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.
Health Care Organization: An International Perspective (Credits: 3)
The American pursuit in making its health care system more equitable, effective, and efficient has largely been based on domestic health services research and policy analysis. Although the health care system in each nation is somewhat unique to its culture and history, the issues each faces are remarkably similar. Nations can learn a lot from one another in meeting these challenges. This course examines health care systems in approximately eight developed and developing nations (e.g., United States, Germany, Japan, Canada, United Kingdom, China, Mexico, and Kenya). In particular, comparisons will be made across these nations in the following areas: (a) population health, (b) health care financing and control, (c) health professionals and their patients, (d) health care organization, and (e) health system performance and reform strategies. Understanding how health care is delivered around the world will lead to a better appreciation of the relative merits and limitations of various systems, and will yield many useful insights in management and policy decision making. At the completion of this course, students will be expected to: 1. Describe the global burden of disease and health disparities, 2. Understand how health care is organized and financed in selected developed nations, 3. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, 4. Know the recent health care reforms enacted in these countries and their results, and 5. Apply the knowledge of international systems to the analysis of current issues in health policy and management. The course will be taught by a combination of lectures, in-class exercises, roundtable discussion, and site visits. Effective interventions in health care and related management and policy issues will be emphasized.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.The Politics of Public Health Policy (Credits: 3)
Policy requires politics: behind every positive or negative decision governments make, there are elected politicians, politically skilled officials, journalists, and other stakeholders. Understanding the world of politics is crucial to influencing and implementing policies for public health. Indeed, it is impossible to understand public health policy outside of its political context. This class presents the basic institutions and politics of contemporary public health policymaking through studies of institutions and contemporary policy debates. Through analysis of case studies including obesity, state health plans, smoking and pharmaceutical regulations, students will explore the influence of politics on the definitions and decisions of public health issues. They will leave the class with an understanding of how politics explains current public health policymaking debates and an improved ability to understand the politics of major public health policy issues.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Mental Health Policy in the United States (Credits: 3)
Students in this course will analyze mental health policies in the U.S. The class will meet once a week and have an interactive seminar format. We will approach various topics from both descriptive and analytical perspectives. Examples of topics include mental health insurance parity, the integration of mental health services and other health services, delivery of services in schools, delivery of services in prisons, and incentives influencing the balance between medication and therapy.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Exploratory Data Analysis for Health (Credits: 3)
Real health data is complex, often unstructured, at times inaccurate, inconsistent, contains missing values, and is organized for clinical care rather than to meet analytic needs. Learning from health data requires a solid grasp of data operations, data visualization, statistics, and machine learning, as well as an understanding of ethical and legal frameworks guiding health data privacy and security. Students in this course will learn foundational topics in data science focused on health data and will apply this knowledge on real health datasets through hands-on labs integrated into lectures. The course is based on two large themes: (a) understanding health data, and (b) making inferences about data. Students will develop a systematic working understanding of R, one of the most widely used languages for data science, and an introductory understanding of several packages useful in analyzing health data. They will participate in a group project focused on answering a health-related question. After completing this course, students should be able to securely store a health data set, summarize its structure, merge tables, visualize relationships, reshape and subset it to meet analytic needs, deal with missing values, apply statistical and machine learning methods to build prediction models, and evaluate the performance of those models.
Fundamentals of Sales Management (Credits: 3)
Nearly $1 trillion is spent every year on the selling function. Every senior management team must deliver its revenue and profit numbers. As customer loyalties diminish and marketing channels proliferate, sales - once seen as a tactical adjunct to marketing - has increased its role to become the key interaction between company and customer. Today sales professionals must expand their perspective to see their role in an enterprise-wide, cross functional context. This course covers the basics of selling skills as well as the core sales management building blocks including organization, compensation/motivation, hiring, training, sales tools, process and leadership. The goal of the course is to show how integrating the sales function within the company's strategic planning increases productivity and profits. Case studies, interaction with outside executives and outside speakers are used extensively in delivering the concepts.
History of Race and Racism (Credits: 4)
This course examines the history of race and racism in medicine and healthcare in the United States and is divided into five generally chronological modules: (1) Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality; (2) Racial Ideologies and the Construction of Race, (3) Racialized Slavery and the Paternalism of Care; (4) Race-based Medical Care and Civil Rights in the 20th Century; and, (5) Health Justice in the 21st Century. Each module will approach the history of race and racism in medicine across time to understand 1) how race and racism were foundational to the development of medicineand its various fields in the US, 2) how the field of medicine traversed social, scientific, political, cultural, and economic boundaries, 3) the role of white supremacy in science and medicine and the corresponding construction of racialized identities, and 4) the role of resistance and advocacy in shaping and challenging unjust medical practices. Further, each module will focus on the core content as well as skills of critical analysis. As such, the structure of this course will include discussions and activities related to the course readings as well as work on collaborative and inquiry projects. Reading course materials will be paramount, but so too will we learn and refine our skills of processing, reflection, critical inquiry, collaboration, and collective meaning-making. Consequently, writing will also be a major tool of engagement.
Research (Credits: 1-6)
The experiences will vary depending on the specific faculty member's project but may include: conducting clinical or basic science research, performing an extensive review of the literature and preparing a summary report/manuscript, analyzing data that has previously been collected. Students may work on a single project or be exposed to several types of projects during the course. For specific details of the course, students should contact individual faculty.
Prerequisites: Graduate and PharmD students. Permission of instructor.Exploring Pharmacy: Past, Present, and Future (Credits: 2)
A survey of the past, present and future of pharmacy in the context of drug discovery, including such topics as the history of pharmacy, pharmaceutical biotechnology and personalized medicine. The course examines the current state of global healthcare and its impact on drug discovery and the future of pharmacy.
Prerequisites: Second year PharmD students or permission of instructor.Human Neuroanatomy I (Credits: 3)
This course covers functional neuroanatomy of the human nervous system, essential brain processing as well as neurologic disorders. Organizational principles, subdivisions into specialized regions, how the brain transmits sensory and motor information, and how the brain controls behaviors are emphasized. Each session begins with a learning objective-based lecture and is followed by either an observational laboratory experience (plastinated human brains) or a discussion.
Prerequisites: Please view the course schedule for current advisory and/or enforced prerequisites.Introduction to Global Health: Issues and Challenges (Credits: 2-3)
This elective course introduces the student to global health concepts and the network of organizations working to advance health care internationally. Emphasis for this course is on the global burden of disease, determinants of health and the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to health care delivery. It will provide the student with a broad introduction to programs, systems and policies affecting global health. Students will explore facets of the global health care delivery system, health care economics and the political process and its impact on the health of individuals and populations.
**Students may take only one of the following for professional elective credit: Nursing 420, Nursing 421, or Nursing 521.**
For more information see the Nursing Course Guide
