Courses

The course descriptions below are correct to the best of our knowledge as of June 2010. Instructors reserve the right to update and/or otherwise alter course descriptions as necessary after publication. The listing of a course description here does not guarantee a course’s being offered in a particular semester. The Course Rotation Guide lists the expected semester a course will be taught. Paper copies are also available in the BUSPH Registrar’s office. Please refer to the published schedule of classes for confirmation a class is actually being taught and for specific course meeting dates and times.

• 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
  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
  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
  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
  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
  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
  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.
• SPH PM 821: Advanced Health Services Research Methods
  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
  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
  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.
• SPH PM 827: Strategic Management of Healthcare Organizations
  This course examines key strategic issues that healthcare organizations face that affect their competitive position and performance. Through the course students learn to select and apply analytic frameworks from economics, management, and law to resolve these strategic issues. Students develop skills in strategic planning and management that includes industry and competitive analysis.
• SPH PM 828: Advanced Methods of Qualitative Research
  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 830: Developing Patient-Based Health Status and Outcomes Measures
  Contemporary health services research relies heavily on patient-based measures of health status and other outcomes of health care. This course covers techniques for defining health status constructs to be measured and the content of questionnaires, psychometric procedures of scale development and evaluation, as well as the theoretical bases of patient-based health status assessment in the context of outcomes research. Practical issues of selecting and applying measures in designing health outcomes research are addressed.
• SPH PM 833: Health Economics
  This course develops the lens and tools of basic microeconomic analysis and applies them to key health policy issues, emphasizing the trade-offs involved in various choices within the health care economy. The debate between pro-market and government regulatory approaches is examined. The main focus is on domestic health economics; however, analytic methods developed in the course are applicable to foreign health care systems.
• SPH PM 834: Health Regulation and Planning
  Past failures of competitive markets in health care led to demands for public planning and regulation. But these, in turn, have not been very successful in ameliorating cost, coverage, or quality problems. Employing cases of successful and failed public interventions in health care, this course dissects what has worked and why. It provides frameworks and skills that can be used to address real world health care problems.
• SPH PM 836: Survey of Managed Care
  This course gives a comprehensive overview of managed care and its impact on U.S. health care. The course begins by examining early managed care organizations (MCOs) and evaluates the impact of increasing costs and concern about poor quality associated with the traditional fee-for-service system on the rapid growth of MCOs beginning in the 1980s. Students explore the impact of managed care on the role and relationships of primary care, specialist physicians, and hospitals. Specific programs to reduce costs and improve quality are evaluated with a focus of their impact on the patient as well as the physician-patient relationship. The course integrates a discussion of the key management challenges facing managed care and larger health policy issues.
• SPH PM 837: Evaluating Health Care Quality
  This course covers methods for describing, evaluating, and managing the quality of health care services. Examples are drawn from various settings, e.g., acute care, home health care, and ambulatory care.
• SPH PM 838: Politics and Public Policy
  This course examines selected major health policy issues affecting public and private health organizations. It discusses the political processes and institutions shaping these policies, and seeks answers to who gets what from whom, when, where, and why in health policy.
• SPH PM 840: Analysis of Current Health Policy Issues
  The purpose of this course is to arm students with the skills to debate, define, and defend health policy proposals. We will explore, in depth, several current health policy problems. The course will take an analytic case approach, identifying policy options and tools, then gathering information and applying data to evaluate outcomes, costs; winners and losers. Methods for finding and accessing information on the Internet are emphasized. This is a capstone course meant to be taken in the student’s last semester.
• SPH PM 842: Health Economics for Health Services Research
  This course provides an understanding of principles of microeconomics and applied microeconomic analysis of public health policy issues sufficient to comprehend and conduct health services research. The over-arching philosophical issues facing the post health care reform world and the arguments defining the debate between pro-market and government regulatory approaches are addressed. The main focus is on domestic health economics; however, analytic methods developed in the course are applicable to foreign health care systems. There is a lab component. Students may not take both PM833 and PM842 for degree credit.

Note that this information may change at any time.

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