Graduate Healthcare Strategies Cluster

This course enhances the student's ability to look closely at a healthcare organization and develop a strategic plan. Healthcare organizations, both nonprofit and for-profits, must be concerned with the changing environment and consumer demands. The healthcare organization, similar to other businesses, must be able to respond quickly to demands including but not limited to, health promotion, and wellness programs as well as alternative medicine breakthroughs. Therefore, strategic planning is more important in today's changing healthcare environment.

This course provides the healthcare administration student with a thorough understanding of the principles and concepts of marketing as they apply to healthcare organizations. The class will discuss marketing applications from both a traditional fee-for-service approach and a managed care framework, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of both.

This course reviews the current healthcare system, history of quality, and quality issues specific to health care industry. Health care organizations are under regulatory and financial pressures to improve the quality of care they deliver. Students will discuss the integration of quality into the strategic planning process. Students will understand the strategic role quality in the American health care system.  Students will learn domains and dimensions of quality and their integration into operational activities into the healthcare organization. Learn a structured approach for reporting quality performance at multiple levels of the organization Students will learn that there are parallels between financial performance and quality performance management.