Innovating in Health Care
Find opportunities to innovate in health care
Led by Harvard Business School faculty, this course explores how global business ventures in health care improve access and meet the needs of consumers.
What You'll Learn
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:
- How innovation in health care can improve cost, quality, and access
- The six factors that critically shape competitive strategies for innovative health care ventures
- What other elements combine to create a feasible business model for an innovative health care venture
- How to distinguish the key to successful innovations from those likely to fail
- How to apply the IHC framework to evaluate business models across different kinds of innovations
- How to craft your own business plan for your next innovation venture
Your Instructor
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.
She teaches an MBA course, Innovating in Health Care and two related field study courses. Based on that work, she is currently completing three text and cases books on Innovating in Health Care for the life sciences, health care insurance, and health care delivery. In 2013, she launched a new HBS Executive Education program “Business Innovations in Global Health Care.” In 2012, she launched a continuing series of conferences, “21st-Century Health Care Management Education: Confronting Challenges for Innovation with a Modern Curriculum,” with 156 global academic attendees.
Regina Herzlinger received her Bachelor’s Degree from MIT and her Doctorate from the Harvard Business School.
Ways to take this course
When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.
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.