Review examples of successful health care transformation from around the globe. Explore changes and innovations leaders can enable in culture, strategy, and measurement to achieve high-value transformation that restores health care to its purpose—achieving better health.

Introduction to methodology for defining relevant patient segments, assessing patients’ unmet and unarticulated needs, and identifying outcomes that matter to patients and families. Explore the person-in-environment perspective and the social determinants of health, with the goal of understanding how high-value solutions can improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities.

Explore the fundamentals of outcome measurement: identifying meaningful outcomes; finding and creating validated and clinically actionable measures; designing systems for collecting, analyzing, and reporting health outcomes data; and accelerating learning by clinical teams.

Form a project team and develop an action-oriented learning project aimed at improving some aspect of health and/or health care. The work of this semester includes completing background research, identifying project objectives and critical questions, choosing an organizational setting and client, creating a business proposition and project “pitch”, and developing measurement and analysis plans.

Distinguish between situations in need of process improvement and situations where new solutions need to be created to enable improved health outcomes. Explore how to reduce unwarranted variation and manage improvement cycles. Analyze process improvement techniques such as managing bottlenecks, reducing queues, balancing workflow, and scheduling.

Analyze financial information in not-for-profit and for-profit contexts, as well as budgeting, forecasting, and cost and managerial accounting. Use these tools to manage strategic decisions and to explore the effects of different funding and payment approaches.

Explore communication and team-building skills. Assess individual strengths and weaknesses and examine how to build high-performance teams, give and receive feedback, manage ambiguity, resolve conflict, manage change, and lead transformation. Students will also develop and enact a plan to achieve a leadership goal.

Implement a project, conduct outcome measurement, analyze the organizational setting and team, and gather data for analysis. Refine goals, outcomes, and analysis plans to adapt to meet the needs of the selected project. Students will also create a summary and presentation to share their progress with their organizational sponsors or clients.

Explore the role of information (IT) and technology to support a successful strategy for creating value for individuals and families. Explore organization needs from IT systems, how technology can support strategy, and how to create a platform business that addresses a health problem.

Explore how strategic thinking differs from strategic planning and how to apply concepts of uniqueness, tradeoff, fit, and cause to articulate and achieve effective strategy. Using a variety of case examples, examine how to improve the value delivered by multi-facility or multi-location organizations as well as scale high-value initiatives for high-volume implementation.

Analyze experiential learning project results, write a final report, and design a final poster to present to classmates, faculty, and organizational sponsors.