MBA in Multi-Sector Health Management

This course provides students with the necessary experience and orientation to the online MBA Programs as they are exposed to specific course content through online training modules, assessments, and evaluations. Additionally, through the exposure of the resources listed in the ‘Course Syllabus,’ students are enabled to navigate and maximise their skillsets towards successful completion of their courses. Consequently, they will identify and strengthen areas of weakness to be effective graduate students.

This is an intensive online one-week residency course that lays the foundation for the MBA program. Students will get to know each other and become familiar with the expectations of the MBA program while learning about leadership, management, and teamwork. Specifically, students are asked to reflect on their own leadership and management competence, asking themselves questions such as: How can we best manage ourselves while we make decisions without perfect information or endless time? How do we maximize the performance of the teams we become part of? What interpersonal skills give us influence? Which interpersonal strengths can propel us to our next promotion? What development areas might impact our leadership and management effectiveness, or prevent our ascension to the executive suite? The course is designed for deep self-reflection about what behaviors we choose to use, the consequences of those behaviors, and given choices, how we might be even more productive.

Additionally, the global context for creating healthy organizations in the Healthcare Industry is examined, where the need to provide high-quality, cost-effective healthcare through healthy organizations and good work has never been greater. By answering the question, “Why would someone follow you?” students are motivated to develop a personal leadership credo and development plan for the program. This course provides the insights needed to successfully build and lead healthy organizations.

With leadership comes responsibility and a duty to “do the right thing” using an awareness of one’s own and others’ ethical viewpoints. This course explores the numerous ethical duties faced by organizations and managers. Utilizing analytical frameworks and the latest findings on human behavior, you will explore a wide range of ethical decisions and strategies, many with paradoxical and conflicting perspectives. These will help students reveal and assess their ethical intuitions, assumptions, and frameworks, compare them within explicit modes of formal ethical thought, and learn how to use ethics in business scenarios. The course will thus fundamentally assist students with integrating decision-making with personal and professional ethics.

This course will examine the rapidly changing industry of healthcare. It looks at healthcare as a business commodity and issues such as demand, the role of government in determining policy, provider behavior, and competition are explored, providing an understanding of the unique economic complexities of healthcare. It also provides an understanding of the economic principles of scarcity, efficiency, productivity, and market behavior that drive the rapidly changing industry of healthcare around the world, and particularly in the USA. The major components of the healthcare system are examined, with a focus on topics such as quality versus quantity of healthcare, care costs versus financing, and social welfare gains versus social welfare losses.

Marketing in healthcare has evolved at a fast pace, requiring health managers to better understand how it is related to consumer behavior, systems, and innovations in delivery in pharmaceutical and medical device industries. Students gain insights into the needs of a broad range of consumers, including patients, physician-managed care providers, and insurance firms, among others. This course covers marketing strategy and research, consumer-based marketing, analysis and implementation techniques, and evaluation in light of changing market, policy, social media, and ethical considerations as well as taking into account cultural implications.

Solving the healthcare crisis will require innovation across the industry. The issues are many, including the combination of high costs, uneven access and quality of care; growth in healthcare spending by consumers, governments, and insurance companies; the growing burden of care by hiring firms for their employees and retirees; public health and disease management; growth of the elderly population; the quality and cost of both “fee-for-service” reimbursement, and public-provided systems, among others. This course combines the application of concepts, studies, and tools from the fields of innovation and social entrepreneurship to understand these issues. During this course, students will select the individual or team project to be addressed in the Leadership and Management Labs course.

This course involves discussion and analysis of the foundations for global health and health systems and their foundations in policy, economics, human, and cultural subsystems. Challenges and opportunities associated with global health such as the aging population, electronic medical records and information technology, genomics, healthcare quality and costs are examined as well as the role of non-governmental organizations and public/private partnerships in creating transformative change. The course takes a holistic and comparative approach to understanding the systems and nature of health by studying the realities of a number of national health systems.

Learning how to effectively lead, manage, and develop effective organizational systems in the Healthcare Industry are critical skills required of successful managers. By examining traditional, modern, and post-modern theories of the organization, students are able to discuss, compare and contrast a rich set of topics related to organizational behavior and dynamics, including motivation, learning, group dynamics, team building, power and politics, conflict, and interpersonal relations. Through experiential learning, participants explore the role of leadership in organizational transformation and decision-making within firms differing in culture, values, and ethical foundations.

BUSI 885 explores how financial management affects decisions in healthcare. Classical and emerging analytical methods applied to the financing, investment, and operational components of healthcare delivery are presented. An overview of the organization of financial management in healthcare, revenue sources, cost accounting and analysis, the setting of care rates, and capital management practices are also covered. Planning and budgeting for optimal health management are introduced in the framework of current health policies and reforms.

