Health Policy & Management

• SPH PM 702: Introduction to Health Policy & Management
  Close to 90 percent of the $2.6 trillion spent on health care in this nation in 2010 was 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. Peace Corps/MI students who are not HPM concentrators, students studying on F-1 or J-1 visas, students who are not permanent residents of the U.S. and who are not Health Policy and Management concentrators and all International Health concentrators may substitute IH704.
• SPH PM 721: Organizational Behavior and Health Management
  Graduate Prerequisites: PM702 or consent of the instructor
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702
  This course associates practical management in health care settings with real-world business knowledge and skills. It aims to better equip present and future health care managers in order to plan effectively, anticipate challenges and marshal resources. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexities of management and leadership in challenging health care situations. Concepts will be discussed briefly with the greater emphasis on the development of critical thinking skills necessary to succeed in today's healthcare environment. This course will make significant use of case study and requires class participation. Topics include differentiating leadership from management, budgeting, patient and process flow, and managing change. In addition, one session is devoted entirely to healthcare negotiations. 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: PM702 or consent of instructor
  This course describes how money works in health care, presents a variety of useful analytic techniques, and explores alternative 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702
  This course provides students with a skills-based orientation to human resource management, especially in a public health or human services setting. Core human resource management activities such as staffing, training and development, compensation, and employee relations are explored via readings, cases, and experiential activities. Using case examples that illustrate basic principles, students develop strategies to improve human resources practices through job analysis, selection, training, compensation, employee relations, while developing an awareness of the legal mandates and unique aspects of health care workforces that affect human resource management in such settings.
• 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: PM702
  This hands-on course is designed to introduce students to the complex organizational and delivery aspects of many levels of health care--primary care, mental health, long term care and hospital-based care. Students are introduced to concepts such as Patient Centered Medical Home, the Chronic Care Model, patient-centered care, care coordination, team-based care (teamlets), the Institute of Medicine's six aims for improvement and the IOM's 10 Rules for Redesign, and implementation science frameworks. Students select a health care problem/policy of their choice to research and potentially solve. This will involve students' examining the barriers and facilitators to achieving quality health care as described in this policy, and conducting field-based interviews with experts in this area to learn more about their perspectives on this health care problem. Using the Chronic Care Model, students will describe a new policy that meets the IOM's Six Aims for Improvement or 10 Rules for Redesign. Then, using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research, students will discuss the steps needed to bring their new policy into action. Written and group work, self-reflections, peer review, a professional presentation, and a final policy brief compose the graded assignments during this course.
• SPH PM 758: Introduction to Mental Health Services
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702 or consent of instructor.
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702 and consent of instructor.
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702 or PM814 and the MPH biostatistics core course requirement
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702 or consent of instructor
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: The biostatistics MPH core course requirement and PM702 or PM814
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: Admission to MS or PhD program in Health Services Research or consentof instructor.
  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
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH PM702
  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. The class meets at the Charles River Campus with GSM HM817 on the GSM schedule. In Spring 2011, class meets 1/19-5/4/11.
• SPH PM 821: Advanced Health Services Research Methods
  Graduate Prerequisites: BS723 or consent AND PM811
  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.
• SPH PM 824: Theory & Research on Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: MS or PhD candidate in health services research degree program or consent
  The purposes of this course are first to develop the students' understanding of major theoretical perspectives on health care organizations, and second to develop their abilities to apply these theories to conduct theory-based research on health care organizations. The course achieves this understanding through an in-depth review of contemporary literature addressing each major theoretical perspective and through written assignments and discussions of the contrasts among the major theoretical perspectives on organizations. To develop their abilities to apply the theories, students also design organizational research based upon the different theories.
• SPH PM 826: Health, Illness, and the Use of Health Services
  Graduate Prerequisites: PM814 or consent
  This course provides an introduction to social and behavioral science research that would serve as a basis for inquiry in health economics (e.g., consumer behavior, decision making) and health outcomes (e.g., adaptation to chronic disease, patient satisfaction). Its goal is to develop an understanding of the social context of health services, focusing on how people perceive a need for health services, seek them, engage in transactions with health care providers as "patients" or "consumers" and live with the outcomes.