Healthcare Management Online Graduate Certificate

This course covers financial and managerial accounting topics relevant to the healthcare industry. Concepts covered include the financial and operational implications of changes in healthcare reimbursement; understanding and analyzing external financial statements for taxable and tax-exempt healthcare entities; usefulness of capital and operating budgets; practical applications of managerial accounting; and decision-making tools for managers within healthcare enterprises.

Healthcare expenditures now account for more than 1/6 of the Gross Domestic Product in the United States. This class will explore the sources of funding for those expenditures, and the rapidly changing trends therein.

This course will explore the principles of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) and apply them to healthcare organizations. We will begin with investigating the need for a paradigm shift in healthcare culture that addresses healthcare reform, value-based purchasing, healthcare regulation, and the increased complexity in healthcare that makes it nearly impossible to eradicate all healthcare errors. The course will then explore High-Reliability Organization Theory and the driving principles behind it.

Healthcare organizations need to adapt to the rapid changes occurring in payment models, delivery mechanisms, and industry organizations. This course covers theory and techniques for leading organizations through a transformation at the broad strategic level and in terms of improving processes and efficiencies, all within the unique context and challenges of the healthcare industry.

Leadership in practice is endlessly fascinating. Reading about theories of leadership can be as entertaining as watching paint dry. Therefore, the challenge in this class is learning about leadership in a way that is engaging and insightful. We will use several interviews with healthcare leaders to help understand the subtleties of leadership action. We will also use several exercises, cases, and reflections to have you experience different elements of effective leadership. The exam, term paper, and other writing assignments will ask you to analyze and reflect, rather than simply memorize, and recite.

This course focuses on the management and organization of health care delivery, particularly in the United States. The course examines the salient features of the health care context, the unique challenges these features produce for managers in the industry, and solutions that organizations have used to address those challenges. The micro to macro challenges and solutions are explored, with a particular emphasis on the ways that leadership, human resources, culture, operations, organization design, and strategy influence the quality, safety, and costs of care and the patient experience

This course introduces students to the concepts and practices of healthcare information systems. Topics include (1) introduction to the health IT discipline; (2) major applications and commercial vendors; (3) decision support methods and technologies; (4) information systems design and engineering; and (5) new opportunities and emerging trends. A semester-long group project will provide students with hands-on experience in planning and building healthcare information systems; associated ethical and legal concerns, software engineering and human-computer interaction issues, and user acceptance and outcomes evaluation methods will also be discussed. Graduate-level requirements include leading a class discussion on a course-related topic.

In this course, we will take a "customer-centric" view and explore how participants in the healthcare sector (physicians & nurses, hospital administrators, executives in the pharmaceutical and medical devices sectors, as well as various intermediaries who service the sector) can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their offerings (both products and services) to help with the needs of their customers- the consumers of health care, i.e. the patients and their families. We will explore a framework through with this marketing philosophy.