Certificate Curriculum
The certificate is comprised of six fully online sequential courses. Each course is approximately 5 - 8 weeks in length. Courses are a combination of live virtual sessions, weekly readings, assignments, and video lectures. Each course has a website where you will access all course materials. View the course descriptions below to learn more.
Courses
Understanding the Implications of Variation
This course will explore Dr. Jack Wennberg's groundbreaking book on variation, Tracking Medicine. Dr. Thom Walsh will synthesize the pivotal research by Dr. Wennberg (the founder of The Dartmouth Institute) beginning with small area variation in Vermont, extending through efforts to evaluate the reasons behind variation in surgical procedures, and concluding with the more recent work associated with overuse of supply sensitive care as described in the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Dr. Walsh will facilitate and guide students in the interpretation of variations research and the implications of this analysis across health care disciplines and delivery models.
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, videos, and discussions forums. The course will involve about 3 hours of activities per week. There are four live virtual sessions on Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Define the potential for societal savings in healthcare expenditures implied by geographic variation research.
--Demonstrate an ability to retrieve and organize data on Medicare reimbursements from the Dartmouth Atlas.
--Distinguish three types of health care, effective, supply-sensitive, and preference sensitive
--Explain the difference between societal spending and institutional costs
--Integrate knowledge of unwarranted variation to recommend strategies to reduce health care costs.
Shared Decision Making in Patient-Centered Care
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, videos, and discussions forums. The course will involve about 4 hours of activities per week. Beginning in the third week students will start preparing a case based on their own practice or personal experience. Cases will be presented in the final live session. There are three live virtual sessions Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Define shared decision-making and contrast it to motivational interviewing, informed consent, patient education
--Explain differences between preference-sensitive and effective care
--Describe one example of patient decisional conflict from your practice and how to remedy this using shared decision making tools and techniques
--Identify opportunities to systematically use shared decision-making tools and techniques in your clinical setting
--Identify barriers to using shared decision-making techniques in your practice and propose potential solutions
--Demonstrate familiarity with range and location of web and hard copy patient decision support tools
--Incorporate the “6 steps” into a shared decision making conversation
--Evaluate decision support tools for presence of required elements to meet minimum international standards
Informatics for Value-Based Health Care
Informatics for Value-based Health Care (VBHC) offers students who do not have an IT or analytics background the opportunity to be exposed to the concepts and challenges of leveraging data to support VBHC. By the end of the course, students will have a basic understanding of data sources, the requirements to prepare data for analysis, the path from analysis to insight, and the importance of integrating insight into workflow. Students will be able to apply their understanding of the challenges and requirements of informatics to their own health care environment and to improving value in health care services through leveraging data.
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, videos, and discussions forums. The course will involve about 4-5 hours of activities per week. There are three live virtual sessions on Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Explain how information technology and informatics support value-based health care
--Describe the data value chain, from data sources to insights
--Apply each link in the data value chain to real-world examples
--Outline the challenges of leveraging data to support value-based health care
--Perform an analysis, leveraging available resources and recognizing the limitations of the specific work environment
Quality by Design
Instructor Tina Foster, MD guides participants to look at the improvement process through the lens of a clinical or supporting microsystem. Students will learn the principles and methods for attaining peak performance to help knit together care in a fragmented health system. This will require overcoming the challenges posed by will, complexity, and resources and developing an active information environment with dashboard utility, fast feedback loops, and data/knowledge repositories to advance science and to support best practices.
Quality by Design, the critically acclaimed book, offers a new and unique approach to an old problem: how to redesign health services processes to improve quality, add value, reduce variation, and improve morale, in such a way that frontline caregivers lead the process of change, rather than obey it. The book is a practical reflection of research and applied training conducted at The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth under the leadership of Paul Batalden, Eugene Nelson, and Marjorie Godfrey.
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, videos, and discussions forums. The course will involve about 4 - 5 hours of activities per week. There are four live virtual sessions Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Define, identify and assess clinical microsystems.
--Summarize strengths and characteristics of high-performing microsystems.
--Identify opportunities for improvement and outline the framework required for planning and executing an improvement plan.
--Explain how measurement is used to plan and assess improvement.
--Identify leadership actions needed to support front line improvement.
Health Care Finance
Instructors Eric Wadsworth, PhD and Bonnie Blanchfield, CPA, Sc.D. offer students who do not have a finance background the opportunity to learn about and practice financial management as those disciplines apply to health care institutions. By the end of the course, students will have a basic understanding of financial accounting and reporting, financial analysis, managerial and cost accounting, and budgeting. Students will be able to apply financial techniques to the analysis of the health care environment, to improving value in health care services and to organizational decision making.
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, and videos. The course will involve about 4 - 5 hours of activities per week. There are three live virtual sessions Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Explain and apply the basic concepts terms in health care finance.
--Describe the types and sources of revenues and expenses in health care.
--Interpret, analyze, and construct basic financial reports for a health care organization.
--Construct and evaluate operational and capital budgets for a health care facility.
Organizational Ethics: The Foundation and Framework for Value-Based Health Care
How does your organization resolve ethical conflicts? What guidelines and resources are available to you as a health care professional? In this course, instructors Dr. William Nelson and Craig Westling, DrPH, MPH, MS will guide you to recognize, critically evaluate and progressively respond to contemporary clinical and organizational ethics conflicts. Practical ethical reasoning skills, strategies and tools will be presented to develop the managerial and clinical ethical leadership necessary for fostering an ethical organization. Recognize the ways recurring ethics conflicts can be detrimental to organizational success by contributing to wasted resources, high costs, and diminished quality of care; and the value in anticipating and working to decrease the presence of those conflicts in the future.
Students will have weekly assignments, including readings, and videos. The course will involve about 3 hours of activities per week. There are four live virtual sessions Wednesdays from 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
Objectives:
--Describe the importance of ethics both to organizations, and to the role of individuals as health care professionals within those organizations.
--Identify, analyze and reflect on ethical issues commonly encountered in the health care setting; and show competence in ethical reasoning when applying the basic ethics concepts to this process.
--Recognize the relationship between health care ethics and quality and value in the delivery of health care.
--Describe the negative impact of ethics conflicts on health care organizations.
--Identify the current role and limitations of traditional ethics committees.
--Demonstrate an understanding of the concept, purpose, and function of an integrated ethics program, including the implementation of a preventive approach to ethics conflicts.