Nashville Business Journal

Former U.S. Senate majority leader and surgeon Bill Frist is returning to Vanderbilt University to teach at the Owen Graduate School of Management.

Frist has designed a class which will combine business students with fourth-year medical students to examine the financing, delivery and quality of health care.

“Connecting students from these two disciplines will help them get a stronger understanding of the complexity of all aspects of health care reform,” Frist says in a statement. “Current and future challenges in cost, access and quality of health care demand a synergy between the business and medical sides of the industry.”

Frist hopes the class will inspire students to work creatively and innovatively on ways to improve the public and private sectors of the health care system.

Before being elected to the Senate in 1994, Frist spent almost a decade as a transplant surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He also founded and directed the Vanderbilt Transplant Center and performed more than 150 heart and lung transplant procedures during that time, including the first lung transplant and first pediatric heart transplant in Tennessee and the first successful combined heart-lung transplant in the South.