Health Policy & Management

• SPH PM 702: Introduction to Health Policy & Management
  Close to 90 percent of the $2.5 trillion spent on health care in this nation in 2009 is being used to provide medical services to individuals. High costs, declining coverage, stresses on many caregivers, tradeoffs among quality and cost and access, and growing political tensions afflict U.S. health care. These problems affect all of us who work in public health. This course analyzes these problems, their causes, and ways to solve them. Specifically, how can our vast human and financial resources be marshaled and managed to improve health care delivery for all Americans? To answer this question, the course examines how people are covered, how care is organized and delivered, how caregivers are paid, management, politics, ethics, and more. It considers hospitals, physicians and other caregivers, long-term care, prescription drugs, and mental health. NOTE: This course meets the health policy and management MPH core requirement. It is the prerequisite for most others in the department. International, nonresident students who are not Health Policy and Management concentrators and all International Health concentrators may substitute IH704.
• SPH PM 715: The Impact of Insurance on Health Care
  This course examines the efforts of employers, as purchasers of health care, to shape the delivery, cost, and quality of health care. It describes the origins of job-based health insurance in the United States, how is insurance linked to American culture and tradition (is it an accident or natural to our political/economic ethos), how insurance works in health care, the ways in which health care realities can conflict with the requirements of traditional insurance, the employer-sponsored “consumer-driven” health plans that reduce first-dollar coverage and thereby attempt to make patients more cost conscious in their health care use, and efforts by employers to induce hospitals, doctors, and other caregivers to improve quality and safety while containing costs.
• SPH PM 721: Organizational Behavior and Health Management
  This course provides a framework for understanding, diagnosing, and taking actions to improve individual, group, and system-wide effectiveness in health services organizations. The conceptual framework is derived from the organizational behavior literature and applied to health services organizations. Some of the topics this course addresses and integrates are leadership, motivation, corporate culture, teams, organization design and coordination, and organization change. Case studies, brief lectures, student presentations, and experiential exercises are used throughout this course.
• SPH PM 733: Health Program Management
  This course introduces practical management in health care settings with real-world business knowledge and skills. It aims to better equip present and future health care managers to plan effectively, anticipate challenges and marshal resources. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexities of implementation in challenging health care settings. Concepts will be discussed briefly with the greater emphasis on concrete skills necessary for success. Concepts and skills will be tied to practice by examples, case studies, problem-solving, experimental exercises, and reflection. Topics include differentiating leadership from management, negotiating techniques, budgeting, and patient and process flow. PM733 is a summer-long course.
• SPH PM 734: Principles of Non-Profit Accounting
  This course combines didactic and case study approaches to the fundamentals of nonprofit accounting, with emphasis on health care institutions. Topics covered include accrual accounting, fund accounting, budgeting, and cost concepts. Analysis and interpretation of financial statements for decision making by the nonfinancial manager are stressed.
• SPH PM 735: Health Care Finance
  This course describes how money works in health care, presents a variety of useful analytic techniques, and explores methods of using money to shape more accessible, affordable, and effective health care. We examine current financial crises and managerial problems in health care and their proposed solutions. No financial or accounting background is assumed.
• SPH PM 736: Human Resource Management in Public Health
  This course provides students with a skills-based orientation to human resource management, especially in a public health or human services setting. Core concepts such as workplace assessment, motivators, human resource planning and recruitment, decentralization, criteria-based position descriptions and performance appraisals, and union management issues are presented via case studies that amplify a systems-oriented public health approach. Using case examples that illustrate basic principles, students develop strategies to improve retention, manage and coordinate human resource problems with the organizational culture in many public health and human service organizations. Workplace enhancers affecting retention, innovative management models, current regulatory and service issues that affect reimbursement, wage and practice in multiple settings are introduced in lecture, discussion, group, and case analysis.
• SPH PM 741: Consultation Techniques
  This course prepares the student to be a consultant with a health policy and management perspective. The course covers key concepts in how to identify and market your expertise to a potential consulting client, evaluate client demands and needs so as to develop a winning proposal, select and apply appropriate tools to successfully address a range of common types of consulting engagements. The course offers guidance for avoidance of common pitfalls of client relationship management as well as how to maximize the benefits of these relationships. Further, it provides an overview of the healthcare management consulting industry today. The course will provide guidance on writing your resume to fit what consulting firms are seeking, as well as identifying and evaluating consulting firm employment options, and developing your own consulting practice. Evaluation of case examples of proposals, reports and ethical dilemmas as well as development of a MS PowerPoint marketing proposal are a part of class assignments. This course assists students in determining whether consulting may be a suitable personal pursuit and how to effectively select and direct consultants as a healthcare manager.
• SPH PM 742: Introduction to Pharmaceutical Assessment, Management, and Policy
  This course provides an introduction and overview of the pharmaceutical sector in a public health context. It is a required course for students who enroll in the Pharmaceutical Assessment, Management, and Policy (PAMP) program. This course will attempt to synthesize and integrate key areas of study from health policy and management, epidemiology, biostatistics and international health. The course will use a case study approach designed to apply the knowledge base from prior course work targeted to real world decision making problems related to pharmaceuticals.
• SPH PM 744: Introduction to Health Facility Planning & Design
  This course explores the factors that drive the planning, design and construction of healthcare facilities. Key concepts, such as converting market demand to workloads, workloads to space programs and programs into functional designs - while considering quality, cost, and schedule aspects - will be discussed. By understanding the processes that planning and design professionals use to translate ideas into “bricks and mortar,” students will learn how “educated” owners develop successful healthcare facilities.
