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. 

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 community.

Elective Courses

Elective health care-focused courses will vary from year to year. Upcoming HBS course offerings include:

Lab to Market: Field Course

The Lab to Market field course outlines the path from embryonic discoveries made in R&D labs to their development for commercial use and onwards to market launch. The course is designed for students who either want to start businesses that have science and technology intellectual property at their core or anticipate leading market launch teams in incumbent organizations. 

Course Catalog Listing

Innovating in Health Care: Field Course

This course is intended for students who are interested in careers in financing, leading ,or creating innovative health care services, health insurance, health IT, or medical technology. Student teams meet with Prof. Herzlinger on a biweekly basis. All students must complete a business plan.

Course Catalog Listing

Innovating in Health Care

(IHC) helps students create successful entrepreneurial health care ventures by enabling them to:

1. 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.
2. Create a business model that responds appropriately to any misalignments.
   
   

Course Catalog Listing

Tech Ethics: AI, Biotech, and the Future of Human Nature

The course explores the moral, social, and political implications of new technologies. Will biotechnology and AI enable us to hack humanity? Should we edit the genes of our children, extend the human lifespan, and genetically enhance our athletic ability and IQ? Can algorithms be fair? Will robots make work obsolete? Can smart machines outthink us? In an age of big data and social media, is privacy over? Is democracy? The course will ask how science and technology are transforming the way we work, learn, make friends, raise children, care for our health, conduct our politics, and understand what it means to be human.

Course Catalog Listing

Transforming Health Care Delivery: Field Course

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. 

Course Catalog Listing

U.S. Health Care Strategy

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.

Course Catalog Listing

Independent Projects

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.

Short Intensive Programs (SIPs)

SIPs allow students to sample electives they might not otherwise be able to take, provide some electives even to first-year students, enable first- and second-year students to take classes together for the first time, allow faculty members to try out new content and teach their passions, and engage alumni and other practitioners in offering real-world perspective. Upcoming SIPs include:

Pricing the Priceless: BioPharma Innovation in an Age of Precision Medicine

For students who don’t know anything about the industry but want to understand what the front-page articles are all about. We will assume no prior knowledge of the underlying science or of this industry. It’s also for students interested in the life-sciences industry and in medicine, and for students interested in venture. Most of all, it’s for anyone who cares about patients and their wellbeing. So whether you plan to lead a large biotech company or work for a non-health care company, you will need to know more about this pervasive industry.

Value-Based Health Care Delivery: An Intensive Seminar for Students & Practitioners

This course is the premier value-based health care course geared toward executive management and physician leaders from health care delivery organizations, health insurers and government. It assembles a group of senior U.S. and international health care leaders to examine new strategies, organizational models and measurement approaches to drive value improvement in health care delivery. The program includes three days of intensive Harvard Business School–style case discussions, guest protagonists, and concept presentations to discuss the value-based health care framework and its application.