This course discusses ways for healthcare management personnel to provide service in a competitive marketplace. Students will analyze theories, methods, and techniques with regard to strategy, staffing, and systems. Topics discussed will include areas such as building a customer service culture; training, motivating, and empowering staff; measuring service quality; managing service waits; and recovering from a service failure.

This course addresses the legal issues that are most prevalent in the delivery of healthcare. Emphasis will be on the common issues that healthcare professionals encounter. The student will be introduced to various legal terms, policy and statutes and their relationship to the healthcare system process. Additionally, the student will be provided with foundational knowledge regarding healthcare law and ethics and the effect on healthcare policy.

This course provides information on the importance and process of strategic planning in response to the rapid transformation in healthcare delivery. Students will examine and formulate strategies to assist in analyzing their organizational factors critical to strategic planning in order to achieve the organization’s mission.

Healthcare organizations are ultimately driven by a mission of care and service. They have a distinct culture and approach to meeting the complex and ever-changing needs of the healthcare consumer. Students will examine the culture of healthcare and how it impacts the way organizations and the people working in health care interact. Healthcare organizations will be viewed from the system, community, organization, group, and individual levels. Students will examine and critique organizational behavior and apply theories, frameworks, and concepts to influence behavior in healthcare organizations.

This course explores the complex organizational dynamics and structures that influence the interactions among the major components of the US. healthcare system. The course also provides opportunities to investigate current and emerging best practices to guide patient safety and excellence in service.

As a member of a Six Sigma project team, students will learn how to lead and executive process-level improvement projects. They will develop process flow charts, collect and analyze data, develop hypotheses, and use basic statistical tools to determine optimum ways to reduce cost, improve processes and increase customer/client satisfaction. Where applicable, students will design simple experiments to validate theories. This hands-on class will focus on projects to eliminate waste and defects by applying lean and Six Sigma methodology. In-class case studies will focus on Healthcare issues.

To remain competitive, organizations must continuously seek new ways to be efficient and effective in their work processes. The tools and techniques taught in this course can be applied to any type of organization including for-profit organization, nonprofit organization or government agency. In this course, students will learn the following continuous improvement tools: Cause and Effect Diagrams, Flow Charts, Check Lists, Pareto Charts, SWOT Analysis, Brainstorming Techniques, the 5 Ys, Root Cause Analysis, and Corrective Action Techniques.

The objective of this course is to provide an understanding of the importance of integrating change management and project management activities. Typically, the study of project management focuses on the tasks and activities needed to accomplish a project: who, what, when and how. It provides project structure and addresses the actions, deliverables and outcomes. However, change management focuses on the people impacted by the change and ways to reduce resistance to change and to elicit behaviors to support change. Although change management is critical to the success of any change intuitive, it is often forgotten and not integrated into project management theory. This course stresses the importance of addressing the “people” aspect of a change project.

This course will provide an overview of the key factors affecting the economic and financial management of healthcare organizations in today’s environment and provide the knowledge necessary for health service managers to apply financial management theory and principles to help make decisions to promote the financial well-being of the organization.

This course introduces data management and database technologies, including relational database systems and the structured query language (SQL). In addition, data warehousing and more analytic databases also are introduced, along with online analytic processing (OLAP) tools to support decision making. Data quality issues, emerging cloud databases and other special topics will round out the coverage. Finally, the course offers a brief introduction to data mining techniques.

This course is an introduction to regulatory policies, based on Federal and State Health laws including; Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), Meaningful Use and Medicare/Medicaid which influence the design and security requirements for an Electronic Health Record (EHR). This course examines ethical principles related to the development, implementation and usage of EHRs such as; patient autonomy, beneficence/ non-maleficence, privacy, confidentiality and justice. Case studies presenting unauthorized disclosure of protected health information will be discussed. Risk analysis, data breach analysis and notification requirements will conclude the course.

This course discusses the system analysis lifecycle; planning, analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of healthcare software. Database technologies, programming languages (SQL, Java) and how they are used to structure the software will be explored. Development of network principles, design methods as well as system integration tools to exchange data in a secure manner are reviewed. Key concepts of business continuity, technical security, data mining, maintenance, virtual network and disaster recovery will complete the course.

This course provides students with an understanding of how health informatics systems are implemented and used by clinicians to improve the quality and safety of patient centered care. Methods of how HIM Systems are used to exchange data between a variety of Healthcare organizations will be reviewed. Students will learn about Health Information Exchange (HIE), Population Health, disease mapping, analytics and healthcare trends.

The BPU Lean/Six Sigma Lean Green Belt Certification in HealthCare requires the student to take and pass, according to a predetermined criterion, a qualifying comprehensive examination. The exam content is aligned with the Lean Six Sigma Green Belt methodology that focuses on improving work performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation that is embedded within the MS in Organization Excellence program.

Each student identifies and proposes a project meeting the requirements for six sigma lean implementation. Attendance at 3 seminar sessions is required during the pre-practicum seminar. The seminar is a competency-based course which is part of the program fulfilling the requirement for LSSGB certification. The seminar is designed to ensure the student understands the requirements of the project design which will culminate in a final signature assignment presentation. The student will create and present a project using the DMAIC process to demonstrate how the DMAIC process is used as a method to improve one or more of these critical areas in healthcare systems: operational efficiencies, reduction in costs, and improved patient satisfaction.