Students stand in a darkened conference room with HSM 50 in large light up letters after a Health Sector event.

Health Sector Management

Interested in health services delivery, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, or diagnostics? The Health Sector MBA program will prepare you to lead in this fast-growing industry no matter which path you take.

Meet the Health Sector MBA

Boston is a national leader in health and life sciences research and discovery. Ranked #1 among U.S. biopharma clusters and home to world-class academic medical centers, the city drives innovation in the field. Questrom’s Health Sector Full-Time MBA (HSM) connects you to it all. Ranked Top 5 in healthcare management (U.S. News 2019), Questrom ensures you gain the expertise to make an impact. Whether you’re focused on health services, biotech, pharma, medical devices, or diagnostics, the Health Sector MBA equips you to lead in this rapidly growing industry.

Questrom was among the first business schools to recognize the MBA as the ideal path for healthcare and biopharma leadership. Since 1972, the HSM program has provided students with the education and hands-on experience needed to excel in the health sector through an innovative curriculum, intensive skills training, and global learning opportunities.

Learn from nationally-known health sector experts

Questrom is home to some of the nation’s top health sector researchers and practitioners. In fact, over 40 of the 160+ Questrom faculty members have research, specific interest, or industry experience in the health sector. Your HSM professors will bring their expertise directly to you in the classroom every day, covering everything from healthcare delivery to drugs, devices and diagnostics. They’ll also make sure you’re on top of industry trends like new market forces, consumer-driven healthcare, cost sensitivity, and new policies impacting the healthcare and biopharma regulatory ecosystem.

A collaborative, impact-driven community.

The Health Sector MBA community is a tight-knit group. Our students come from all over the globe and have backgrounds in everything from healthcare to biopharma to marketing to finance. At Questrom, everyone is here to challenge themselves and learn from each other. Diversity is valued. So is teamwork. This is Questrom—globally minded, socially conscious, ethical people determined to use their MBAs to create value and lead positive change.


Click on a picture to meet a few of our Full-Time Health Sector MBA students.

Building your network

We’ll connect you right away with alumni and other top professionals ready to support and guide you through our Health Sector Mentoring Program. After you graduate, you’ll become part of our vibrant HSM alumni network—more than 2,000 professionals you can rely on throughout your career.

“The faculty here are so plugged in. They are wonderful at introducing students to their contacts, which range from pharmaceutical companies to the department of public health.”

Kendra Wright

Full-Time Health Sector MBA

Manager, Healthcare Advisory at Cognizant

Savi Bailey View Profile
Savi Bailey
Kate Broderick View Profile
Kate Broderick
John Barbadoro View Profile
John Barbadoro

CONSULTANT AT VANTAGE PARTNERS

Marisella Andrews View Profile
Marisella Andrews

Beyond the Classroom

Apply what you learn in the classroom to work in the real world right away—creating positive outcomes while you’re still a student. In addition to gaining the same valuable hands-on academic experience as our Full-Time MBA students through summer internships and global immersion courses, our health sector students also participate in HSM-specific student clubs, case competitions, and student treks.

Experiential Learning

HSM students can participate in our annual student-led health and life sciences conference or design a health sector-related student trek. Best of all, you’ll study and learn in the center of the world-class Boston health sector scene, collaborating with leaders in the nation’s premier center of health and life sciences. 

Questrom’s Health & Life Sciences Conference is an annual, student-organized event that brings together more than 250 diverse students and professionals across all sectors of the U.S. healthcare industry for valuable networking and comprehensive programming spanning healthcare delivery and hospitals to pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

Adventure awaits! Join a team of students to design your own health sector trek or hop on a trip that’s already planned. Instead of class deliverables, you’ll focus on a concept, place, or health sector project you invent yourself. The location is up to you! Treks last one or two weeks and have gone to Guatemala to assist budding entrepreneurs and Israel to focus on innovation. Where will you travel to make a difference?

Student Clubs

We have over 25 different student clubs and organizations, and over 60% of students get involved. Here are a few options specifically for HSM students.

Many Health Sector students are involved in the student-run Health Sector Management Club which focuses on building a sense of community for all MBA students enrolled in or interested in Health Sector Management by providing educational, professional development, and social events. The group hosts company treks, networking sessions, and panels.

