1.07 (R) [INFO] Welcome and Course Overview
Welcome to the course! Whether you are auditing this course or enrolled for the certificate in this course, you should find the information in this section helpful. If you are auditing, thank you for visiting. I hope you enjoy your visit and decide to enroll for the certificate at some point. If you are a certificate learner, I look forward to working with you! Thank you for enrolling for the certificate. This section contains a general introduction to the course. It asks and answers the following questions: What is a brief summary of the course? What are the course objectives? What is needed to successfully complete the work for the certificate? What is the educational philosophy of the course? Is this course part of a specialization? What are the course rules for certificate learners? Note [FUN]: Links within this section lead to external [FUN] readings not needed for the certificate work. You do not have to visit these external links. Do so only if you have the interest and the time. 1. What is a brief summary of the course? Have you ever been in a healthcare waiting room and thought about how the organization could be more efficient? For example, have you found yourself thinking about how to reduce the amount of time spent waiting? Or do you work in a healthcare organization and find yourself thinking about how to improve the organization? If you have, this course is for you. This course is for you if you are interested in the world of healthcare organizations in the United States. Course content includes an overview of healthcare organizations, their administration and management, and their governance. The course is suitable for those with a developing interest in healthcare organization operations, administration, and management. It is also suitable for those who have some expertise, but who wish an overview or refresher of these topics. Each section of the course is marked to indicate its relevance to the work required to obtain the certificate. The markings are: [CERT] which means the section contains work which must be successfully completed to obtain the certificate. [INFO] which means the section provides information relevant to the work required for the certificate. [PREP] which means the section provides practice for the certificate work. [FUN] which means the section provides either: 1) interesting additional information which is supplemental, but not needed for the certificate; 2) an opportunity to post your comments on a specified topic for discussion with course colleagues, if you choose to do so; or 3) an opportunity to provide feedback on the course, if you choose to do so. The course format is readings, videos, quizzes, and a project. The readings sections are [INFO] sections which present content using the Socratic Method - questions and answers. The videos are [FUN] sections used to present interesting supplemental content not needed to successfully complete the work for the certificate. The project [CERT] requires you to synthesize course material to design a healthcare organization and governance structure the way you would have things run in the best of all worlds. The plan (submitted as an electronic poster file) is an artifact of the course which you can circulate to colleagues or use as the basis for a talk or presentation event. Links within course sections lead to external [FUN] readings not needed for the certificate work. These [FUN] links to external sites are intended to connect you to the larger "real world" of healthcare organization business processes, business process management, and entrepreneurship. You do not have to visit these external links. Do so only if you have the interest and the time. The links also serve as resources you can take with you after you complete the course experience. And because everyone loves a road trip/field trip, there are also [FUN] "virtual field trips" to the often hidden places of interest on the web. There are also [FUN] trivia questions - just for fun - because everyone also loves little known, but interesting, fun facts. The course is 4 weeks, 4 lessons, and 4-6 hours of learner work per lesson; total time commitment for the course = 16 - 24 hours. The four lessons of the course are: Healthcare Organizations and the Health System (Assessment: Quiz) Healthcare Administration and Management (Assessment: Quiz) Governance (Assessment: Quiz) Design a Governance Structure for a Healthcare Organization(Assessment: Project Poster) For the poster project, you will need PowerPoint software or its equivalent. There are many software options other than PowerPoint. Some are available at no cost such as Impress which is part of LibreOffice. Note [FUN]: There are many wonderful videos in the public domain which are relevant to this course. One such video provides a historical overview of one healthcare organization. Healthcare organizations in the United States seem to be in a constant state of change. The video for this Welcome and Course Overview section - History of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) - is a YouTube video produced by MGH. This video discusses the changes in MGH over its first 200 years (1811-2011). 2. What are the course objectives? Course content includes an overview of healthcare organizations, their governance, and their administration and management. Upon successful completion of this course, a learner will have a better understanding of healthcare organizations. Learners working within a healthcare organization will be better able to contribute to the efficient and effective operations of their organization. They will be able to undertake and improve healthcare administration and management responsibilities within their organization. Specifically, upon successful completion a learner will be able to: Define a healthcare organization, a health system, and their relationship. Define effective evidence-based healthcare administration and management models. Define the forms of organizational governance and functions. Synthesize course content to create a healthcare organization and governance structure. Generate an effective electronic file poster suitable for presentation and printing. Judge the quality (content presentation and format) of a poster. It is hoped that upon achieving these objectives, the learner will not just know more at the end of the course than at the beginning, but that the learner will think about healthcare organization structure and governance in new ways. The goal of