Courses

The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. Please refer to the published schedule of classes on the Student Link for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• SPH PM 733: Health Program Management
  This course aims to equip future health program managers and supervisors with a range of skills to lead, plan effectively, anticipate challenges, and allocate resources. Students will gain an appreciation for the complexities of management and leadership in different health programs--both globally and in the US--and to develop the critical thinking skills needed to succeed in such settings. The course will make use of interactive exercises, case studies, group work, and real-life scenarios to help students develop critical thinking and analytical skills, and requires substantial class participation. Specific topics covered in class sessions will include: leadership; organizational culture; strategic planning; negotiation; promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice; and disaster planning.
• SPH PM 734: Principles and Practices in Non-Profit Health Care 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: How Policy-makers and Managers Can Use Money as a Tool to Improve Health Care
  This course describes how money works in health care. It examines how policy- makers and managers view and use money. It presents a variety of useful analytic techniques and skills, and then explores various ways to use money to shape more accessible, affordable, and effective health care. We examine current financial crises and managerial problems in health care along with alternative ways to remedy them- and also to advance both financial and clinical accountability for equitable and affordable care. 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 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, and employee relations, while developing an awareness of the unique aspects of the health care workforce that affect human resource management in such settings.
• SPH PM 740: Comparative Health Systems and Policy in Industrialized and BRIC Countries
  This course examines the population and individual health systems of industrialized and emerging countries, exploring each system's historic, cultural, political, economic and demographic antecedents. There are significant variations in organization, finance, structure, operations and population level outcomes. Since the US health system performs at the top of cost and the low end of outcome measures there are lessons to be learned from other systems, but it is essential first to understand why differences among systems developed and persist.
• 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: Health Care Delivery Systems: Issues and Innovations
  This required intermediate course in the Health Policy Management concentration is designed as a hands-on introduction 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
  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 760: Health Law, Policy and Policymaking
  This course is an introduction to the institutions, processes, and politics of United States government; how they were designed and how they actually operate today. The first month will be spent building a foundation of political science and legal theory dealing with concepts of power, institutional design, representation, interests and public opinion. Each subsequent week will feature an in-depth look at how government approaches a given issue. We will focus on instances of policymaking that have shaped health care and population health in America. This approach will help students not only become familiar with what happened, but why. History is not inevitable. Examining moments of policymaking will equip students to not only understand but also to anticipate and influence government policymaking.
• 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 780: Managerial Accounting for Healthcare Leaders
  This course will focus on the differences between financial and managerial accounting, and how to apply financial data to everyday decision making in a health care organization. Students will develop skills in: creating financial reports that project both revenues and expenses into the future; evaluating such reports as the basis for operational and strategic decisions; and understanding the relationship between cost measurement and behavior.
• SPH PM 785: Mental Health Advocacy
  This two credit course is designed to help students understand how advocacy works in the field of mental health (and substance use), how it has succeeded and failed in this field historically, and how it is similar to and different from other advocacy movements. Each student will identify an advocacy project in the field and develop a proposal describing what it would take to execute it. In seven short weeks, it would be difficult to expect every project to be executed, but students will learn strategies for the planning, vision, and coalition building needed for their Advocacy Projects. In a word this is a course about HOW a needed change would be enacted. Your job is to identify a change that needs to happen and to work to see how it would happen.
• SPH PM 790: Pro-seminar: Tools for Project Management, Communication, and Budgeting
  Researchers and research professionals are routinely called upon to ensure research project success through the application of many professional skills beyond data collection, management, and analysis. In this course, students will learn and apply concepts and tools relevant to research project management, budget development, research team management, and the communication of research results to various audiences. Students will work together to apply each skill to a real research project, and will present their work to the rest of the class.
• SPH PM 802: Pharmaceutical Management, Policy and Practice in the 21st Century: A Case Study Approach
  This course, formerly PM742, gives an overview of the pharmaceutical industry domestically and internationally in a public health context. The course will synthesize and integrate key pharmaceutical topics with a focus on health policy and management. Topics include the functions of the FDA, research and development of drugs, government regulation and patents, access to drugs, vaccines, Medicare Part D, Accountable Care Act and the use of large pharmaceutical datasets to investigate the effectiveness of drugs. This course will use a case study approach targeted to real world decision making problems raised by the pharmaceutical industry.
• SPH PM 804: Digital Disruption In Health: The Effects Of Health Information Technologies On Polices, Delivery, Patient Engagement, And Health Outcomes
  This course is designed to introduce students to health information technologies (HIT) and how they are changing delivery of care in the US--- including effects on efficiency, equity, effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Students explore issues related to electronic medical records, standards for meaningful use, personal health records, public health information systems, interoperability of HIT, and mHealth. Students examine the impact of federal government intervention to increase HIT adoption, and compare the use of HIT in the US with other industrialized countries. Students apply their knowledge by working through an in-depth case study of an implementation of HIT in a health care delivery organization or public health department. Readings introduce theoretical frameworks related to HIT, including the Technology Acceptance Model. Assignments include a policy memo, an individual case analysis, and in-class quizzes.
• 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 relative effectiveness and consequences of health care interventions (e.g., pharmaceuticals), prevention programs, and policies. 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, learning to appraise published literature, and developing simple cost-effectiveness models. Case studies demonstrate the use of CEAs. Exercises highlight methodological issues and the development of models in several in-class computer lab sessions. The computer lab sessions offer hands-on experience with the design of models in Microsoft Excel. The class is appropriate for students in the Pharmaceuticals Program. Students who take PM855 may not take PM807.
• 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
  Required for all students in the MPH Healthcare Management Certificate. This cornerstone course for the MS and PhD programs in Health Services Research provides an introduction to the issues, policies, and research questions in the field. Namely, how do institutions, organizations, and policy decisions, as well as the actions of people whose needs are to be served, affect the quality, quantity, and availability of health care? How is research informing changes in health services? Readings are drawn from research reports and articles. The course challenges students to formulate research questions and consider evidence within the evolving, multidisciplinary context of the health services research field of inquiry.
• SPH PM 817: Introduction to Organizational Theory
  Aligning with evidence-based medicine, evidenced-based management advances decision making from the realm of intuition to scientific study and implementation. Historically, however, there has been limited adoption of evidence-based programs without first changing an organization's culture. This suggests a need to both support "active users of evidence," but also to define which "evidence" is best, mindful that whoever controls the definition of "evidence" holds the power to disrupt the system. With this paradox in mind, the structure and behavior of healthcare organizations can have a major impact on the access, quality, safety, and cost of patient care. In this course, we will review and apply the major organization theory perspectives to address health care planning and action at the: (1) macrolevel - the ways that organizations adapt to various market and environmental factors; the (2) mesolevel - the structures and processes occurring at the level of the organization as a whole or within an organization network; and (3) the microlevel - the internal activities and relationships, such as within teams, inside an organization's boundaries. Particular attention is given to the theory of how organizations function in their changing environments, and in developing the student's ability to conduct theory-based research on health care organizations.
• 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. The class meets at the Charles River Campus with GSM HM817 on the GSM schedule.

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