The Olin Business School offers both a major and a minor in Healthcare Management. The program has attracted undergraduate business and non-business students with a variety of interests, including aspiring managers, doctors, lawyers and social workers.
The major requires four business courses: Olin Grand Rounds, Healthcare Economics and Policy, Healthcare Management, and Research Seminar in Healthcare. The minor requires completion of the first three courses listed above. The courses are taught by Bart Hamilton, Ph.D., the Robert Brookings Smith Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship, and Bruce Hall, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Surgery at the School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Health Care Management at the Olin Business School.
Olin Grand Rounds focuses on the intersection of business and medicine and provides an introduction to the challenging problems facing the business of medicine. The objective is to provide students new insights into how modern management tools can be combined with scientific and clinical knowledge to manage health care organizations more efficiently and practice medicine more effectively. Throughout the course, University physicians and industry experts discuss high-priority topics, such as global disease control, the organ-transplant market, and treatment disparities.
Healthcare Economics & Policy discusses factors external to the healthcare organization which affect the demand for healthcare. The course includes discussion of health policy, insurance principles, and pharmaceutical products.
Healthcare Management helps student develop the ability to apply management principles to actual situations and dilemmas facing health care managers, consultants, financiers, investors, innovators, or providers. Students learn basic frameworks, such as cost/benefit analysis and evaluation of risk in the context of the healthcare industry. Also addressed are financial issues, management challenges, and conduct of operations.
Research Seminar in Healthcare Management is the capstone course for this major, and through it students are able to apply rigorous statistical and analytical approaches to healthcare industry research. Teams of students work on projects identified by University faculty and corporate partners. Areas of study may include an analysis of the operational conduct of surgical procedures, analysis of the potential market for new pharmaceutical products or medical devices, or the development of a business model for the provision of special services to the Medicaid population. At the end of the course, each team writes a research paper worthy of submission to an academic journal, and student teams present their papers to course faculty and company sponsors.