The HSM program has an extensive Health Sector Mentoring Program, which connects you with alumni and other professionals who will support and guide you through your time at Questrom.

Your Health Sector Career Goal. We’re on it!

The healthcare and biopharma industries are growing—and hiring. In Boston, it’s predicted that biopharma will add 10,000+ new jobs by 2023. With a Health Sector MBA from Questrom, you’re sure to stand out in a crowded field of competitors. In this increasingly complex sector, leaders must possess more than scientific expertise.

CAHME Accredited log and BAHM Business School Alliance logo.

The decisions they must make require mastery of sophisticated tools and methods, like the advanced technology of digital health and health analytics. And the teams they lead are interdisciplinary, essential to advancing care and new therapeutics and diagnostics. Questrom’s HSM program—accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Management Education (CAHME) and a member of the prestigious Business School Alliance for Health Management (BAHM)—delivers well-prepared graduates who meet these new demands.

Customize for your career

Create a curriculum for the career you want. In addition to your health sector specialization, our MBA career pathways allow you to mix and match electives to reach your individual career goals. Travel your own path! 

Whatever your specialty or area of interest—health services delivery, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, diagnostics—the HSM program will prepare you for the kinds of challenges faced every day across the industry and give you the insight and expertise you need to make a difference. Many of our students go into biopharma, care delivery, healthcare consulting, and digital health. In addition to all of the great career resources we provide to all full-time MBA students, Health Sector MBA students will engage directly with academic experts and industry leaders in the health sector space through global immersion courses, consulting projects, case competitions, guest speakers, classroom activities, and more. HSM students also benefit from a strong and committed HSM alumni network (2000+) in Boston and beyond willing to help you succeed.

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Top Health Sector Employers & Recruiters

No matter where you want to work, Questrom’s HSM is a valuable asset. Our students secure employment at all types of industry leaders.

  • Abbott Laboratories
  • Amgen
  • Amwell
  • Anderson Management
  • Consulting Co., Ltd.
  • athenahealth
  • Beacon Health Options
  • Biogen
  • CBPartners
  • Change Healthcare
  • CVS Health
  • Deloitte
  • Harvard Bioscience
  • Healthcare Strategy Partners
  • IQVIA
  • Mathematica
  • Mercer
  • Millipore Sigma
  • New England Quality Care Alliance
  • Optum
  • PwC
  • Sanofi Genzyme
  • Simcare Pharmaceutical Corp.
  • Takeda
  • Thermo Fisher Scientific
  • Vantage Partners

HSM Curriculum

Success in the ever-changing health and life sciences industry calls for a rigorous, responsive curriculum. That’s why we give you plenty of opportunities to customize and focus your degree. Master the core foundations of business, dive deep into Health Sector courses and electives, then put what you learn to the test with a real organization in an internship and a capstone project. And then there are Learning Communities, global immersion courses, and specific Career Pathways. The choice is yours.

Program Requirements

Because the Health Sector MBA is a specialization within the Full-Time MBA program, they share the same curriculum. By adding the health sector specialization, however, you’ll be able to focus your MBA degree with our HSM targeted electives. HSM students must take 3 Health Sector courses and choose 2 additional Health Sector electives. 

The required Health Sector courses follow this path:

COURSE CODE: hm703

This course provides a dynamic introduction to the health sector, beginning with the burden and distribution of disease and current patterns of expenditures. While the emphasis will be on the American system, a global context will be developed. The basic elements of insurance and payment, service delivery, and life sciences products will be described, and put in the context of the unique economic structure of the sector. The intense challenges of the sector will be explored, as well as both the ethical issues presented and the opportunities that emerge. Public policy and technological and practice development as drivers of change will be addressed throughout.

COURSE CODE: hm820

This course provides students with tools from the fields of economics, strategy, and finance to understand the problems faced by firms involved in both the provision and payment sides of the health care sector along with those in the life-sciences industry. The course focuses on models that clarify the tradeoffs in the healthcare sector. The goal is to provide students with frameworks for profit maximization, frameworks that are unique to healthcare.


