The 45-credit curriculum provides students with the management and policy skills needed to be an effective health care leader. The curriculum is comprised of four components:
OVERVIEW OF THE POLITICAL, LEGAL AND ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK
OVERVIEW OF THE POLITICAL, LEGAL AND ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK Issues and Approaches in Health Policy and Management
Satisfies the Health Policy and Management core requirements for the M.P.H. degree. Lectures, team projects, and readings on administrative problems and interventions that affect, and are affected by, all public health practitioners, as they seek to improve health care delivery, health care, and the health status of populations.
Health Policy and the Political System
Analysis of the role of major institutions-the central government, the federal system, the private sector, interest groups-in formulating and implementing health policy in the United States. Discussion of underlying normative issues, cross-national perspectives, and the ups and downs of health care reform.
Introduction to Health Economics
Economic analysis offers an analytic approach to problem solving that is particularly useful in thinking about the financing and delivery of health services. The course covers relevant aspects of microeconomic theory and their application to health care issues.
Legal Aspects of Health Services Administration
Legal responsibilities and liabilities in relation to consumers and providers of health services. Topics include licensure, malpractice, negligence and death.
OVERVIEW OF THE PUBLIC HEALTH SYSTEM Biostatistics
Satisfies the core requirement for the M.P.H. degree. This course covers the language of Biostatistics, the standard techniques of data collection and analysis, the content of vital statistics and mass data of the health fields. The inferential topics include the normal distribution, measures of central tendency and dispersion, hypothesis testing, confidence intervals, regressions and correlation.
Epidemiology
Satisfies the Epidemiology core requirement for the M.P.H. degree. The concepts, principles, and uses of epidemiology. Epidemiologic analysis of the determinants of health and disease. Study of particular diseases to illustrate the descriptions of their distributions and courses, the analysis of their causes, and approaches to prevention and control. Teaching is in lecture format and autonomous small-group seminars.
Environmental Health Sciences
Satisfies the Environmental Health Sciences core requirement for the M.P.H. degree. An introduction to preventative health practices with an emphasis on environmental factors. Review of basic public health concepts as they relate to disease causation and prevention. Toxicology, especially carcinogenesis, is stressed. In cooperation with Population and Family Health, infectious diseases and the implications of population growth are discussed. Available techniques of preventative practices, such as controlling the quality of air, water, and consumer products, are described for both the workplace and the general environment.
HEALTH CARE MANAGEMENT Accounting and Budgeting for Health Administration
Financial statements enable us to evaluate the performance of an enterprise, analyze its cash flow, and assess its financial position. Budgets, based on forecasts, take the form of projected statements and serve as an important managerial tool for planning and control purposes. The course examines the generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) underlying the statements and their implementation in practice. It also notes the limitations of the financial reports and their evolution in response to changing business conditions.
Health Care Financial Management
This class conveys an understanding and appreciation of health care strategic financial planning and management. It is intended to look at key financial issues such as physician/hospital integration analysis, reimbursement methodologies, cost allocation strategies, capitation and risk sharing.
Health Care Quality Management
Health care quality management involves both the evaluation of quality and its improvement. The course will begin with the study of various methodologies for evaluating quality, including techniques that measure aspects of the structure, process and outcome of care, as well as levels of satisfaction. Then we will look at systems that take the results of these measurement techniques and apply them in strategies to improve quality. Once we have covered methods for both measuring and improving quality, we will examine how they are applied in two of the most common settings: hospitals and managed care organizations.
Health Information Management
This course will teach the fundamentals of understanding how health information technology and the Internet will dramatically change healthcare research, development, and operations around the world. The readings, discussions, and course work will result in a healthcare leader adept in properly responding to the challenges in information technology management across a variety of healthcare organizations.
Hospital Management
This is an advanced course for students of health system and health care facility management. The focus includes several in-depth case studies of hospitals that focus on organizational relationships, capital finance, development of operating capacity, management of operations, financial management, human resource management, collective bargaining, community relations, new service development and physician relations. At the end of the course, the students should be able to understand each of the major issues confronting management and governance in a modern American inpatient health facility and have absorbed principles and information pertinent to hospitals and health care facilities in other countries as well.
