Online Graduate Certificate in Business Administration (OGCBA)

Offers students an opportunity to understand general business strategy concepts as they relate to the healthcare industry. Explores how to analyze market opportunities and challenges as they apply to various healthcare organizations, such as hospitals, physician organizations, and nursing homes. Presents and discusses analytical frameworks for making strategic decisions, drawing on different disciplines, including economics, management, and psychology. Strategic issues include mergers and acquisitions, vertical integration, joint ventures and alliances, performance-control systems, and organizational design.

Examines today's evolving environment, in which effective utilization of human resources is a source of competitive advantage. To maximize the contribution of organizational members, managers must be able to understand, diagnose, and influence workplace behavior in the context of change. Topics include management of cross-functional teams and boundaryless organizations. Emphasis is on the role of corporate culture and distributed leadership.

Explores key principles of accounting, as presented in the principal financial statements. Using those principles, explores a number of accounting practices and issues. Develops tools of financial analysis and financial planning and applies the information gained to business decision making. Utilizing the principle of time value of money to compare inflows and outflows of funds occurring at different times, develops basic decision tools for managers to make sound financial choices and to understand the context in which they are made. At the end of the course, the successful student should have a sound basic understanding of accounting and financial matters and the ability to understand business decisions in context and to evaluate the choices that management faces in the normal course of business development.

Studies patient engagement and health informatics systems and analyses of data collected from these systems. Patient engagement is the ability and willingness of patients to manage their own health and care combined with interventions to increase patient involvement in their own health and care, as well as other positive health behaviors. In these interventions, health informatics systems and analyses of data are used. Offers students an opportunity to engage in data analytic exercises to investigate the underlying design and implementation of health informatics systems used in patient engagement initiatives. Presents an overview of the current state, new technologies, and other areas (health reform, legal, privacy, quantified self) influencing the future direction of patient engagement.