Courses

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

• SPH PM 714: Healthcare Management as a Profession
  This seminar will provide students with an understanding of the scope of current healthcare management practices and challenges, an introduction to case-based analysis, and the professionalism skills necessary to engage with healthcare managers in practice-based projects and other applied educational activities.
• SPH PM 733: Health Program Management
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719 & SPHPH720) SPH PH 719 and SPH PH 720; or consent of instructor. - 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent of instructor - 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPM702 OR SPHPH719) or consent of instructor. - 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
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719 & SPHPH720) or consent of instructor. - 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 755: Health Care Delivery Systems: Issues and Innovations
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) consent of instructor. - This hands-on course is designed to introduce students to the complex organizational and delivery aspects of many levels of health care. Students are introduced to the structure of financing the health care system, including concepts such as Patient-Centered Medical Home, Accountable Care Organizations, care coordination, the health care safety net, and value-based delivery reforms. Elements of the class are applied through case-based learning and a semester- long project where students select a health care problem of their choice to research and plausibly solve through policy or a quality improvement project. Students will also work in groups on a case study presentation which will provide opportunities to apply the concepts learned in class to current issues in health care delivery. Written and group work, a midterm exam, a presentation, and a final paper compose the graded assignments during this course.
• SPH PM 758: Introduction to Mental Health Services
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719 & SPHPH720) 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 760: Health Law, Policy and Policymaking
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent of instructor. - 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 785: Mental Health Advocacy
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent of instructor. - 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 795: Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drug Policy and Politics
  Alcohol, tobacco and other drug (ATOD) use are among the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S. and globally. While access to effective treatment for ATOD addiction is important, we will never "treat" our way out of these problems -- as the tobacco experience has shown, it is far more effective and cost- effective to use policy as a lever to reduce and prevent ATOD use and related harms. Drawing on examples both from the U.S. and other countries, the course will review key lessons from existing public health research for ATOD policies, and along the way examine different methods for assessing and evaluating these policies. The course will take a "deep dive" into each of tobacco, alcohol, cannabis and "other drug" policies, and equip students for a final project, deploying public health research tools, literature and insights to address a current drug policy issue of their choosing and what it would "take," including analysis of the effects on public health, political context, key stakeholders, impact on social justice and equity, and responses to key opposition arguments, in order to achieve their recommended policy change.
• SPH PM 802: Pharmaceutical Management, Policy and Practice in the 21st Century: A Case Study Approach
  Graduate Prerequisites: MPH integrated core courses. - This course 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,
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent from instructor. - Globally recognized digital expert and professor, David L. Rogers, argues that digital transformation for organizations is not about the technology and tools that are often over emphasized when approaching a shift to a digitally enabled- world, but instead is more about strategy and a new way of thinking. According to Rogers, there are five domains of strategy to approach digital transformation: Customer, Competition, Data, Innovation, and Value. This course will address both--learning about the tools and technologies in healthcare, while also understanding how to use those to strategically transform care including improvements in equity, efficiency, effectiveness, and patient and provider satisfaction. This course will introduce students to the policy and application of digital tools and models across the healthcare delivery system, including learning about and critically assessing concepts such as patient engagement, interoperability, telehealth, artificial intelligence, big data and analytics, health information technology (HIT) adoption and communication, data security, among others. Students demonstrate their knowledge through a team project, presenting their own proposal on using digital tools and technology to transform the healthcare sector. Case studies, readings, and interactive exercises in class round out topic knowledge and application.
• SPH PM 807: Introduction to Cost Effectiveness Analysis
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH717 & SPHPH719) or PM814. Cannot count both PM807 and PM855 for credit. - 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 820: Introduction to Quality Measurement and Evaluation
  This course sets out to answer a number of foundational and application-based questions for health services researchers and other health professionals focusing on evaluation of health care quality: What are some frameworks within which we can measure, evaluate, and improve quality of care? How we do reliably and validly measure quality? How do we use different types of data to measure and report on different dimensions of quality? What are ways in which quality data may be aggregated and what controversies surround those approaches? How do we appropriately profile providers and systems, and how do we best create and interpret composite measures in doing so? Throughout the semester, students will be able to answer these questions and apply this learning to practical data exercises and case studies.
• SPH PM 822: Advanced Quantitative Methods for Health and Social Policy Research
  This course builds on MS and PhD program with a quantitative focus 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 827: Strategic Management of Healthcare Organizations
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent of instructor. - This course is designed to make the student aware of well-established and innovative best practices that are necessary for making strategic decisions in the competitive environment of health care. Each session offers an opportunity to explore various aspects of formulating, monitoring, and leading strategies while considering the complexity of the structure and processes in healthcare. Real-life projects engage the student in making evidence based and value driven decisions while being cognizant of culture, regulations and the dynamic nature of the industry. Discussions from the readings, case studies and assignments focus on developing systems thinking and strategic intuition that is vigilant of the drivers of change, leadership skills and countermeasures by competitors.
• SPH PM 828: Advanced Qualitative Methods
  Graduate Prerequisites: SPH SB818 or GMS MA 710 or consent of instructor. - This course will focus on the use of qualitative methods in understanding outcomes of care, such as patient-centered perspectives on illness and health care; processes of care, such as doctor-patient interactions and communication; and the organization of care, such as the impact of different organizational structures on the quality of care. Students will develop skills in the use of qualitative methods in health services research, including the procedures of focus groups, the use of in-depth interviews, naturalistic observations of health care practices, and ethnographic studies of health care organizations and client communities. The course is part of the PhD program in Health Services Research, but will be of interest to other students who wish to learn about utilizing qualitative methods in their research.
• SPH PM 832: Operations Management in Health Care
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH717 & SPHPH719 & SPHPH718) or consent of instructor. - This course is designed to focus on the field of operations management (OM) in healthcare. Students will learn to apply OM principles to develop more effective operational processes, mitigate risks, and improve quality. Discussions from the text, case studies and assignments will focus on strategies and techniques of quality improvement processes, project management, work-flow and system design, and capacity planning. Additionally students will explore the intricacy, complexity and dynamics of logistics in healthcare. An industry based project will enable students to engage and implement several of the tools learned in class.
• SPH PM 833: Health Economics
  Graduate Prerequisites: (SPHPH719) or consent of instructor. - This course develops the tools of basic microeconomic analysis and applies them to key health policy issues. It emphasizes the trade-offs involved in various choices within the health care economy, with particular attention to examination of issues related to the debate between pro-market and government regulatory approaches to health care policy. Topics include the role of risk and uncertainty in health and health care, the industrial organization of the health care sector, and how payment systems affect the incentives and behavior of patients, insurers, and providers.