• SPH PM 755: The Shape of Health Care Delivery
  What types of hospitals, doctors, nurses, long-term care, mental health, and other caregivers are available in the United States? How are they organized? Are they in the right places? Is the supply of caregivers appropriate? To what extent does the shape of care delivery address the needs of patients and of caregivers themselves? How did these patterns of care delivery evolve over time, and what market, regulatory, political, and other forces shape the delivery of care today? What are the main strengths and weaknesses of health care delivery in the United States? What problems in care delivery and organization have been identified and what are their causes? What remedies have been proposed, and how well have they worked so far? What are the possible roles of physicians, patients, managers, businesspeople, and regulators in improving the overall supply and types of caregivers, their locations, and how they are organized? In what way could coordination among physicians, hospital, long-term care, mental health services, and other types of care be improved? In what ways is care delivery influenced by methods of payment, and by efforts to improve coverage, control cost, and raise the appropriateness and quality of care? And reciprocally, in what ways does the shape of care delivery influence payment methods and efforts to improve health care?
• SPH PM 758: Introduction to Mental Health Services
  The purpose of this course is to develop a basic understanding of the mental health service delivery system and its relationship to public health and to the health care delivery system. Topics include a description of mental health services, epidemiology of mental health disorders, the current delivery system, mental health managed care, innovations in mental health services, and mental health policy, financing, and standards of treatment. Other issues such as parity, consumer and family advocacy movements, and issues relevant to children and adolescents are also discussed.
• SPH PM 771: Topics in Health Policy & Management
  Topics classes vary per semester. Consult with the course schedule and course descriptions for the specific semester for details on courses offered.
• SPH PM 776: Managerial Skills for Problem Solving
  Students explore a variety of problems that managers face, learn introspective and interpersonal skills useful in solving these problems, and have opportunities to practice applying those skills, through the analysis of their own experiences in organizations. The aim of the course is to provide skills and confidence that students can use to face and solve problems on their own. The class also introduces students to systems thinking as a way to map and manage the underlying dynamics that produce managerial problems. Specific skills relevant to the case problems are developed through reading assignments, written case analysis, interactive class exercises, real-world practice, and lectures.
• SPH PM 807: Introduction to Cost Effectiveness Analysis
  This course examines the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) in health policy and medical decision-making. Students gain a working knowledge of theoretical and practical issues encountered in conducting and applying CEA, i.e. identifying costs and assessing the relative merit of the consequences of policies, programs, and interventions. Approaches to formulating the problem, adopting a perspective for the analysis, measuring costs, evaluating consequences, discounting, and reflecting uncertainty are discussed. Emphasis is on acquiring skills necessary for becoming informed consumers of CEA and learning to appraise published literature. Case studies demonstrate the use of CEAs. Exercises highlight methodological issues, measurement, and data problems. Group projects provide hands-on experience. The class is appropriate for students in the PAMP program. Students who take PM855 may not take PM807.
• SPH PM 810: Introduction to American Government and Health Policy
  This course is a brief introduction to the institutions, processes, and politics of federal institutions; how they were designed and how they actually operate today. Concepts of power, representation, interests are explored. Cases in the course focus on public health policies. Students learn to use the internet to find how particular public health issues are handled by the federal government
• SPH PM 811: Health Services Research and Methods
  This course emphasizes an application-oriented approach to the study of health services research with the goal of informing health care policy. Emphasis is on definition of the problem, scale of the study, research methods, and analysis. A foundation is covered among the following possible areas: measurement issues (reliability and validity), secondary data analysis, clinical trials, sampling, survey methods, qualitative methods, and economics (cost-effectiveness). Students are expected to prepare a grant proposal on a contemporary topic of their own choosing with health policy implications.
• SPH PM 814: Contemporary Theoretical and Empirical Issues in Health Services Research
  This cornerstone course for the MS and PhD programs in Health Services Research provides a rigorous introduction to the issues, policies, and research questions in the field. Namely, how do institutions, organizations and policy decisions affect the quality, quantity and availability of health care? And, how is research informing the debate? Readings are drawn from research reports and articles. The course challenges students to explain current health care problems and trends in light of competing theories and empirical evidence.
• SPH PM 818: Health Information Technology
  This course provides students with the knowledge and skills to evaluate and manage information technology in heath care organizations. In particular it focuses on the role of IT in driving organizational change and supporting quality improvement and elimination of medical errors. Topics include electronic health records, computerized provider order entry, interoperability, management decision support, and provider pay for performance. The perspective of the course is that of the chief information officer (CIO) and other managers and users of health care information systems, not that of the technical specialist. The course will consist of a series of lectures, cases, and discussions, some of which will be led by guest lecturers who are experts in the field of health care information technology and systems. Course requirements include a quiz, a 10-page paper, and a class presentation.
• SPH PM 821: Advanced Health Services Research Methods
  This course builds on SPH PM811 by providing advanced methods and their applications to studies of health care outcomes, quality, and economics. Methods covered include: advanced measurement techniques such as item response theory and applications through computer adaptive testing, selecting the research design, meta-analysis, advanced statistics applied to grant proposals, and econometric methods using instrumental variables. Students develop an original paper based upon a secondary data analysis.

Note that this information may change at any time.

Back to full list of Courses