Choose ONE of the following:

COURSE CODE: hm710

This course will provide knowledge and skills needed to develop and implement systems capable of delivering accessible, high quality, efficient health care services. It will draw upon relevant information from disciplinary areas of study including strategy, operations, marketing, finance, law, human resources, quality improvement, and information technology.

COURSE CODE: hm717

This course will examine issues and opportunities in life sciences including the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical devices sectors and the life sciences service industry supporting these sectors. The course will investigate who manages these companies and what are the strategies that are used to build successful enterprises. There will be a review of the expertise that is needed in these companies or that must be out-sourced including development, manufacturing, marketing and finance. The principals governing the industry including patent law, regulatory and FDA compliance will be addressed. Formerly, "Bio-Pharma and Medical Device Companies: Strategies, Solutions and Execution"

HSM Electives

Full-Time MBA students at Questrom have choices—10 electives within the program to be exact. Health Sector MBA students are required to take 5 Health Sector electives and may use the additional 5 electives as they wish. You can either take additional health sector electives or explore any elective we offer that fits your interests.

Here’s a sample of some of the Health Sector MBA electives you’ll be able to choose from.

COURSE CODE: hm710

This course will provide knowledge and skills needed to develop and implement systems capable of delivering accessible, high quality, efficient health care services. It will draw upon relevant information from disciplinary areas of study including strategy, operations, marketing, finance, law, human resources, quality improvement, and information technology.

COURSE CODE: hm717

This course will examine issues and opportunities in life sciences including the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical devices sectors and the life sciences service industry supporting these sectors. The course will investigate who manages these companies and what are the strategies that are used to build successful enterprises. There will be a review of the expertise that is needed in these companies or that must be out-sourced including development, manufacturing, marketing and finance. The principals governing the industry including patent law, regulatory and FDA compliance will be addressed. Formerly, "Bio-Pharma and Medical Device Companies: Strategies, Solutions and Execution"

COURSE CODE: hm801

The subject of the course is the translation of medical technologies into new products and services for the healthcare system. The course begins with a rigorous study of intellectual property, licensing and the core aspects of planning, creating, funding and building new entrepreneurial ventures. Concepts and tools are presented for assessing new technologies and their potential to be the basis for a new entrepreneurial venture. Comparisons will be made of how technologies can be sourced and commercialized out of three very different environments: universities, national laboratories and corporate laboratories. Cross-disciplinary teams of students will be formed which will evaluate translational research projects currently being developed at Boston University and their potential for transformation into a start-up company to commercialize the technology, providing a unique linkage between the scientific research activities of the university and the professional schools. Each week there will be a case study which will discuss examples of both success and failure in technology commercialization. Some of these case studies examine Boston University life sciences spin-out companies, and the founders and CEO’s of these ventures will share their experiences with the class.

COURSE CODE: hm817

For students interested in enhancing their skills for positions in the rapidly growing field of healthcare information technology, this course utilizes healthcare delivery, life science, and business leaders to deliver current perspectives and trends in the use of information technology (IT) to enhance patient care outcomes while delivering more cost-effective care. Students explore various methods and approaches that can be applied to both develop and evaluate IT systems encompassing electronic medical records, administrative systems, healthcare mobile applications, and the emerging field of digital therapeutics. The course provides strategic perspectives important to the healthcare chief information officer, chief medical information officer, other managers, prospective healthcare IT entrepreneurs, and users of both clinical and administrative IT systems. Its focus is not on the technical specialist.

COURSE CODE: hm833

This elective provides an in-depth understanding of health sector marketing in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors for both products and services (hospital, managed care and health services of all types, life sciences, pharma and biotech, medical devices, medical software, and so on). The course explores how the tools of marketing (e.g., consumer behavior, pricing, promotion, channels, branding, segmentation, etc.) can be employed in the rapidly changing health sector with particular attention to changing organizational structures, financing, technologies, market demands, laws, channels of distribution, on-line applications, and regulations which require new approaches to marketing. Topics to be addressed include marketing to physicians, DTC (Direct-to-Consumer) Marketing, new product development particularly for pharmaceuticals and medical devices, adoption of medical and service innovations, typical decision making units in the health sector, and social marketing. (The course is still in development so there will likely be more topics added.) The course will have you keep in mind always while making marketing decisions that medicine, in the purest sense, is a profession with an intellectual discipline, a tradition of service, and an ethical code of conduct, and that service to the patient, as individuals and in the aggregate, is foremost in marketing decision making.

