Class of 2019: ER Doc, Professor, Mother of Two Earns MBA, Starts a Company

Growing up in Appomattox, Leigh-Ann Webb dreamed of attending the University of Virginia.
Suffice to mention, the dream has come authentic – and then some. By a multiple of 3, to be exact.
This week, the emergency offerings health practitioner within the UVA Health System and assistant professor of emergency medicine within the School of Medicine (who additionally holds a twin appointment within the Department of Public Health Sciences) will earn an executive MBA from the Darden School of Business and come to be a “Triple Hoo,” a time period reserved for 3-time graduates.
Webb – who met her husband, Cameron, when they were first-year undergraduate students at UVA – formerly earned a diploma in kinesiology from UVA’s Curry School of Education and Human Development in 2005 before graduating from the UVA School of Medicine in 2009.
The cherry on pinnacle: As a result of a Darden path she took, the mother of has launched a business enterprise that ambitions to improve a patient’s time in a health center.
“It’s been fantastic, interesting enjoy,” Webb stated.
The feeling has been mutual.
Webb is the epitome of what Darden seeks in its govt software college students, consistent with assistant dean Barbara Millar.
“Leigh completed achievement inside the program, at the same time as also serving as an emergency room medical doctor and elevating a family,” Millar said. “If that doesn’t mirror a force and commitment to continuous mastering and expert improvement, I don’t know what does.”
During clinical faculty, Webb thought she could pass into anesthesiology, but a very last clinical rotation in the course of her fourth yr of clinical school – that she signed up for almost on a whim – changed everything.
Needing to fill out her schedule, Webb did a -week rotation in emergency medicine. The daughter of a pastor and live-at-domestic mother, she knew proper away she had determined her calling.
Webb especially preferred the reality she can be the primary character to evaluate an affected person.
“It became the front door to the health center and you can evaluate and treat everybody, no matter their ability to pay,” she stated. “I loved the way I may want to order a check and it might come back the identical day.”
Webb went on to do her residency in emergency medicine at the University of Chicago. She ultimately worked at hospitals in North Carolina, New York City, and Baltimore before coming again to UVA in 2017 with Cameron, a UVA assistant professor of medicine within the Division of General, Geriatric, Palliative and Hospital Medicine (and the featured speaker for Saturday’s Final Exercises ceremony).
In the 9 years, Webb has labored in fitness care, she’s observed its landscape changing, with enterprise gambling a more vital position than ever. Emergency departments have emerged as overcrowded, and plenty of patients just don’t have the assets that they need.
Webb felt she had to make bigger her skillset.
“I desired to look if there was something else I may want to do to contribute to fitness care past the clinical issue,” Webb said. “I still cherished looking after sufferers, however, turned into just like, ‘There’s something more to this.’”
Enter Darden.
I felt like I became in the scientific bubble for a truly long term. … I honestly wanted that multi-disciplinary professional interaction. – Leigh-Ann Webb
Enrolled in Darden’s 21-month-lengthy Global Executive MBA application, Webb has taken part in residencies around the world, during which students study center curriculum cloth while meeting with business leaders, traveling factories and vegetation, networking with Darden alumni, participating in speaker events and touring cultural points of interest.
“I chose Darden due to the fact I wanted to have a broader view of the sector,” stated Webb, who visited China, South Africa, Europe, and India. “I felt like I turned into in the medical bubble for a totally long time, beginning from once I changed into an undergraduate scholar via medical training and the practice of medication. I married a person in the fitness profession and many of our buddies are in medication as properly.
“So I clearly wanted that multi-disciplinary professional interplay.”
Webb said operating with classmates – all professionals from other fields – was one of the most treasured parts of the revel in.
“Everyone got here in with their expertise,” she said. “Whether they had been seeking to climb the ladder or pivot into something else, it changed into terrific working with them – going via the case technique and simply soaking up and learning from other those who suppose so differently from every different, due to the fact absolutely everyone is from exceptional areas.
“For me, that was sincerely the advantage over a fitness care MBA exclusively for physicians.”
Toward the give up of her time at Darden, Webb took an entrepreneurial route in which her class task, born from a concept she and her husband concept of at some stage in a recent road trip, led to her beginning “The Get-Well Company.”
“The question we requested ourselves is how we’d use empathy and innovation to revolutionize patient enjoy, whilst they’re in the sanatorium dealing with all of the lifestyle disruptions that come alongside that,” Webb stated.
Webb’s solution is a digital platform that serves as a gifting service – still within the very early degrees of improvement (she’s not making plans on giving up her day process simply but) – that could link sufferers and their caregivers to an awful lot-wanted service. Their village might be able to use social payments to chip in for items that mitigate the disruption of being admitted to the health facility – from comfort gadgets to upgraded toiletries to concierge services including errand going for walks and house cleaning.
“I envision humans using it with pals and own family to offer sensible, medical doctor-curated items whilst any individual they recognize is admitted in the medical institution,” Webb said.
Webb, who has committed many nights and weekends to the assignment, all whilst persevering with her medical work and raising two young children, laughed whilst requested if she could be going back to UVA inside the future for every other diploma that would make her a “quadruple Hoo.”
“This,” she said, smiling, “is my remaining one.”