Health Care Entrepreneurship

Catalog description

This course equips students with the frameworks, tools, and mindsets needed to identify opportunities, design and build solutions, and launch ventures in one of the most complex, rewarding, and impactful sectors of the economy: healthcare. Through a blend of lecture, case studies, founder stories, and hands-on project work, students will explore the full entrepreneurial lifecycle in healthcare: from understanding the big picture, identifying unmet needs and validating solutions, to navigating regulatory and reimbursement landscapes, to raising money, hiring teams, building products, going to market, learning and adapting, and scaling. This course will draw on examples from new models of care delivery, digital health, and population health management and will emphasize the realities of starting and scaling ventures in regulated markets with multiple stakeholders and strong incumbents. Guest speakers from across the healthcare ecosystem–founders, venture capitalists, lawyers, and stakeholder executives–will connect classroom concepts to real-world experience. Students will form teams to develop their own healthcare venture idea, advance it through iterative stages of validation and present their concept to [panel of industry leaders and investors] OR [to their classmates who will act as venture capital investors and will allocate “virtual seed money” into the most promising concepts]. By the end of the course, students will be able to: 1. Identify and validate unmet needs in the healthcare market 2. Develop business models that align with payor, provider, employer, and/or patients needs and incentives 3. Be able to write a business plan that communicates the value proposition 4. Navigate the regulatory and reimbursement systems strategically 5. Secure financing and partnerships to be able to launch a healthcare venture 6. Determine if being a healthcare entrepreneur is…