Leading and Innovating in Health Care

Leading and innovating in complex, high-stakes settings - like health care, where lives and livelihoods are on the line - present distinctive challenges and constraints. This course challenges you to integrate previous course work and work experience to evaluate managerial decisions and develop evidence-based and innovative strategies for leading health care teams and organizations. The course is designed to further participants' understanding of organizational, managerial, and strategic issues facing health care organizations, including hospitals, medical groups, insurers, biopharmaceutical, and health information technology firms, and the health care workforce, and to improve your ability to effectively lead them. The course will provide participants with a foundation for developing, implementing, and analyzing efforts to improve health care organization performance. Objectives of this course include sharpening the leadership, decision-making, problem-solving, and presentation skills of those who aim to hold operational and strategic positions in health care organizations and to introduce participants to health care industry leaders and innovators. Through case studies, readings, in-class exercises, and class discussions, participants will learn analytical frameworks, concepts, tools and skills necessary for leading organizational learning, improvement, innovation, and performance in health care. Group work and exercises will simulate high-pressure situations and risk-taking under uncertainty. While this course will focus on application to health care situations, lessons are relevant to anyone considering engaging as an investor, entrepreneur, technology developer, consultant, or industry or organization leader or manager in health-adjacent fields. Prior experience in the health sector is not required.