Healthcare Administration Curriculum

This course provides an overview of the history, challenges, and opportunities facing healthcare administrators today. Topics will include the ongoing transition from a pay-for-services model of healthcare delivery to accountable care networks, emerging public health and healthcare partnerships, and the need for analytics that can address the particular characteristics of big health data.

This course introduces students to central health informatics tools, techniques, and concepts used to improve health outcomes through technology. Students explore various healthcare technology platforms, how data is used in healthcare, and how the need for cybersecurity and health data privacy shape the information infrastructure that powers modern healthcare. This course offers students a framework for deeper understanding of many of the concepts explored in subsequent coursework.

This course explores the dynamic between healthcare delivery and leveraging data for enhanced patient outcomes. Given an increased scrutiny on empirical value-based care metrics for payer reimbursement, the strategic use of data will be key in new continuum of care models. Students will complete this course with a solid understanding of healthcare quality standards, the regulations around those standards, and how they are affected by the use of technology and data analysis. Key themes will include quality improvement methodologies, measuring and interpreting quality data, strategies to increase healthcare process reliability.

This course explores the range of legal and ethical issues facing healthcare administrators and providers. Students will gain expertise analyzing legal and ethical dimensions of healthcare from administrative, clinical, and organizational perspectives. Current issues, as well as perennial conflicts in healthcare law and ethics, will provide real-world case studies for students to research and debate. Throughout the course, students will gain practice integrating core healthcare law and ethics concepts and practices into their leadership approaches to ensuring excellent patient care.

This course explores the challenges and opportunities facing healthcare leaders and organizations in an age of accountable care, and examines the critical role health data and informatics can and should play in strategic management. Using case-based study techniques, students explore practice and system management, strategic planning, and change leadership. Students combine these insights into health leadership with the actionable insights offered through effective health informatics and business intelligence practices, to craft optimal solutions to internal organizational processes and to external business decisions.

This course explores the fundamentals of finance and economics in a health care system at both the local system and national levels. Healthcare leadership increasingly depends upon deep and strategic understanding of the complex payor systems that provide revenue to their organizations. Students will gain expertise crafting strategic approaches to managing market supply and demand, the economics of care and managed care, budgeting, accounting, and fiscal reporting.

The implementation or integration of major projects or initiatives, such as a new healthcare technology system requires careful planning and organization. This course will provide students with widely-accepted concepts and skills that can be used and scaled to successfully complete projects of varying sizes. Through course work, students will gain experience with the common language used by professionals involved in project management. Students will explore concepts of project charter, work breakdown structures, scheduling, risk planning, and project reporting.

This course brings together graduate students in public health, education, healthcare administration, health informatics, nutrition, and social work to work collaboratively to learn the fundamentals of policy-making as applied to the broad issue of student mental health in an educational setting. Students work in interprofessional groups to identify the social problem, describe the policy context, map potential policy solutions, and make final recommendations in an individual written policy analysis that incorporates learning from their interprofessional peers. Students will explore the structure and function of government systems as they relate to values-driven policy decisions.

This course is the culmination of the student’s learning throughout the Healthcare Administration program. Combining the leadership theories and practices they have studied, the challenges facing the healthcare sector they have explored, and the contextual practice they have gained through their focus area courses, students will develop a research-based inquiry into healthcare leadership that addresses a current or emerging challenge relevant to their professional goals.

The field of health informatics depends on advanced computing systems to collect health data and analytical sophistication to make sense of that data. This course provides students with a solid understanding of the computer science that undergirds the entire field, exploring the design and implementation of database systems and technology applications, data communications, and systems analysis. Students will learn to identify current and emerging information technologies that may have strategic value for enterprise solutions, assess where those technologies may have strategic value, and explore methods for implementing those technologies in their organizations.

This course explores in depth database basics such as the relational algebra and data model, schema normalization, query optimization, and transactions. The course addresses current needs in database design and use for optimized human-computer interaction, for rigorous security, and for robust modeling that can transform raw data into useful information. This course will also provide a deep exploration into data standards and what part that plays in the field of Informatics. Students will gain a solid understanding of, and extensive practice with, structured query language (SQL).

This course explores legislation and regulation relating to health informatics. The course will examine the major laws and agency regulations governing healthcare technology, data collection, management, and privacy, as well as the security standards required for healthcare and health-related organizations. Students will explore the intent behind, and ethical dimensions of health informatics regulatory frameworks, using case studies of recent health information uses, security breaches, and challenges to interoperability. This course will also look ahead to the impact of future Health IT regulations.

