Christopher Howard, MBA, MPH
Assistant professor at Howard University
“I’ve always been interested in understanding what I can do to improve the communities that I’ve lived in, what I can do to improve, to strengthen them, and most importantly what I can do to help me to understand what their healthcare needs are and prevent a lot of the things that I witnessed growing up as a child.”
Christopher Howard was a freshman in college when he experienced the shortcomings of the U.S. health care system firsthand. Not knowing what to do while suffering from a severe sore throat, he visited the emergency room where doctors made erroneous assumptions about him, booked him for an overnight stay, and even gave him a false HIV diagnosis (a disease he does not have) without testing him for the virus. When his insurance was taxed by the quickly escalating charges, he was released from the hospital without a diagnosis or treatment plan and referred to a free clinic across the street. Once there, he received a diagnosis in 15 minutes and ultimately improved in the next few days.
“The whole experience made me question my career path, [he was a pre-med major at the time] and made me wonder, if this happened to me, was it happening to others too?” recalls Howard. “My whole mindset was, I could be a physician and help one patient at a time, but I’d rather have a bigger impact and try to study quality issues from a health systems approach. That’s what led me into my academic major change, from being pre-med to health care administration.”
Growing up in a low-income neighborhood where health inequities were prevalent and as the son to parents who valued service and led by example (his mother worked in public education, his father was CEO of an Urban League affiliate), giving back has long been an integral part of Howard’s DNA.
After college graduation, Howard directed his interests into the accelerated (12-month) Health Care Management MPH degree program at Rollins. In between classes in strategic management, leadership, and administration, Howard served as president of the Association for Black Public Health Students.
With an MPH (and later, an MBA) beneath his belt, Howard set out on a career path in academia. He’s currently an assistant professor in the Health Management Department in the College of Nursing and Allied Sciences at Howard University. A tenure-track faculty, Howard’s current research projects include a study examining a recent policy passed by HUD banning smoking in public housing and another that looks at leadership behavior in the nation’s leading hospitals based in Washington, D.C. On the side, Howard works part-time as the director of the Healthcare Council of the National Capital Area, one of 18 regional hospital associations affiliated with the American Hospital Association and is also actively engaged with D.C.-area community service projects.
Never one to become complacent, Howard is also a full-time PhD candidate whose dissertation is aimed at examining health care quality from a health equity standpoint.
“I’ve always been interested in understanding what I can do to improve and strengthen the communities I’ve lived in, and, most importantly what I can do to help people understand what their health care needs are and prevent a lot of the things that I witnessed growing up as a child. So, that’s just always been connected to my idea of what service is. I tell people there’s always an element of humanness that’s involved in service.”