Course Descriptions

HM703 Health Sector Issues and Opportunities

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 addressed throughout.  

HM710 Health Service Delivery: Strategies, Solutions and Execution

This course is intended to 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 and application areas of study including strategy, operations, marketing, finance, law, human resources, quality improvement, and information technology.

HM717 Bio-Pharma and Medical Device Companies: Strategies, Solutions and Execution

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 discussed.

HM801 Bench-to-Bedside – Translating Biomedical Innovation from the Laboratory to the Marketplace

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.

HM802  Introducing and Sustaining Health Sector Innovation

Technological and biomedical advances, public health challenges, cost concerns, and consumer empowerment are fostering experimentation in the health sector, including new delivery and financing models, policy reform and entrepreneurial ventures. This course will explore the actual everyday process of trying to introduce and sustain such innovation in health delivery organizations and systems for improving quality, safety, access and affordability of patient care. The course content will include: (1) the theoretical underpinnings of understanding system level innovation through a micro-organizational lens; (2) identifying and evaluating the efficacy of micro-level strategies of embedding innovation; (3) cultivating the capacity to see and explore new possibilities for innovating; and (4) negotiating the in-situ cultural and political dynamics central to sustaining innovation over time. The course will be conducted as an advanced graduate seminar and as such will require intensive reading for high-level class discussion, in-depth analyses of cases, and significant group project work.

HM817 Health Information Technology

With increasing cost constraints and demands for improved quality of care, information technology has become essential to manage health care organizations and systems. This course is intended to provide students with knowledge of extant health care information systems for operations management, financial management, performance appraisal, and strategic planning. It will also investigate analytical frameworks and methods that can be used to evaluate information systems, determine information system requirements, and plan system changes to meet future requirements. The perspective of the course is that of the chief information officer and other managers of health care information systems, not that of the technical specialist.

HM833 Health Sector Marketing

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. 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 will further 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.

HM840 Health Sector Consulting

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.

HM856  Corporate Entrepreneurship in the Health Sector

Corporations have long recognized the importance of promoting entrepreneurial activities within their organizations as a strategy for accessing new markets, innovating new product lines, and establishing new global partnerships. But the continuous pressure to reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and meet short-term financial objectives has worked against creating a corporate culture of risk taking, acceptable failure, rapid response, and imaginative exploration often attributed to traditional entrepreneurial new venture formation. In the health sector, these challenges are multiplied by the demands of a highly regulated industry, long product development cycles, and short product lifetimes. How large corporations overcome these complex barriers to innovation in the pharmaceutical, medical device, and health provider industries, and how individual entrepreneurs are thriving and redefining corporate leadership roles in providing world-wide patient care, is the principal topic of exploration for this course.

OM840 Managing and Improving Quality:  Six Sigma Green Belt Certification

(The course project must be in the health sector)

Six Sigma quality programs help companies deliver near-perfect products and services. Participants in this course will develop proficiency in Six Sigma, including its underlying philosophies, tools (for example, statistical process control), implementation and will be certified as Six Sigma Green Belts.

SP852 Starting New Ventures

(Business plan developed must be within the health sector for this to count as an elective)

This course focuses on the process of identifying and obtaining the necessary resources to launch an entrepreneurial venture through the development of a business plan.  A well-written business plan will communicate the business concept in a way that attracts the various resource providers necessary for the venture’s success.  Students will individually develop a business concept and prepare and present a professional business plan.