ISP Historical Overview:
The roots of the University of Minnesota's ISP program are deep, going back to the 1950's and the American Hospital Association (AHA), where ISP founder and director emeritus Vernon E. Weckwerth was serving as the organization's head of research and statistics. He was eventually tasked with running the AHA's research arm, the non-profit Hospital Research and Educational Trust. While there, HRET received a large grant from the Kellogg Foundation to fund university based programs to provide training and continuing education for hospital administrators.
Following Dr. Weckewrth's return to the SPH, he created OCHE (Office of Continuing Hospital Education) to work through the the Upper Midwest Hospital Conference, which represented hospital associations from Montana to Michigan and Iowa to Manitoba to what was, at the time, a groundbreaking educational approach: use the expertise of employed hospital administrators to train new and junior administrators in their geographical area. This, combined with the topics taught by faculty at the partner educational institutions, was the earliest iteration of ISP. Students were given an exam at the end of the training program to demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach. Initial evidence showed that is was indeed successful. The evaluation of the approach became the basis for the doctoral dissertation of Edith Leyasmyer, who later would become the Dean of the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, which was the longtime home to the ISP program.
In 1960, with the ink not yet dry on his Ph.D. degree, Dr. Weckwerth took a faculty position in the University of Minnesota School of Public Health's Master of Hospital Administration (MHA) program. He built an enormous research program, due in part to his earlier connection with the AHA and Maternal and Child Health. That research portfolio was eventually spun off to become Minnesota Systems Research, at the time the largest health research organization in the Minnesota.
By the late 1960's, Weckwerth realized the importance of reaching back to his own rural roots to educate those who were in no position to leave their professional positions to attend the University of Minnesota, and if they did, may never return to their rural outposts.
In 1968 Dr. Weckwerth, now a full tenured professor, issued a call to hospital administrators for applications to the first-of-its-kind executive education program in the world: ISP. The admissions criteria and curriculum for ISP were the same as those of the University of Minnesota's MHA full time program. In ISP, students would spend two weeks on campus each year for three years, and participate in a monthly education session in the field, near their home institution, with an executive mentor who served as a preceptor.
The link between ISP and the MHA program proved to be a critical one. ISP students, in their third year, learned from Ph.D. students in the healthcare administration program about how to do a research thesis. The Ph.D. students, in turn, were exposed to the real-world experience of the ISP'ers.
ISP students earned a credential of management studies (CMS) after two years and a credential of advanced studies (CAS) after three years. They were also elgible, afer admission, to enter the School of Public Health's MHA of Master of Public Health (MPH) programs.
By the mid 1970's, the ISP had developed a reputation dor excellence that reached far beyond the Upper Midwest. Indeed, demand for entrance into the program was coming from all over the world, based solely on the word of mouth.
When the ISP program was closed in 2008, more than 40 years after its inception, it had 3,117 alumni from 45 countries.
