Education

Venture capital has played a major role in shaping many of the innovations that form our modern society, ranging from the ideas that spawned the tech giants to life-saving medications. In recent years, there has also been an explosion of venture investment in new areas of healthcare – namely digital health and tech-enabled healthcare services.

This course aims to provide some insight into the world of venture capital through a healthcare lens. We will explore a range of topics, from fund formation, to identifying an investment target, to negotiating and closing an investment, to managing growth, to achieving an exit. One class will focus on what makes venture investment different in healthcare than in other industries. All along the way, we’ll look at some notable successes and failures to learn how venture capital can create enormous value, and where – and why – it has come up short.

The course will conclude with a VC pitch session to give students the experience of presenting their ideas to real venture investors. Students will work in groups to create and present their pitches and will learn what this experience is like for both entrepreneurs and investors. Afterwards, the investors will also discuss their experiences in the field and provide some insights to students from a career perspective.

Information technology and the management of this technology is increasingly critical in healthcare. Healthcare represents a new frontier for information management. This class explores the promises and challenges of health information technology in today's environment. Readings and lectures will focus on the nature and uses of health care information systems in a variety of health care settings. Students will learn fundamental IT terminology, understand how IT fits into the organizational structure in terms of quality of care, financing, and strategic organizational issues as well as project management. They will also learn about opportunities and challenges for IT in healthcare in the future.

This course will use practical resources, site visits, and in-depth healthcare policy analysis to provide students with an overview of the major public healthcare companies that influence and shape the U.S. healthcare system and the current policy challenges faced by these entities in light of healthcare reform. Content will focus on Fortune 500 companies covering areas including pharmaceutical, clinical care, medical device, managed care, technology, and emerging business models. Students will be able to debate pressing issues such as pay-for-performance, transparency, technology innovation, consumerism reimbursement pressures, and the new role of government that affect all players; assess the intersection of public players with the new era of healthcare reform that is forcing innovation and change in a volatile market place; and discuss the drivers of cost growth in relation to pricing innovation and the influx of new patients under the exchanges.

The type of capital investment used by a healthcare entity can have a profound impact on the financial viability of a healthcare organization. At one end of the spectrum, it can contribute to growth of the company and income generating potential. At the other end of the spectrum, it can create a crushing financial burden on the organization, as it tries to serve its debt obligations or repay its equity investors. It can also hamstring the management of the organization if investors sitting on the board have a different vision from the founders about the strategic direction of the company.

Capital finance therefore has short, medium and long-term consequences for the business opportunities and risks of healthcare organizations that go well beyond the capital investment itself.

Through a mixture of lectures, discussions, case studies and guest lecturers, students will be provided with the tools to understand the raising and allocation of investment capital for strategic and/or investment gain. The course will span the healthcare continuum from product makers (biotech, pharmaceuticals, medical devices,) supply (distributors, PBMs, pharmacies, CROs), payors (HMOs, government) and providers (hospitals, SNFs, Healthcare IT, diagnostics, practioners) and consumers. The course is for students who are interested in seeing how their healthcare management skills can be used in an applied setting.

In recent years, entrepreneurship has gained enormous popularity, even becoming accepted as a means to address pressing social and environmental issues. A significant percentage of our economy is now based on small businesses, and an entrepreneurial career is more likely and possible than ever before. Even in a more traditional corporate career, entrepreneurial skills can serve a manager well as companies that see out new opportunities. The benefits of entrepreneurship are abundant: the creativity to grow and manager your own business, the freedom of time, the potential to accumulate significant wealth and the possibility of making the world a better place. How does it happen? How can we take an idea and a blank piece of paper and transform them into an operating business with customers, cash flow and profits?

This course will break the process into discernible steps and skills. It will teach skills in opportunity identification and evaluation as well as an understanding of the steps and competencies required to launch a new business. The focus will be on scalable businesses that are large enough to attract professional investors.

Popular media routinely tout imminent breakthroughs that often fizzle. In this course, we examine advances that indisputably changed medical practice in the last quarter of the 20th century through case histories. The case histories suggest that protracted, multiplayer innovations – not solitary breakthroughs – produce transformational results. Yet venturesome individuals who do not follow the crowd remain crucial. Engaging stories make the vast number of facts presented in the case histories memorable. But the course treats learning new facts mainly as a valuable byproduct. Rather, we rely on the case histories in two more subtle ways, namely: (1) developing skills and judgment and (2) sharpening goals and aspirations.

One of the great frustrations of health care innovation lies in the gap between how many promising innovations are developed each year and how few reach patients at any degree of scale. Too often, great products and services fail to gain traction, with negative human, clinical and financial consequences. A significant driver of these failures is the asymmetry between the needs of the sellers of emerging technologies (particularly startups) and those of the buyers who are trying to innovate. Many innovation disappointments can be traced to a failure to reconcile these differences.

This course examines what it takes to bridge those differences to make innovation work within large health care organizations, such as hospital systems, multi-specialty physician networks, and health plans. Students will put themselves in the shoes of a seed-stage startup that has created a tech-enabled service and is striving to win an anchor buyer. Through case studies, simulations, guest speakers, and practical assignments, students will explore the real-world challenges of gaining internal champions, navigating governance processes, securing funding, aligning incentives, and scaling adoption from pilot to enterprise. Emphasis will be placed on understanding the buying process, stakeholder mapping, business case development, and the organizational politics startups must navigate.

This course examines one of the most significant but relatively recent developments in the healthcare market place: the trend toward increased consolidation of healthcare providers into larger practices and into vertically integrated delivery systems, as well as the parallel trend toward consolidation of health insurance companies into fewer, but much larger entities. It will draw upon economic theory, empirical research, and health policy and economic analysis to explore the implications of these developments, coupled with other emerging trends, on healthcare market competition, prices, profits, expenditures, and consumer welfare.

This course is designed to equip healthcare management, public health and policy graduate students with the knowledge and skills necessary to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into healthcare settings. The course covers the fundamentals of AI, its applications in healthcare, ethical considerations, and strategic implementation. By the end of the course, students will be able to identify opportunities for AI deployment, manage AI projects, and evaluate their impact on healthcare operations and/or patient outcomes.

The United States is facing an array of public health crises including opioid use, youth mental health challenges, maternal health disparities, and rising rates of obesity. Health care policies—the laws and regulations that govern the health care system—play a critical role in addressing these crises. The goal of this course is to strengthen students’ skills in identifying and evaluating innovative health care policy options to address major public health and health system issues. In Spring 2026, we will focus on the U.S. maternal health crisis—marked by rising maternal mortality and persistent racial inequities—as a grounding case study. While maternal health will be the primary focus, students will gain a deeper understanding of key measures of health system performance and the main health policy “control knobs” (i.e. financing, payment, organization, regulation and behavior) that can be leveraged to reform the US health care system more broadly. This seminar-style course will incorporate didactic learning, engaged classroom discussion, and both individual and team-based work. As a culminating project, students will work in small teams to analyze the features of the maternal health crisis in specific jurisdictions, propose innovative and tailored policy solutions, and engage in constructive peer critique. Ultimately, students will leave the course equipped with a practical set of tools for proposing and evaluating policy options in response to contemporary public health and health systems challenges.

Description will be available in the fall.