Introduction to Healthcare Systems Modeling

Catalog description

The objective of this course is to equip students with both domain knowledge about healthcare systems and the skills of applying quantitative modeling techniques for tackling application problems specific to the healthcare domain. This course exposes students to the contextual knowledge about the structure, finance, and operations of healthcare systems and provides students with the understandings of decision-making from different perspectives within the healthcare systems. It introduces common types of data used in healthcare settings, measures for health outcomes, and the framework of health economic evaluation. This course also emphasizes applications of quantitative modeling techniques ranging from statistical analysis, data analytics, optimization, and simulation to a variety of decision problems in healthcare operations and health policy settings. Students will learn to identify and formulate decision-making problems in healthcare systems, apply proper analytic tools and data sources to solve the problems, and interpret the modeling analysis results in the healthcare context. Students taking this class should be familiar with computer programming and basic mathematical modeling techniques.