Fuqua is widely recognized as a top business school with outstanding academic courses, and our faculty are among the world’s top business management and data science researchers. We pioneered blending face-to-face and distance learning, and have long been the global leader in distance education for working professionals.
Fuqua’s difference comes from our deep expertise in health care. With one of the largest and oldest health sector management programs in the country, here you’ll focus on understanding market fundamentals and gain exposure to the complex interactions among industry players. With project work and experiences that take you outside your comfort zone, you’ll become a health care leader who can move entire teams forward toward a common purpose as you strengthen your quantitative skills.
Course Overview
Your curriculum includes a mix of courses in business functions, data science and quantitative methods, and different health sectors and policies. While the course topics may evolve over time, and when they are offered may shift between calendar years, the MSQM: Health Analytics structure is likely to follow this format:
The program launches with a 2.5-day residency in Durham, NC.
Programming for Data Analytics
Build a foundation in R and Python to prepare for subsequent courses in your program that use these languages. In addition, you’ll learn basic principles of visualization.
Applied Probability and Statistics
Examine a framework for data-driven decision making under conditions of partial information and uncertainty. You’ll acquire probabilistic and statistical tools for understanding, analyzing, and interpreting data, such as discrete and continuous probability distributions, linear regression, and time series.
Managerial Economics for Health Care
Assess firms' strategies and market outcomes across a wide variety of settings, focusing on health care, in a structured framework. Understand microeconomic concepts, such as pricing decisions, market equilibrium, strategic interaction, and asymmetric information.
Business Fundamentals: Accounting and Finance
Cover the basics of financial accounting and finance. Determine the information requirements of a firm and the activities they take within the accounting system to address them. Gain a working knowledge of fundamental finance concepts and tools, such as Net Present Value, for analyzing investment and financing decisions of individuals and firms.
Business Fundamentals: Marketing and Strategy
Gain an overview of marketing and strategy and their roles in a business. Review issues and decisions involved in planning and managing activities, such as positioning, targeting, pricing, product development, distribution, customer behavior, and competitive activity. Learn concepts and skills to understand, craft, and support a firm's strategy.
Data Analytics and Applications
Investigate how to use data to impact business practices by understanding the interplay between data science and business decisions. Study principles that will stay constant despite rapidly changing technology, and conduct "hands-on" analyses of actual data sets to learn methodologies such as data mining, advanced regressions, classification, clustering, and cross-validation.
Health Care Institutions and Policy
Gain an overview of the US healthcare market along with its institutions and key policy issues. You’ll examine the primary commercial segments of the industry including pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology, long-term care facilities, and health IT.
An optional 2.5-day Leadership Intensive is offered in Durham, NC, after Term 2.
Life Sciences Strategy
Examine business strategy in the biotech, device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical industries, focusing on product development and commercialization. Learn how companies develop product roadmaps, demonstrate safety and efficacy to regulators, payers, and providers, commercialize their products, justify the product's price/value equation, and how they market these products.
Electronic Health Records and Data Structure
In this course, you’ll explore the fundamentals of data storage, cleaning, and retrieval with a special focus on electronic health records. Examine structured and unstructured data, data integrity, data security, and interoperability issues.
Advanced Data Analytics and Applications
Expanding data availability, improving computational power, and designing of digital- and data-centric organizations have fostered more data-driven business decisions. Learn advanced tools, algorithms, and technologies and explore causal inference, experimental and observational studies, text-mining, and advanced predictive models.
Provider Operation Analysis
Use limited resources more effectively and increase patient satisfaction. Understand congestion and wait times, explore managing an inventory of drugs and medical supplies, understand how to maintain high and consistent quality of care to patients, and find strategies to address these issues. Learn capacity planning, scheduling, queueing and inventory analyses, and lean and six-sigma implementation.
Decision Models
Effective management requires recognizing when a decision is needed, what factors impact that decision, and choosing a path. However, many decisions are so complex that they are difficult to grasp fully, or the stakes are too high to learn by experience. Learn about decision models, or simplified representations of these situations that allow different scenarios to be evaluated, that will be of great benefit in these situations.
Value-Based Care
Discover the implications of moving from a traditional fee-for-service model to a variety of value-based models of reimbursement and find their relative merits. Assess the components of a value-based model, such as coordination of care, patient compliance, social determinants of health, and the selection and definition of specific outcomes, data and measurement, and analysis of observed data.
An optional 2.5-day Data Visualization Intensive is offered in Durham, NC, after Term 4.
Analysis of Healthcare Effectiveness and Outcomes
With access of the health care ecosystem to vast amounts of data, you'll focus on the analysis of real-world observational data to draw inferences about the effectiveness of interventions at patient or community levels. Study potential confounding factors and quasi-experimental methods, and understand how to mitigate their effects.
Navigating Organizations
Conducting useful quantitative analyses in organizations requires overcoming cognitive biases and working well with others. Learn what principles you can draw on to analyze and improve performance in your organization as well as what to do to be an effective leader and contributor to your firm who others respect and are willing to follow.
Business Communication
Learn and practice techniques to communicate effectively--clearly, strategically, persuasively, and collaboratively--in a business setting. Hone your skills in team presentations by learning to present recommendations that hold up to challenges, present with one voice, structure for coherence, ask and answer questions, and enhance audience understanding of materials.
Ethics and Legal Issues in Health Analytics
Examine the issues in bioethics and the law, including decisions made by providers, payers, and product manufacturers. Discuss cases illustrating issues in patient privacy, data ownership, restrictions on data analysis, new technologies' implications for science policy, end-of-life care, and rationing of scarce drugs, organs, and other resources.
Teaching Methods
Your faculty will bring courses to life through lectures, class discussions, and case-based learning. Professors use actual health care business problems, leverage interdisciplinary perspectives, and help you understand the "Data to Decision" cycle. The case-based learning method uses real-world business cases as the basis for discussions and team projects. This approach challenges you to see business problems from a corporation's perspective and to take what you learn in class to develop quantitatively-supported recommendations. Because so much of your online learning happens through debate and analysis, you’re expected to be an active participant in class discussion. As a result you’ll learn to think practically, critically, and creatively, preparing you to tackle business problems from multiple perspectives.
Honor Code
Fuqua is serious about ethical leadership and we create a climate of integrity. All members of our community are governed by Fuqua's Honor Code. By electing to join our community, in turn, you will be expected to abide by our standards of honesty and integrity.
