Courses to be offered by the Sauder School of Business include:

Strategic Marketing for Health Care Management

October 28 - 30, 2011

Marketing has a strategic role to play in the management of all organizations.  Originally conceived as a function primarily of businesses, many non-profit and public sector organizations have found that marketing plays an important role in the effective and efficient accomplishment of the organizational mission.  This course focuses specifically on marketing’s role in health care organizations.  While the primary focus will be on marketing as a strategic function, the course will also examine specific marketing approaches to see how they can improve health outcomes and lead to the efficient use of health care resources. The course materials will consist of articles, cases, and learning exercises. An important component of the course will be in class discussion, focusing on the application of theory to applications.

Financial Management in Health Care

November 18 - 20, 2011

Investigate the basics of finance and learn fundamental skills and concepts such as: financial instruments, basics of corporate finance, investments and risk management. Topics covered include: Financial Instruments, Markets and Institutions, banks, hedge funds, other FI’s, central banks, governments, stocks, bonds, basic derivatives, exchanges, indices, OTC markets. Learn the time value of money, costs, benefits, and valuation.  Bond and stock valuation, corporate funding –IPO’s etc...Systematic vs. Idiosyncratic risk, diversification and dispersion, beta and the CAPM, efficient markets and asset prices. Risk Instruments –options, futures, swaps, basics of options pricing. Public and Private partnerships –issues for governments and healthcare.

Managing Patient Flow

December 9 - 11, 2011

To identify the impediments to good patient flow and provide a set of tools to mitigate them. Evaluation:  Participation in class discussions and mini-project after the course. 

Overarching questions:

• How do we know if patients are flowing well? 
• Why does it matter?
• How do we improve flow?
• How do we know that what we did improved flow?
• How do we sustain our improvements?
• Why is this challenging?

Techniques covered:

• Lean health care
• Capacity management
• Simulation
• Data analysis   
• Process mapping
• Spreadsheet models
• Optimization
• Forecasting   
• Event Timelines
• Performance Measurement
• Quantification of variability

Cost Benefit Analysis and Decision Making

January 13 - 15, 2012

This “how-to” course provides an overview of cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, multi-goal analysis and related techniques for evaluating the social impact of projects, programs and services. The course is applicable to the entire range of government and public sector programs, including social programs as well as physical infrastructure. It will also benefit consultants to government agencies and private sector managers who wish to assess the social impact of their business decisions.

By attending this course, you will learn:

• how to evaluate policies or projects that have a public or social impact
• how to choose among evaluation techniques
• how to choose among alternative projects with multiple goals
• how to choose among alternative projects when subject to budget constraints
• how to incorporate equity into decision making
• how to value project impacts
• how to discount and what discount rate to use the value of creating jobs
• how to value lives saved and other intangibles
• why not to use multipliers
• when and how to use cost-effectiveness analysis and related techniques

Leading Self and Leading Others

March 2 - 4, 2012

In today’s complex and fast-changing healthcare environment, it takes a skilled leader to empower change and improvement. Building on the EMBA Core, these two modules are designed to broaden your understanding of what it takes to be an effective leader in times of chaos and rapid change. They will provide you with a tool kit of skills to help you lead others and yourself in productive and healthy ways. Based on the premise that leadership can be taught, the program format is highly interactive. Students will work on healthcare projects to solve real-life leadership challenges, using their creative talents and what they are learning in the course to devise appropriate solutions. Students will take away a leadership game plan for organizational and personal action.

This course will help participants:

• See themselves, their organization and the external environment from a variety of perspectives
• Gain new insights into addressing the challenges faced when dealing with complexity
• Improve essential leadership skills in coaching, communication, negotiation, creativity and political savvy
• Cultivate a calm, clear mind even in times of stress
• Recognize their personal values and improve their balance as a human being and leader

Information Technology and Management of Implications in Health Care

March 30 - April 1, 2012

This module is designed to better prepare healthcare executives for the challenges in initiating, governing, and participating in the introduction and application of healthcare information technology (HIT) systems. Based on critical analysis of common HIT approaches, strategies, and methods and their outcomes, participants will gain a broad and deeper understanding of the barriers to effectively manage and apply HIT. Analyzing the potential of new approaches and their limitations will provide students with a systemic, management perspective of HIT systems.

We also examine a number of key typical HIT systems and certain medical and technological standards, their unique role, characteristics and interrelationships, and their specific managerial challenges including issues of monitoring and evaluating their models, development process, and qualitative and quantitative outcomes. We explore Canada’s Infoway and British Columbia strategies and their accomplishments. Students will have the opportunity to learn from one or two leaders in healthcare and HIT about their views on key issues discussed in this course. As a final point, students will apply what they have learned by critically analyzing a case study of a complex clinical application.

Resource Allocation and Priority Setting in Health Care

February 10 - 12, 2012

Economics is of increasing importance in health care, both in the production of knowledge and the use of that knowledge. For example, it is now the norm for clinical trials to address economic issues alongside of health outcomes in evaluating new drugs and technologies in order to ensure maximum value. Similarly, decision makers must base service delivery decisions on both benefits and costs. As such, it is important to appreciate how to conduct economic evaluations of new and existing interventions, and to be able to critically appraise such evaluations. In addition, managers require skills to set priorities and allocate resources in a manner which is both evidence-based and pragmatic noting the real world complexities of the health care ‘market’. This demands that decision makers understand economic principles that underpin decision making and have a firm grasp on key ethical principles to ensure fairness and legitimacy when allocating scarce resources. This course provides students with a firm understanding of key economic and ethical principles, and how these principles can be applied practically in setting priorities and allocating resources within the health sector. As part of this, important aspects of health care decision making including assessing relevant evidence, stakeholder engagement, benefit/ outcomes measurement, incentives and organizational behaviour are all addressed.

Health Care Management and Strategy

May 25 - 27, 2012

The goal of this course is to build and present a strategic plan for a health organization drawing upon a deeper understanding of the development of strategy and its implementation in health care organizations.  The course builds on the introductory work on strategy provided in the EMBA CORE and focuses on the complex environment represented by health care services in the public sector.  A highly participative, work, study, debate and build format will be followed.  It will be essential that students prepare extensively prior to the start of the course in order to be familiar with the principles of strategic planning, actual plans within government and the health authorities and the overall environment of health care in Canada.

Students will work with the Instructor to consider and debate concepts and tools for Strategic Planning.  Classes will be supplemented with special guest lecturers drawn from the Ministry of Health Services, private sector consultancy and a health authority.