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Individual Course

Innovating in Health Care

Course Length

9 weeks

6-8 hours a week

Featuring faculty from:

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health LogoHarvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Find innovation opportunities in health care technology, management, consulting, or investing by examining health care cost, quality, and access.

Health care spending, quality, and access continue to plague America and global nations alike. With U.S. health care costs trending toward $4 trillion in 2020, the need to innovate and create smart, viable business plans is more important than ever before.

This course focuses on a framework of evaluating and crafting business models that attain alignment between an entrepreneurial health care venture and the six factors that critically shape new health care ventures—structure, financing, regulations, consumers, accountability, technology, and public policy. Innovating in Health Care discusses the impact of these factors on business models for three different kinds of innovations: consumer-focused, technology-driven, and integrations which create scale.

Through lectures, insights from global health care innovators, and real-world case examples, learners will explore the challenges and decisions facing real entrepreneurial health firms and how to analyze each situation through the IHC framework. By the end of the course, you will understand how to evaluate opportunities and how to apply elements of successful business models for different kinds of health care innovations.

The course is offered in two formats: an open, online experience and a limited, team-based deep dive experience, where teams (self-assembled or newly created online) can produce actual business plans evaluated by peer teams and the IHC course instructors.

The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Self-Guided

edX

  • Learn from Harvard faculty
  • Do it on your own time
  • Get a certificate, add it to your resume
  • Be part of the Harvard Community
Data Science for Business values
An example HarvardX certificate

Ways to take this course

Audit or Pursue a Verified Certificate

A Verified Certificate costs $249 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate.

⁠Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums. Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.

Faculty

Your Instructor

Regina E. Herzlinger

Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School

Regina E. Herzlinger is the primary instructor for Innovating Health Care. She is the Nancy R. McPherson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. She was the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and the first to serve on a number of corporate boards. She is widely recognized for her innovative research in health care, including her early predictions of the unraveling of managed care and the rise of consumer-driven health care, a term that she coined. Her work was key to introducing consumer-driven health plans and “focused health factories,” such as centers for orthopedics, cardiology, and cancer care.

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