The first-year “required curriculum” (RC) incorporates health care cases and topics in many courses ranging from Marketing and Finance to Entrepreneurship and Strategy. Roughly ten percent of the cases covered in the RC year span the many sectors of the health care industry. This ensures that all students will understand the industry from various functional perspectives.
During the second-year "elective curriculum" (EC), students may choose courses and field-based research specific to their particular health care interests. Some students also choose to cross-register for health care courses at other schools within the Harvard University community.
Elective Courses
Elective health care-focused courses will vary from year to year. Upcoming HBS course offerings include:
The course covers three main themes: 1) technology strategy 2) business model design, and 3) leadership. It covers such issues as managing risky technological bets, selecting and resourcing projects, building teams and managing scientists in a commercial setting, incentive design, intellectual property strategies, licensing and partnering, vertical integration decisions, and financing of science-based ventures. The course includes case materials from a broad array of science-based sectors, including biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, alternative energy and advanced materials. A centerpiece of the course is a multi-disciplinary team project to create the plan for commercializing research from a university or private-sector lab. Final presentations of the projects will be attended by Harvard faculty, alumni, and local venture capitalists.
Course Catalog Listing
This course is intended for students who have a career interest in leading or investing in companies in the health care sector, and are interested in how information technology can improve quality, efficiency, and access to health care. Students will be exposed to pure health care IT (HCIT) businesses, health care service businesses that rely heavily on IT to achieve their goals, and pure health care service businesses. Though the vast majority of these enterprises will be for-profit, the course will also examine the innovative role social ventures play in health care.
Course Catalog Listing
(IHC) helps students create successful entrepreneurial health care ventures by enabling them to:
- Identify the alignment between an entrepreneurial health care venture and the Six Forces that shape health care: structure, financing, technology, consumers, accountability, and public policy.
- Create a business model that responds appropriately to any misalignments.
This Course embraces every part of the health care sector, including insurance, services, IT, medical devices, biotechnology, diagnostics, and pharmaceuticals. It also has a global focus, with case studies set in Brazil, India, Spain, the UK, and the US, among other countries. Additionally, IHC provides an analytic framework that shapes new health care ventures and exposes students to different kinds of innovation in health care: consumer focused, technology driven, and consolidations.
Course Catalog Listing
This course will help students develop the managerial skills required to identify and implement change. It will draw upon a range of approaches for improving healthcare delivery, including the value-based health care framework, continuous improvement, organizational redesign, population health management, precision medicine, patient engagement, and payment reform. For each of these approaches, the course will emphasize the importance of identifying improvement targets, implementing relevant changes, and measuring their effects on performance.
Course Catalog Listing
Many health care organizations lack a coherent business strategy. How can firms create and capture value in this complicated, heavily regulated industry? There are serious fiscal challenges ahead if spending growth is not permanently curtailed, yet substantial opportunities exist to enhance efficiency and quality. This course covers the components of sound strategy and different industrial, institutional, and regulatory challenges across a range of health care sectors.
Students learn about several key health care sectors. The emphasis will be on payors and providers, but the course will also devote 15-20% of the case discussions to drugs and devices (which comprise about that share of health care spending). hroughout the course, discussions will cover U.S. health care reform and its implications on the various industry sectors.
Course Catalog Listing
Students may earn academic credit by working independently or in teams as they conduct research and complete projects for health care organizations. This student-initiated learning enables students to choose their faculty sponsor and the organization where they will work.
Recent projects include:
- Quantifying the size of the medical tourism market
- Identifying applications for multiplex protein analysis techniques
- Evaluating IT strategies for a startup health care organization
- Redesigning urgent care triage for a major academic hospital
- Developing a China business model for a large pharmaceutical company
CROSS-REGISTRATION
HBS students may take graduate-level courses at several other schools within Harvard University. Courses at the Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Kennedy School are popular.