Anitra Karthic
Anitra Karthic, MD-MHA Candidate
The Ohio State University College of Medicine
STARS Spotlight: Bridging Clinical Care and Health System Leadership
Why I Developed This Role
I entered medical school, like many students, with a desire to care deeply for patients. Early in my training, I understood doing right by patients primarily as a matter of developing strong clinical judgment, mastering medical knowledge, and delivering compassionate care at the bedside. What I had not yet appreciated was how profoundly the design of a health system shapes what clinicians are ultimately able to do for their patients.
During my first year of medical school, I was introduced to high-value care. Rather than feeling like an entirely new concept, it gave language to values I already held: avoiding unnecessary harm, considering the financial consequences of care, using resources responsibly, and aligning medical decisions with what matters most to patients.
Alongside another medical student, I helped develop a three-part high-value care curriculum for our preclinical class at Ohio State. Teaching these principles and later studying how students across the country experience high-value care during clinical training reinforced my belief that value-conscious care should not be treated as an optional addition to medical education. It should be part of how students learn to think about medicine from the beginning.
Clinical rotations, however, exposed me to a more complicated reality. I saw physicians working extraordinarily hard to care for patients while navigating time pressure, limited continuity, and incentives that did not always support the care they wanted to provide. These experiences led me to question whether gaps in care could be explained by deficits in knowledge or effort alone. Often, the deeper problem was that clinicians were working within systems they had little opportunity or capacity to understand, influence, or redesign.
Rather than ignoring this, I pursued a Master of Health Administration alongside my medical degree to better understand how strategy, operations, finance, policy, and incentives shape clinical practice. I also joined the STARS national task force to examine how medical students experience high-value care education across core clinical clerkships. Together, these experiences motivated me to create a fellowship year in value-based care to move beyond learning about healthcare systems conceptually and participate in the real, often difficult work of improving them.
How I Developed the Role
The fellowship emerged through mentorship, persistence, and a willingness to follow questions that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of medical training.
Beginning in September 2024, I had conversations with faculty mentors about my interests in high-value care, quality and safety, physician engagement, and health system transformation. Those conversations led to introductions to physician leaders and colleagues. Many were surprised that a student knew about value, clinical variation, and resource stewardship.
Over the following months, my mentors and I worked to translate that curiosity into a defined educational role. We identified institutional projects I could meaningfully contribute to while learning how improvement work is developed, negotiated, implemented, and sustained. We then created a learning plan, secured senior leadership sponsorship, and clarified the expectations for both my contributions and my development.
What I’m Working on Now
My primary project has been the development of a physician-facing value framework designed to bring measures of clinical outcomes, resource utilization, and cost together in a form that clinicians can meaningfully interpret and use. The problem is not that health systems lack data. Most generate enormous amounts of it. The harder problem is determining how to translate that data into information clinicians trust, understand, and find relevant to patient care.
Working with my mentor, I designed it as a clinician-facing entry point into an existing value analysis process: a way to make variation visible, provide context, and support more productive clinician-led conversations about outcomes, clinical practice, supply use, and opportunities for improvement. Developing the framework has required collaboration across supply chain, finance, analytics, information technology, quality improvement, and clinical leadership. Each group sees a different part of the system, uses a different professional language, and may define value differently. Much of my learning has come from understanding how those perspectives differ and helping connect them while keeping patient outcomes and clinical credibility at the center.
I have also contributed to projects involving enhanced surgical recovery, clinician-facing quality measures, and the use of performance data to support improvement. Across these efforts, I have seen that successful transformation depends not only on the quality of an intervention, but also on whether the people expected to use it understand its purpose, trust the process, and believe they have a meaningful role in shaping it.
What This Year Has Taught Me
One of the most important lessons I have learned through participating in this work is that health system transformation does not begin with a dashboard, policy, payment model, or strategic plan alone. It begins with relationships.
Improvement requires clinicians, operational leaders, analysts, administrators, and patients to develop enough shared language and trust to confront difficult questions together. It requires accountability, but not accountability that is experienced solely as surveillance or top-down pressure. It requires shared responsibility for the downstream consequences of clinical and organizational decisions and a commitment to learning when systems fall short.
This fellowship has fundamentally changed how I understand both healthcare and my potential role within it. I no longer see systems work as separate from patient care. The systems that determine access, affordability, coordination, safety, clinician capacity, and resource allocation directly shape what patients experience. Improving those systems is therefore not peripheral to caring for patients well. It is one way of taking responsibility for the conditions under which care occurs.
My medical training has been essential to developing this perspective. It has allowed me to understand the human consequences of system design and to recognize the distance that can exist between what clinicians are taught to value and what their working environments make possible. My MHA training has given me additional tools to examine why that distance exists and how organizations might begin to close it. This experience has also clarified that I am most energized by work at the intersection of patient care, value-based care, clinician engagement, and health system improvement.
STARS first showed me the power of student-led, values-driven change. This fellowship showed me what becomes possible when student curiosity is paired with mentorship, institutional sponsorship, and meaningful responsibility. I hope sharing this experience encourages you to pay attention to the questions that continue to follow you through training. Creating a role like this does not require arriving with extensive expertise or a perfectly defined career plan. It requires curiosity, humility, persistence, and a willingness to learn from people whose work may initially seem far removed from the bedside.
About the Author
Anitra Karthic is a dual-degree MD-MHA student at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. She developed a fellowship year at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, where she has worked alongside clinical and operational leaders to develop a physician-facing value measurement framework, contribute to quality and safety initiatives, and explore how health systems can make value more visible and actionable for clinicians.