Professional Electives Search
This search tool is designed to help you identify professional electives that may align with your interests. You can search by any/all of the fields provided. This tool is not intended as an exhaustive list of all possible professional electives; rather, it includes electives offered through the college of pharmacy, professional electives approved by the Curriculum and Assessment Committee, and electives that have been taken by students at some of the other schools on campus. Term offered is only provided for College of Pharmacy courses; a link to the appropriate course guide is provided for all other courses.
As a reminder, graduate courses (>500 level) that are relevant to biomedical, human health, and/or the practice of pharmacy which are offered through the U-M health-science schools (Pharmacy, Nursing, Social Work, Public Health, Medicine, and Dentistry) qualify as professional electives provided they are not attendance-only courses. Attendance-only courses offered through the health-science schools (e.g., seminars or journal clubs that do not require a rigorous form of student assessment) are not accepted for professional elective credit. Courses offered through U-M non-health-science schools must be reviewed and approved by the Curriculum and Assessment Committee.
Introduction to Public Health (Credits: 1)
This course is intended to serve as an introduction to the major issues of public health in the United States, although issues of global health will be considered as well. We will examine environmental, social and ethic determinants of public health, and how they may be altered.
Social Activism, Democracy, and Globalization from the Perspective of the Global South (Credits: 3)
How are the inherent and intersecting relations of power including inherent structures of dominance related to the experience of violence, oppression and resistance textured into the context of politics and policy making? This course investigates how multi-faceted historical relationships of traumatic experience including Colonization, Slavery and Apartheid can be related to the ways in which we think about policy. This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to how the production of culture, ecology, psychology, law, economics and politics frames the sociology and historiography of the policymaking context. This course provides the opportunity for students to improve their analytical abilities. Whilst the material content used in this course will have a global focus local issues will also be considered.
Contextual Inquiry and Consulting Foundations (Credits: 3)
This course builds skills in user-centered qualitative research methods and professional consulting. Students will work in teams of 3-5 people, working with a real-world client who poses a problem involving information, technology, and/or human processes in the context of a work environment or product/service delivery. Students will learn to manage projects; work in teams; work with a client; conduct interviews; observe work practices; analyze and synthesize qualitative data; present their recommendations; and write formal reports.
Introduction to Health Informatics (Credits: 3)
Introduction to concepts and practices of health informatics. Topics include: a) major applications and commercial vendors; b) decision support methods and technologies; c) analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation of healthcare information systems; and d) new opportunities and emerging trends.
Cross-listed with HMP 668.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Consumer Health Informatics (Credits: 3)
Consumer health informatics (CHI) gives health care consumers information and tools to facilitate their engagement. Students will become familiar with, and evaluate, a range of CHI applications. They will also assess the needs and technological practices of potential users, generate theory-informed design and implementation strategies, and select appropriate evaluation approaches.
Cross listed with HBHE 654.
Needs Assessment and Usability Evaluation (Credits: 4)
Covers the key concepts of evaluation and a variety of methods used to determine the goals of a system or service, performs organizational analysis, assesses task/technology or service fit, determines ease of learning of new or existing services or systems, determines ease of use, assesses aspects of performance (including information retrieval), and evaluates the success in accomplishing the user/organizational goals. Methods include observation, survey, interviews, performance analysis, evaluation in the design/iteration cycle, usability tests, and assessment of systems in use.
Healthcare Data Application, Analysis, Consulting, and Communication (Credits: 3)
Step into the role of a data consultant and use data to facilitate change in healthcare research, quality improvement and patient outcomes, and population health. Data consultants act as the bridge between the leadership and project stakeholders, and the data analysts to help in translating the data into actionable results. Their expertise lies in effective communication, scoping of projects, and needs assessment. They examine data, processes and technologies to evaluate current state and critical problems. This course is divided into 3 units, each focusing on the use of Health Informatics in different environments. Utilizing real and simulated projects with real anonymized data, students will navigate technical problems at the level of a Research project, a Quality Improvement initiative, and a wide-spread Population issue. Each unit will take between 1 and 3 real world scenarios and put the data in the students' hands. For each example project, a stakeholder will present their business objective. Students will then have the opportunity to conduct an informational interview, and they will then have to figure out the operational issues with the request, scope the project, explore and evaluate the datasets, and effectively use the data to answer research questions. Students will learn how to handle outliers based on organizational research needs as well as how to organize and present the data to the stakeholders. At the end of each unit, students will turn in a technical report of their analyses, including visualizations for effective reporting.
Critical Policy Issues in Health IT (Credits: 3)
This course will introduce the critical policy issues related to the use of Health Information Technologies (HIT) with a primary focus on the U.S. The course will explore issues from both a national perspective as well as the perspective of organizations that use these system.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Managing Health Informatics (Credits: 3)
This course prepares students to take on management challenges faced in health informatics leadership roles within a variety of organizational settings. Through a combination of seminar and case study work, it is a highly interactive course in which students have the opportunity to discuss real-world health informatics scenarios from a variety of perspectives in order to gain familiarity with different managerial approaches. The course also draws on organizational and managerial theory to provide students with more generalized knowledge about how to be an effective leader. Students build knowledge and develop skills to consider multiple dimensions of possible solutions to health informatics-related issues, arrive at decisions, and articulate the reasoning behind the approaches to their decision-making. This course has a strong organizational orientation and is appropriate for any student preparing for a health informatics career that includes managerial responsibilities.
Cross-listed with HMP 661.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Introduction to Community Organization, Management, and Policy/Evaluation Practice (Credits: 3)
This course is a generalist social work foundation offering in the Macro Practice Concentrations (Community Organization, Management, and Policy/Evaluation). It covers basic content in these areas of social work method and prepares students to take the more advanced courses in their concentration. It is partly survey in nature, touching on a range of methodologies and emphases, and providing an appreciation of the historical and contemporary importance of these methods in social work. In addition, it deals with the process of professionalization and introduces students to a range of practice tools. Issues of diverse dimensions [e.g. ability, age, class, color, culture, ethnicity, family structure, gender (including gender identity and gender expression), marital status, national origin, race, religion or spirituality, sex, and sexual orientation] will be emphasized throughout, with special focus on culturally sensitive practice - i.e., multicultural community organizing, culturally sensitive management practices, culturally sensitive analyses of policy proposals and their impact, and culturally sensitive research practices. Students' field experience and future methods courses will build upon the knowledge and skills presented in this course.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.
