Students are required to complete 12 courses to earn the degree.  There are eleven core courses and one capstone course. Review curriculum details and elective choices while you consider applying to this program. Current students should refer to curriculum requirements in place at time of entry into the program.

Curriculum

About the Final Project

This course provides students with opportunities to apply the fundamentals of strategic planning and marketing, human resources, finance, analytics, and operations acquired in previous courses to approach practical problems and decisions faced by real healthcare systems and may include policy or product development and other services innovation. As healthcare is a team sport, students will be expected to work on the project with a colleague. Ideally, the project will address an applicable and current issue in the student’s current organization such as problem-solving a crisis management issue. For students who do not have this option, senior managers from the program will "pitch" the potential projects to students to choose. Students apply techniques of situational assessment, data analysis, strategy development, problem solving, and critical thinking. As the capstone course, students are expected to integrate their knowledge and to apply it to healthcare case studies. Students analyses will be guided by the practicing professionals, who are their faculty mentors, and consistent with the mission, vision and core values of an organization. The outcome is an improved ability to think from the patient point of view, analyze critically, identify key challenges, complete strategic plan for main business problems, and communicate those clearly and effectively to various stakeholders. Projects will host key elements defined by relevance, realistic, consequential, measurable and include more than two distinguishable stakeholders. Projects will be scoped in a reasonable definition and timeline in order to make a marked impact and change within the student’s own organization. Ideal projects utilize the strength and bandwidth of the faculty sponsor and the program's relationship with Northwestern University and the Feinberg School of Medicine. The project is built in concept at the start and continues through the program culminating and a faculty presentation.