For current and aspiring health care managers, this course seeks to illuminate central components of health care policy. The course also examines the political forces that have created the different types of public intervention that constitute current U.S. health care policy.

Designed for experienced managers in a health care or related organization, this course is an opportunity to learn how to transform organizational knowledge into a strategic management system. We will focus on the analytical dimensions of strategic thinking and planning to ensure you are exposed to the technical and conceptual elements of strategy.

This course provides an intensive examination of financial decision-making concepts and tools critical to ensuring accountable, effective, and efficient health care delivery. Topics will intersect the domains of resource allocation, managerial accounting, and corporate finance that are most relevant to health care delivery.

This course will enable you to address the core principles and functions of public health, including how this approach differs from acute care medicine, and how public functions are institutionalized in the U.S. health care system. The course will focus on arguments and evidence that the health status of populations is shaped, not by medical care and health care policy, but rather by basic social conditions that often correlate closely with class, race, and ethnicity.

You will have the opportunity to work on a project that directly addresses a strategic problem in your institution, or carefully examine one within a host institution. This action learning project will enable the application and integration of course material into a coherent response and potential solution(s) to an actual health care delivery issue.