Business and Healthcare

“We opened the very first comprehensive wound program in the city at The Graduate Hospital,” Dr. Weingarten says. “Wound care has been a subspecialty of mine. When I was recruited by Drexel University College of Medicine in 2001, they wanted me to set up a wound program, and that's what I did.” A fellow of the American College of Surgeons, Dr. Weingarten also has an MBA from Villanova. He has been a practicing surgeon for several years but enrolled in the MBA program at the suggestion of his wife Carol Toussie Weingarten, PhD, RN, ANEF, an associate professor at the Villanova College of Nursing.

“In my day, you learned nothing in medical school about the business of healthcare and nothing about billing; that was taboo,” says Dr. Weingarten. “In fact, it was felt that doctors were to learn how to take care of patients without worrying about how their insurance is going to cover their health care.”

“There are literally millions of people in the US suffering from these wounds, and if you look at the economics of it, it’s a large burden on the healthcare system. So if we can find a way to speed up healing, that would be beneficial for the patient and for the health care system,” explains Dr. Weingarten.

When he’s not caring for patients or doing research, Dr. Weingarten, who has been named a “Top Doc '' by Philadelphia magazine five times, teaches a Business of Healthcare course to Drexel medical students. “ I was the first person to teach the course and I never would have been asked nor qualified to do this if I hadn't gone to Villanova,” he says. Not only is Dr. Weingarten a top doctor in his field, he’s also a top educator. This spring he received the Lindback Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching, one of the most prestigious higher education awards given nationally.

While at VSB, Dr. Weingarten did an independent study on analytical hierarchical processing- a way of taking qualitative information and quantifying it- with Robert Nydick, PhD Professor of Management and Operations. He and Dr. Nydick applied the approach to a selection of applicants for surgery. Dr. Weingarten’s research was later published in the journal Academic Medicine with Dr. Nydick as coauthor.

Dr. Weingarten is a medical director of the Drexel University College of Medicine Comprehensive Wound Healing program and Drexel’s Non-Invasive Vascular Laboratory. For more than a decade, he and colleagues from Drexel’s School of Bioengineering have been engaged in funded research on wound healing, and their work has been presented and published internationally.

Their most recent progress is funded by a five-year, $3 million grant from the National Institute of Health and is focused on improving healing for patients with venous and diabetic wounds. He’s partnered with biomedical engineers who have developed new technology in the form of small, lightweight patch that uses ultrasound to speed the healing process. They apply the new device to the patient’s wound in order to actively stimulate healing.

In the Villanova tradition, Dr. Weingarten and his family are committed to service. For example, for two-week missions over six years (2009-2014), Dr. Weingarten served as a volunteer vascular surgeon through the Combat Casualty Program and cared for wounded troops at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. His wife served as a volunteer with the Chaplains Wounded Warrior Ministry Center and as a consultant to the Department of Nursing. He and their daughter, Rober Weingarten Wood, volunteered together in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

With both parents in the healthcare field, it’s no wonder that Robin followed suit; she earned her PhD in Nursing from the Villanova College of Nursing this May and is nurse manager of the Emergency department at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Originally published in the Summer 2017 Issue of Villanova Business magazine.