In today’s knowledge and service era, people or human capital have become the most critical resource in organizations, in both emerging and advanced economies. Human Resource Management (HRM) includes developing individual talent as well as the organizational capability to create future leaders and sustainable long-term success, and to achieve better outcomes from and access to healthcare around the world as well as improved healthcare models. This course will help students gain critical knowledge for creating value through people, addressing topics such as critiquing and reinventing existing HRM systems; recruiting, hiring, and developing talent; developing managers and leaders; organizational practices; managing talent and performance; information and decision-making tools; and managing change.

Strategy is the heart of business performance, yet a strategy is difficult to develop and even harder to implement. This course looks at how firms in the Healthcare Industry formulate and implement business strategies that create value in their local, as well as global marketplaces. By utilizing a number of Healthcare Industry studies and well-tested frameworks, students learn the key ingredients of strategy, think through challenges, develop the capacity to provide alternative and anticipated impacts, and gain lessons they may apply to their organizations. Exercises and training in strategic decision-making allow students to learn and apply advanced strategic thinking skills.

The intersection of information science, computer science, and healthcare creates an interdisciplinary arena. This provides a context for dealing with the resources, devices, and methods required to optimize the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of information in health and biomedicine. Health informatics tools include not only computers but also clinical guidelines, formal medical terminologies, and information and communication systems. The managerial application of concepts prepares the participants as managers and consultants to rely upon and manage information technology to accomplish their objectives. The course provides both an overview of technology solutions and discussions of the latest trends in healthcare informatics, including: Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and Personal Health Records (PHR), clinical information systems, consumer health, Web 4.0 and social media, telemedicine and imaging, privacy and security, and Artificial Intelligence. The managerial application of these concepts will be explored, as students complete assignments examining these trends, and explaining how management decisions and healthcare operations are improved through the use of health informatics.

The challenges of running a professional small business or medical/veterinary clinic are many. Owners or lead practitioners oftentimes wear many hats, servicing clients while running the business and meeting cash flow constraints. Through experiential learning, this course provides the foundations for building and running a professional small business or clinic, helping students learn the nuts and bolts of small business success. It covers topics such as computer systems and back office management; workflow processes; customer service; cash flow planning; budgets and priorities; personnel policies; wages and benefits; marketing and advertising campaigns and measurements; billing, collections, and insurance management, all integrated into class discussions, case analyses, and our course Final Project.

This course gives a review of risk management and legal responsibility in the Healthcare Industry. Part 1 of the course (the first four weeks) provides students with an understanding of the legal and ethical issues that arise in the provision of healthcare services. On account of this, students will develop the legal responsibility skills necessary for a variety of business and health management scenarios. In Part 2 of the course (the remaining four weeks), students would explore the risk management issues related to healthcare and the distinguishing components of a risk management plan.

This final Residency Course seeks to integrate the different knowledge and practices students acquired during the Multi-Sector Health Management Program. This will be amassed by addressing real or simulated situations that require new business approaches, models, or solutions. It will examine how to use the strengths of new business models to confront some of the most compelling health and social challenges facing the world today. By using project-based learning (Social Enterprise Business Plans), the course explores the processes involved in proposing a working solution, including the successful integration of scientific/technological ideas, the social impact, and the business models designed to bring solutions to scale within a particular context. Furthermore, this course allows participants to think through leadership and management challenges in a specific business situation, thus proposing relevant recommendations and decisions, and understanding alternatives and different possible solutions.

• Dean, School of Arts and Sciences – Lucy Eugene, Ph.D.
• Dean, School of Graduate Studies – Calum Macpherson, Ph.D.
• Chair, Department of Business and Management Studies – Anthony Andall, Ph.D.
• Director, Graduate Programs – Curlan Gilchrist, Ph.D.

• Paul Pounder, Ph.D.
• Helen Bhola-Paul, Ph.D.
• Zanifa Payne, Ph.D.
• Rachael Ross, MBA, BSc.
• Alana Twum-Barimah, LLM, LLB, BSc.

• Fernando Mora, Dr.Sc.
• Bryon Ramirez, Ph.D.
• Liliana Gavidia-Ceballos, Ph.D.
• Heather Douglas, Ph.D.
• Andrew Westrum, Ph.D.
• Aaron Logie, DBA
• Gwendolyn Burbank, MBA, MA, MTS, BSc., A.A.
• Asif Jasat, MBA, BSc., PMP.
• Ryan Nurse, M.Phil., BSc.

• Administrative Assistant – Shineal Huggins-John, MSc., BA.
• Executive Secretary – Deneal McQueen