the course is to enable the learner to think critically about healthcare organization structure and governance in new and interesting ways. 3. What is needed to successfully complete the work for the certificate? At the beginning of this course is a section entitled [INFO] INSTRUCTOR RECOMMENDED FAST-TRACK PATHWAY TO CERTIFICATE - Reading: [INFO] STEP-BY-STEP PATHWAY TO THE CERTIFICATE which is a step-by-step instructor recommended (what I would do) 12-step pathway to successfully complete work required to obtain the certificate as quickly and efficiently as possible. The short answer is that the successful completion of work for the certificate requires that you pass each of the six course sections marked [CERT]. These are: Quiz: [CERT] Lesson One Quiz Quiz: [CERT] Lesson Two Quiz Quiz: [CERT] Lesson Three Quiz Quiz: [CERT] Synthesize Course Content Self-Evaluation Quiz: [CERT] Generate an Effective Electronic File Poster Self-Evaluation Peer Review: [CERT] Poster Submission and Evaluation Successful completion of the first three quizzes (Lesson One, Two, and Three) is a score of at least 80 percent (the Pass score). Each quiz is open book, open note. You can take each quiz as many times as you want. If you do not get a score of at least 80 percent on the first try, take it again. And keep taking it, if need be, until you get the Pass score of at least 80 percent. Successful completion of the two self-evaluation "quizzes" is a score of 100 percent (the Pass score). This is a self-evaluation of the work you have developed for the Peer Review: [CERT] Poster Submission and Evaluation done prior to submitting the work (the electronic file poster using PowerPoint or similar software of your design of a healthcare organization and governance structure) for peer-review. If you cannot give yourself a score of 100 percent on the first try, keep iterating on your poster and completing the self-evaluation until you can do so. Successful completion of the peer review requires that you submit your electronic poster file for peer review, review two or your learner colleagues poster submission, and receive a score of at least 50 percent (the Pass score) on your poster submission. The content for this poster addresses your design of a healthcare organization and governance structure. As such, there are no right or wrong content items. There are only sensible and reasonable items within the content criteria specified in the course. There is also no one right way to organize the poster format. There are only sensible and reasonable format aspects within the criteria specified in the course. If you do not achieve 50 percent (if you do not receive a passing score on the poster assignment) and believe it to be the result of having been evaluated by two unusually hard graders, please contact us to resolve the situation. It should be noted that the main point of this peer-review assignment is for you to have the experience of critically judging (evaluating) the quality (content presentation and format) of a poster other than your own within a forum where your judgment has meaning. Your judgment has meaning because your judgment determines your learner colleague's grade on the poster assignment. Your judgment carries with it the responsibility to be critical, honest, fair, and consistent across all the posters you judge; that is, the same responsibility found for any subjective judgment where the judgment outcome affects a person's life. 4. What is the educational philosophy of the course? The course format and philosophy are a little different from most of the other Coursera courses. Most of the Coursera courses present course content primarily through video lectures. This course presents course content through [INFO] readings (text). Links to optional [FUN] material external to the course are included in the text. The philosophy behind the use of reading content is that a reading provides a more direct relationship between the learner and the content than does a video lecture of someone telling the learner about the content. The readings also allow the use of links to resources and additional content external to the course. These links allow learners to create their own learning pathway and customize their learning experience in a way that the video lecture does not. The links make full use of the fact that the course is delivered online. Readings [INFO] content is also presented as a series of questions and answers - the Socratic Method. The philosophy behind the use of this method is that this is a better - and much more interesting - way for a learner to master content. There are videos in the course. These are professionally produced videos (e.g., from the Smithsonian, National Archives) which are included in the course to provide interesting supplemental - optional [FUN] - content. No video-presented content is needed to complete the work for the certificate. As with the [FUN] links to external material, the use of these optional [FUN] videos allows learners to create their own learning pathway and customize their learning experience. The poster project requires learners to synthesize course material to design a healthcare organization and governance structure the way you would have things run in the best of all worlds. The design (submitted as an electronic poster file) is an artifact of the course which learners can circulate to colleagues or use as the basis for a talk or presentation event. The philosophy behind this project is that more learning occurs - and learning is more fun - if a learner can actually build/create something from the course content (rather than just being tested on the content) and show this built/created artifact to others. 5. Is this course part of a specialization? Yes, this course is one course in the four-course Healthcare Organization Operations specialization. The four courses are: Healthcare Organizations and the Health System Health Care Delivery in Healthcare Organizations Business Process Management in Healthcare Organizations Quality Improvement in Healthcare Organizations Each course is a stand-alone course; the courses do not build on each other - they complement each other. No one course in the specialization is a prerequisite for another course. If you choose to enroll in all four courses to receive the specialization certificate, the courses can be completed in any order 6. What are the course rules for certificate learners? The course rules are simple. Work hard! Have fun! Never hesitate to ask a question!