Human Resource Management in Health Care Institutions
Major components of labor law, collective bargaining and labor relations. The course demonstrates the need to plan and direct the relationship of labor and management in order to develop and utilize an effective work setting; provides the student with an understanding of the dynamics of labor relations and the environment in which the legal structure operates; identifies the problems resulting from governmental efforts to define the rights, duties and obligations of labor relations and collective bargaining; and explores the evolution and current problems of collective bargaining.
Managerial and Organizational Behavior
This course has two overall goals. The first is to increase your effectiveness in understanding and managing individuals and teams in health care organizations. The course’s second goal is to prepare you to effectively design organizations. Effective managers not only must lead individuals and teams: they also must ensure that their organizations are well-designed to deliver the results that their strategies promise. This entails developing knowledge and skills to analyze key issues in organizational structure, power and politics, culture, and change.
Strategic Management
The introduction and application of analytical frameworks used in formulating and implementing strategies at the general manager/senior executive level and the integration of leadership and managerial skills in the strategically managed organization. The concepts of mission, values, and vision are presented as the central elements of strategic thinking and are applied in the development of comprehensive strategies across a wide variety of institutional settings and situations in the health care sector.
Six capstones with changing topics are offered to each class. Topics include: Program Evaluation
All programs and policies, whether they originate in public or private organizations, are designed to achieve certain goals. This capstone seminar will provide an overview of approaches and techniques to determine the degree to which such goals are being met. An emphasis will be placed on the design of evaluations, including the selection and measurement of outcomes, data collection, and data analysis. Case studies will be used to illustrate the practical challenges to program evaluation.
Cross National Health Policy
This capstone will discuss how the US differs from other comparable western nations in the health care sphere and how understanding these differences might be useful in thinking about the US health care reform debate.
Management of a Health Plan in Crisis
This capstone provides an in-depth study of the causes for and the rescuing of a health plan in crisis. A multi-dimensional review is conducted of how various constituencies, e.g. physicians, employers, members, shareholders regulators and governmental agencies, hospitals, health plan employees, etc., react and interact to and with a health plan in normal times and in crisis. The resuscitation of a health plan in analyzed by its multiple functional components, e.g. financial, operational, sales, legal, human resources, and public and media relations.
Private Health Insurance & Public Policy: Strategic & Management Challenges
The first goal of this capstone seminar is to provide students with a detailed introduction to the current functioning of for-profit and not-for-profit private voluntary health insurance markets in the United States. The second goal is to provide students with an understanding of the key principles involved in successful leadership for a major health care organization during a period of market change and strategic renewal.
Wall Street and Health Care: The Intersection of Cash and Care
In this course, we will look at health care delivery and payment systems from a Wall Street perspective. To do that, we will
need to develop a basic understanding of equity and credit markets, recent history (the ‘credit crisis’) and its implications
for the current state of health of the health care marketplace. We will synthesize finance, accounting, valuation, policy
analysis, industry structure and competitive dynamics, payment and reimbursement issues and look at how Wall Street
influences Main Street behavior. Finally, we will set the stage for a detailed discussion of the elements of health reform
given the current state of health care, focusing especially on how Wall Street likely reacts to each of these policies.
Management of Prevention
This capstone is about corporate health care management and its critical importance for a company’s survival. What corporations continue to learn about the importance of healthy employees for sustainable business success and how they are changing their approach from treating disease towards promoting health. Using case studies and current company scenarios the class will get an introduction to the various concepts, strategies, tools and requirements for implementation. Successful business precedence is a potential interface for broader public policy implications.
Global Health Policy
This class critically examines approaches to public health policy in the developing context. This capstone seminar will explore the major determinants of morbidity and mortality across nations including: basic public health infrastructure, education policy, health system quality, appropriate technology use, gender issues, and freedoms. The class will analyze these issues both on a macro level and on a personal level, recognizing that policy exists for people and communities rather than for economic growth per se.