A hurricane is an amazing meteorological phenomenon… until it becomes a disaster by coming in contact with humans. From an overturned tractor-trailer full of milk to a global pandemic, the philosophy of “proper prior planning prevents pathetically poor performance” applies. And that’s what emergency management does. Emergency managers and emergency management agencies are tasked with making sure that no matter what life throws at society, society is ready to respond. This course introduces you to the principles and practices of emergency management based on the structure developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Using a combination of readings, didactics, discussions, and participating in an interactive scenario, you will master the emergency management principles of preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. You will also complete FEMA training and be certified in several FEMA competencies that prepare you for work in emergency management.

Large data sets are not useful in their native state. Informaticists have to begin by defining the question that will be answered by the data and then organizing, analyzing, and visualizing the dataset. Analytics provide meaningful patterns in the data, and data visualization communicates the information clearly through graphical means. This course is designed to familiarize students with core concepts in communicating information through effective data visualization. This course introduces students to data visualization elements and best practices in data visualization using Tableau and Gephi. Students will gain hands on experience building explanatory and exploratory visualizations using healthcare data.

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the most intricate and sophisticated computer system is only as useful as its users. This course examines computer and non-computer systems from the perspective of their users, exploring ways to improve user interfaces to facilitate effective interactions between human and system, and examining ways of helping to train and educate systems users to ease the stress of learning and adapting to new systems. Students will gain practice combining ergonomics, psychology, sociology, and educational theory with interface design and systems thinking to design human-friendly interfaces and information systems.

Students will explore the range of social media metrics used to inform marketing campaigns and budgeting decisions. This course will provide students with skills in analyzing social media metrics and developing strategies for viable advertising and social media information dissemination campaigns. Students will gain practice with such skills as evaluating and managing the return on investment (ROI) of social media efforts, modifying campaign strategies based on the outcomes of metric analyses and data visualization, and developing effective social media presentation strategies.

User experience UX metrics are key to designing and improving mission-critical information systems used by many people within the organization. In this course, students will learn techniques for measuring user experience both quantitatively and qualitatively, and for analyzing that data to reveal deep understandings about user behavior with particular systems. Students will move beyond merely understanding user behavior by learning and practicing techniques for influencing user behavior toward desirable interactions and outcomes. Students will learn how measuring and influencing the user experience can significantly improve mission-critical data quantity and quality.

This course will explore the complexities of small business development in healthcare settings. Students will engage with theories of, and practical approaches to, strategic decision making and leadership. Course topics will include such key skills as developing business plans,assessing the risk of business concepts, and identifying strategies for success in competitive, traditional and emerging markets. The course will culminate in a business plan, feasibility study, market analysis report or other project to the student’s professional goals.

This course introduces students to the concept of Healthcare Consumerism, including the relationships between consumer, technology, and healthcare information. Topics covered in this course include consumer applications, mHealth, innovative wearable, consumable, peer engagement, and behavior management systems. We explore how consumers receive and engage with their healthcare data, such as PHRs, patient portals and Exchange systems.

Students in the course will examine concepts, theories, and best practices for communicating in the professional workplace. The goal of this course is to refine they are written, oral and visual communication. Participants in this course will develop strategies to create meaningful communication for a vast audience. Students will enhance their skills in natural and scholarly writing, oral presentation, and visual demonstrations.

R is an open source programming language ideally suited for analysis and visualization. This course will provide students with a foundation in data preparation and preliminary analytics using R which can be applicable for research, quality improvement and industry large-scale data analytics projects. This course will include the following skills: data analysis with publicly available data sets; cleansing and imputing data; descriptive statistics; and data visualization.

Advanced topics in health informatics leverages the concepts introduced in the Foundation course. Students will be exposed to advanced statistics, vast and diverse data sets, and data interpretation and visualization. This course will prepare students for a deeper dive into forecasting, trends, and data modeling.

This course will examine public health principles and concepts. It will provide a broad framework for understanding public health’s role in community health, prevention, and medicine. Using the five-core public health knowledge areas and the ten essential public health services as a foundation, students will explore public health infrastructure, surveillance, social determinants of health, policy, and emerging issues. In addition, the course will weave public health areas such as chronic disease, infectious disease, environmental health, maternal and child health, and injury into discussions and assignments.

This course provides an overview of the history, content, scope, and processes of public health administration. Emphasis is placed on administration, public health structure and framework, organizational culture, management functions and roles, leadership, motivation, and performance management. Basic principles and tools of budget and resource management will be addressed.

This course provides an overview of the development of public health programs and the evaluation of those programs. The course will help students develop the skills required to assess community needs and assets, identify and adapt evidence-based programs, evaluate program effects, and seek funding for these programs.