Course Work

Students who pursue Quality Improvement must take (a) 6 units of Foundation coursework and (b) 6 units of Quality Improvement (Application coursework). We recommend the following courses to satisfy the 6 units for the QI Application coursework: 
 

MED 210: Principles and Practice of Healthcare Quality Improvement
This course will introduce students to foundational concepts in healthcare quality improvement, and provide tools for translating these principles into practice. Topics include: current state, A3, SMART goals, root-cause analysis, metrics and measures, PDCA cycles, process controls, systems, and sustainability. Students have the option of completing the course curriculum in conjunction with a quality improvement/patient safety project offered by the SMS Quality Improvement Interest Group. This course will meet for three in-class sessions throughout the quarter, with students reviewing the online materials before each session. Dinner will be served. May be repeated for credit up to three quarters with continued work on a quality improvement project, and all units count towards the Quality Improvement Scholarly Concentration. Units: 1

CHPR 247: Methods in Community Assessment, Evaluation, and Research (MED 147, MED 247)
Development of pragmatic skills for design, implementation, and analysis of structured interviews, focus groups, survey questionnaires, and field observations. Topics include: principles of community-based participatory research, including importance of dissemination; strengths and limitations of different study designs; validity and reliability; construction of interview and focus group questions; techniques for moderating focus groups; content analysis of qualitative data; survey questionnaire design; and interpretation of commonly-used statistical analyses. 3 units.

MED 278: Stanford Health Consulting Group- Leadership
This course is application-based and will be composed of students who have taken Stanford Health Consulting Group - Core and who wish to take on leadership roles in organizing and managing the high-impact health care projects for the class, which address major strategic and operational challenges in health care delivery and innovation. Participants will select projects, define objectives and deliverables, manage teams of 4-8 students from the core class, and ultimately serve as a bridge between students, faculty sponsors, and other health care stakeholders. Enrollment requires permission from the Instructor. Units: 1-3

MED 208: Health Systems Science: Measuring What Matters For Change
Physicians can and should be leaders in changing our health care systems for the better. To make our institutions more equitable, more efficient, and serve patients with the best of medical knowledge, we must use the same effective scientific methods to guide our work as we do in other fields of inquiry. That is health systems science. In this course students will learn the basics of methods needed for studying health systems: health services research and economics, implementation/ delivery science, quality improvement. Students will learn to distinguish key categories of outcomes: clinical (e.g. mortality) health services (e.g. access, quality, cost, provider wellness) and implementation: (e.g. acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, fidelity, reach).

MED 279: Stanford Heath Consulting Group - Core
This course provides the opportunity to analyze and solve major strategic and operational challenges in health care delivery and innovation through interdisciplinary team projects. Teams will receive direct mentorship from Stanford Medicine faculty, health care leaders, and experienced student leads, with projects carefully defined to optimize high-impact experiential learning and leadership development. Projects will culminate with student-led presentations to faculty sponsors and other health care stakeholders, as well as opportunities for further dissemination of solutions. Units: 1-3

HRP 254: Quality & Safety in U.S. Healthcare.
The course will provide an in-depth examination of the quality & patient safety movement in the US healthcare system, the array of quality measurement techniques and issues, and perspectives of quality and safety improvement efforts under the current policy landscape. Units: 3

EDUC 291X: Introduction to Survey Research (EDUC 191X)
Planning tasks, including problem formulation, study design, questionnaire and interview design, pretesting, sampling, interviewer training, and field management. Epistemological and ethical perspectives. Issues of design, refinement, and ethics in research that crosses boundaries of nationality, class, gender, language, and ethnicity. Units: 3-4

HRP 225: Design and Conduct of Clinical and Epidemiologic Studies
Intermediate-level. The skills to design, carry out, and interpret epidemiologic studies, particularly of chronic diseases. Topics: epidemiologic concepts, sources of data, cohort studies, case-control studies, cross-sectional studies, sampling, estimating sample size, questionnaire design, and the effects of measurement error. Prerequisite: A basic/introductory course in statistics or consent of instructor. Units: 3-4

HRP 218/CHPR 212/MED 212: Methods for Health Care Delivery Innovation, Implementation and Evaluation.
Focus is on implementation science and evaluation of health care delivery innovations. Topics include implementation science theory, frameworks, and measurement principles; qualitative and quantitative approaches to designing and evaluating new health care models; hybrid design trials that simultaneously evaluate implementation and effectiveness; distinction between quality improvement and research, and implications for regulatory requirements and publication; and grant-writing strategies for implementation science and evaluation. Students will develop a mock (or actual) grant proposal to conduct a needs assessment or evaluate a Stanford/VA/community intervention, incorporating concepts, frameworks, and methods discussed in class. Units: 2

HRP 244: Developing Measurement Tools for Health Research.
The focus of this course is on providing the skills necessary to develop, validate and administer both qualitative and quantitative measures and instruments. Topics will include creating valid measures, ensuring the measures used address and apply to the research questions, design and samples; determining when to use standardized measures or develop new ones; instrument validation techniques; factor analysis; and survey administration, including determining the most effective way of administering measures (e.g., online, paper-and-pencil, ACASI) and the best way to design the survey. Units: 2

SOMGEN 275: Leading Value Improvement in Health Care Delivery
Successful leaders on the journey to better care delivery methods with lower total spending inevitably face pivotal crises. What confluence of attitude, strategy, and events allows them to prevail? Contexts will include entrepreneurship and early stage investing, spread of higher value care delivery innovations, health care delivery system management, and private and public policy making to reward value. Guest faculty will include nationally recognized leaders and change agents, who will invite students to recommend alternative approaches to managing pivotal challenges. The course is open to any member of the Stanford community aspiring to lead higher value in health care delivery including graduate students, undergraduates, and postdoctoral candidates, as well as medical center residents and clinical fellows. May be repeated for credit. Units: 1-2

INDE 290A/B/C/INDE 291A/B: The Stanford Healthcare Innovations and Experiential Learning Directive (SHIELD).
This innovative course for first year medical students places patients front and center in the journey to explore health from the patient’s perspective, and better understand the challenges of managing optimal health in a complex health care system. In a unique 3-part monthly workshop format, students will learn about national, state, and local perspectives from experts from Stanford and the community and explore the broad impact of the monthly topic on patient care and health. In the second part of the workshop, students will learn about the patient/family perspective from a patient/family, with time to engage in discussion. Students will then actively engage in a workshop activity based on real-world examples of the impact of the monthly topic, and establish a framework for clinical exploration. Outside the monthly seminar session, students are matched with a patient/family partner for the duration of the course, and meet on a monthly basis at the medical center or other location key to learning about the patient’s journey, and explore together the impact of the monthly topic at the individual level. This course is a partnership of the Stanford Healthcare Innovations and Experiential Learning Directive (SHIELD), the Stanford Health Care Patient & Family Partner Program, and the Stanford Medicine Office for Medical Student Wellness. Units: 3