COURSE CODE: hm840

Students enrolled in this course will be divided into teams of 3-4 students during the first class. Each team will be assigned a business development/strategy/marketing consulting project for a local, regional, national, or international health sector organization. These projects have been requested by these organizations; the organizations are covering all expenses associated with the projects and anticipate receiving a consulting report from the student team at the end of the semester. The deliverables for this assignment are the consulting report as well as a 30 minute in-class presentation followed by a 10 minute question-and-answer period. The team may also be asked by the organization to make a presentation to the organization’s management. These projects constitute a way to apply what you are learning in the MBA program to a real health sector management situation; an opportunity to gain experience and broaden your familiarity with health sector organizations with which you have had little or no direct experience; a way for local, regional, and national health sector organizations to benefit from your expertise and hard work in solving a management problem; and a continuing linkage of the Boston University MBA and Health Care Management Programs to the health sector community.

COURSE CODE: hm848

This course examines an array of compelling opportunities for innovation, incremental and disruptive, across products and services, created within existing organizations or by starting new businesses. It bridges design and implementation, examining the unique and complex array of elements that make successful innovation in the health sector so difficult, and developing the skills and knowledge needed to effectively address those challenges. The course provides a conceptual framework, and then emphasizes hands-on engagement, concrete exercises, written cases, and in-class speakers who are engaged in real-world innovation initiatives. Students will have the opportunity to focus on areas of particular interest and relevance to current or future work. They will leave better equipped to drive or support the viable, value-creating innovation so desperately needed in the health sector.

COURSE CODE: om840

Lean and Six Sigma are powerful improvement methodologies that promote process improvement, cost reduction and significant enhancement of bottom-line profitability. The purpose of this course is to thoroughly examine the concept of quality, to define it in terms that are useful for managers, to survey the ideas of major quality thinkers and theorists, to develop proficiency in the use of quality tools, and to consider the challenges of quality program implementation in real business situations. Throughout the course we will investigate similarities and differences between quality management in manufacturing and service contexts. The course has three major objectives. The first goal is to define quality and explore important philosophies and useful frameworks for managers or consultants. The second goal is to focus on the Lean and Six Sigma tools available for the pursuit of lasting quality improvements. The third is to bring the experiences of Lean Six Sigma practice into the classroom. We’ll benefit from the expertise and experience of Lean and Six Sigma professionals who will help us to understand the challenges of Lean and Six Sigma implementations and analyze the lessons they have learned from projects they have undertaken.

COURSE CODE: si814

Formerly FE814 (students who took FE814 may not take SI814). This course covers the ways in which companies use intellectual property to protect their investments in knowledge assets. Traditionally a concern for technology-intensive businesses, patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets have become important business tools throughout the knowledge-based economy. A good understanding of what IP assets are and how they work has become essential for managers in all types of organizations. This is not a law course, nor a how-to manual rather it is intended to develop your analytical understanding of fundamental economic and legal aspects of intellectual property systems, and how they drive competition and strategy.

*Courses QSTHM710 and QSTHM717 will count as an HSM elective if not taken as an HSM core course.

related degree programs

You can take on the Health Sector MBA at a full-time or part-time pace. Or, tackle two areas at once with our health sector joint degree options. It’s your career vision. We’ll help you make it real.

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Apply to the Full-Time MBA

Ready to apply? Once you’ve submitted your materials, we’ll start the review process. We’re happy to answer your questions along the way.

Application Deadlines

The following deadlines are for Fall 2025 entry.

  • Round 1: October 9, 2024
  • Round 2: *December 16, 2024 and January 9, 2025
  • Round 3: January 9, 2025
  • Round 4: March 12, 2025

*Both December 16 and January 9 dates are Round 2 deadlines, but December 16 is the priority deadline.