The Network — Volume 8
Capstone Project | Alumnus Spotlight | Case Competition | Study Abroad | Newsletter Archive
Capstone Project: Taryn Browning & Jan Zisman
To thrive in future healthcare leadership roles, students often need access to more than curriculum and resources. They need a mentor.
Bonds between students and mentors often shine during the MHA program capstone project, which requires students to create a product with measurable value for a healthcare organization of their choice.
Influenced by one of the MHA program’s core competencies, communication, recent MHA graduate Taryn Browning’s project aimed to improve the “likelihood to recommend” patient scores in Intermountain Health’s emergency department. This idea came to life when Browning connected with Jan Zisman, Intermountain Health’s clinical excellence operations director.
“I love building relationships with people,” Zisman said. “I love learning what they do, meeting them where they are, and I enjoy making things happen. I'm a catalyst for change.”
Zisman acted as Browning’s capstone project preceptor and was a critical supporter of Browning’s success.
“Jan was able to introduce me to people at Intermountain to ask them questions and see how their role works,” Browning said about Zisman.
Browning’s work was able to identify a lapse in communication between nurses and nurse leaders during their patient briefings at the end of each shift. While the ER had fairly high likelihood-to-recommend ratings, Browning found that most nurses were uncomfortable confronting peers and patients about caregiving needs and challenges. Zisman works directly with Intermountain Health’s patient experience and helped Browning create a template for addressing these issues.
“I think her natural ability to seek information, be curious, learn, and connect dots, coupled with a solid program, like Weber State’s MHA program, has really helped her continue to grow and blossom,” said Zisman about Browning.
Learn more about Browning’s capstone project experience and her road to success.
Alumnus Spotlight: Meet the New Chief Supply Chain Officer for Intermountain Health, Jeromie Atkinson
Sometimes, the lynchpin of optimal patient care is 1,000 miles away.
As the chief supply chain officer of Intermountain Health, Jeromie Atkinson, WSU Master of Health Administration graduate, knows that all too well.
“If we don't do our job, a patient may not have the supply or the service that delivers a critical function that they need,” he said. “If we fail, the nurses fail, the physicians fail, and ultimately the patient fails.”
Following the threads contained in a web of supply chains can be daunting. For example, Atkinson is responsible for ensuring that 68,000 caregivers across six different states have the supplies they need to provide quality patient care. Every good or service used in a health system is accompanied by its own distinct supply chain, he said.
For the patient, the logistics are, of course, largely invisible. They are all around, however.
“Supply chain is a critical aspect of healthcare that touches everything from the food that is consumed in the cafeteria, the people that clean the fish tanks, the people that provide the cleaning in the rooms when a patient leaves, and all the other patient supplies used on a day-to-day basis,” Atkinson said.
Just wrangling all of that is a challenge in and of itself, but Atkinson, who has over 30 years of experience, keeps another thing in mind: cost.
“Healthcare is too expensive, and it's too complicated,” he said. “Wherever I can help make it simpler, cheaper, and easier to navigate for patients is something I care a lot about.”
Case Competition: 2025 All-Star Team
The National Case Competition invites students from CAHME-accredited programs, such as Weber State’s Master of Health Administration program, to competitively apply what they’ve learned to real-life scenarios.
Held in Birmingham, Alabama, graduate students from across the U.S. and Canada travel to showcase their practical healthcare skills. Weber State’s 2025 National Case Competition all-star team consisted of Colby Lee, Christina Frazier, Noah Bridge, and Rachel Ford.
Ford had the opportunity to attend the national competition as a student observer, a brand-new role in 2025.
“I got to participate in the class sessions we had leading up to the case competition, and accompany the team to Alabama to see behind the scenes and learn from our professors as they were prepping for the competition,” she said.
Preparation for the national competition is rigorous. Students are given one month to prepare a solution to a selected case study modeled after real problems that real healthcare organizations face.
“The issue was to come up with a sustainability plan for a specific hospital in the Advent Health healthcare system,” Frazier said. “We’re given six hospitals to choose from to build our case around.”
The all-star team worked together to study the different elements for each of the six hospitals.
“It was really important to find the root cause of the problems,” Lee said.
During this process, the all-star team learned to challenge one another in pursuit of the best answer. The ability to work together toward the best solution became crucial when searching for answers for their selected case study.
“It’s just like Professor Rand (Kerr) says, ‘It doesn’t matter who’s right. It matters what’s right,’” Bridge said.
MHA executive in residence Steve Bateman and industry relations expert Rand Kerr advise the case competition students each year.
Watch Lee, Frazier, Bridge, and Ford talk about mentorship, their case study solution, and more: