because something has always been done a certain way is no reason to shy away from improving it,” says Octavia Palmer, PhD (EMBA ’27).
Palmer started the Executive MBA in Healthcare program with a desire to apply what she learned in the classroom to her job at UPMC. She hasn’t even graduated from the program, and thanks to the strategic cost management and accounting classes, one of her ideas may soon become a reality.
As the division director of clinical chemistry, vice chair of population health and organizational culture, and associate professor, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Critical Care Medicine and Clinical Translational Science at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and UPMC, she directs clinical laboratories across several UPMC hospitals that generate critical diagnostic information used to guide patient care.
Through her recent service on an advisory board, she learned about innovative diagnostic testing designed to assess the risk of preeclampsia in pregnant patients and recognized its potential to improve care for patients throughout the UPMC health system.
Preeclampsia is a global health dilemma, affecting three to eight percent of pregnancies, increasing the morbidity and mortality of the pregnant person and baby, and there is no pharmacologic cure. Since it can be dangerous, it’s often decided to deliver the baby early. Early delivery increases the baby’s risk of complications (e.g., underdevelopment of vital organs) and requires specialized care.
Before taking MBA classes, Palmer says she would have just used a public health argument: Think of the number of patients who would benefit from this test. Hospitals want to create positive patient outcomes, but Palmer knows operating costs and budgets are also a factor.
Instead, she used cost accounting data to show that the diagnostic would pay for itself within six months while reducing unnecessary hospitalizations for pregnant persons with low risk of preeclampsia and accurately identifying those at high risk.
This ensures neonatal ICU resources are reserved for the infants who truly need them — generating meaningful savings.
“These classes taught me to consider what my organization would want to know before bringing in a new diagnostic. Does it align with their strategic plan and their mission to improve women’s health?” says Palmer. “I also used cost accounting to look at how much we would pay for the instrument and when it would pay for itself.”
Promotion Opened Her Eyes to Business
In 2017, she was promoted to division director of clinical chemistry, which is within the pathology department. Quickly realizing she needed to learn more about business operations and budget development, she earned the certificate in healthcare leadership and business fundamentals through the University of Pittsburgh Schools of Business and Medicine.
The certificate program sparked her interest in business and prompted her to pursue an MBA. Then Covid hit. Her plans for returning to school were put on hold so she could be clinically supportive of her team.
A second promotion in 2023, to vice chair of population health and organizational culture, prompted her to act on her desire for more business education.
“I realized I was not serving my division well without having some understanding of business, operations, and budgeting,” says Palmer.
“I needed to know how to have conversations so that the business and clinical side understood what each other was saying.”
She wanted the skills to assess how her division contributed to the operations of her organization, plus she wanted her department to be seen as more than just a service center.
“Yes, we perform a clinical service, but there’s expertise, teaching and research that also occurs. How do we define the value of our work and how it is appropriately recognized as a critical component of the healthcare UPMC delivers to patients? That value influences funding priorities and distribution and how decisions are being made,” says Palmer.
After completing two terms in the program, she has identified new variables to accurately quantify the productivity of her division. This will allow for equitable evaluations and ensure prioritization in budgeting and resource allocation.
I realized I was not serving my division well without having some understanding of business, operations, and budgeting.— Octavia Palmer, PhD (EMBA ’27)
Breaking Down Silos in Medicine
When she was an undergraduate, Palmer never considered the financial end of medicine. It wasn’t until her second year in graduate school, when she was awarded a National Institutes of Health grant, that she had to think about costs.
Palmer remembers thinking, “this is like a little business. If I purchased animals or reagents, or if I had to outsource some testing to a collaborator, I had to be diligent in staying within the budget of my grant. Then, I needed to write another grant to ensure additional funding to support continued research.”
She realizes managing a grant is a small section of healthcare, but it helped her understand the financial constraints hospital administrators deal with daily.
The Power to Implement Change
Before enrolling in Pitt’s Executive MBA program, Palmer expected to take financial and leadership classes. What she didn’t expect was to learn more about the role an organization’s culture plays in the success of the organization.
Palmer says she can now “share examples to my department of the importance of culture and its impact on the practice of pathology and laboratory medicine with the goal of asking ourselves, how do we align our culture with our mission to be successful?”
Her long-term goal is to bridge science and business to close healthcare gaps. That is complex since there are so many gaps to address such as access to care, lack of standardized care, social determinants of health and their alignment with financial growth, and these all depend on understanding the business of healthcare.
She also plans to use her degree to create workflow changes.
“I strive to improve patient health outcomes while building sustainable, diverse, and inclusive pipelines across the biomedical science,” says Palmer.
