So welcome to our Specialization Overview of the Healthcare Marketplace Coursera course. What we're going to do to walk through this specialization is talk to you about the four courses and Capstone experience that lay ahead. So, best way to probably dive into this thing is to use a landscape picture of the entire healthcare marketplace. And this actually is going to be emphasized quite a bit for the first course, which is actually called the Healthcare Marketplace. It's an overview of all these different constituencies that you see. This is taking some what the US focus but it also pretty much replies to most other countries in terms of a government role and where different actors, whether they be physicians, hospitals, insurers, all come together. What's interesting about this graphic is that Congress plays a key role and in the US very important because Congress basically creates, if you will the funds, the appropriations for much of the Public Health System and Medicare, Medicaid major pieces, to operate. Some of the big, obvious players, when you look at that map, are the Insurers with their sort of sand colored building that's sort of there to the left. And then the Physicians and Hospitals over to the right of them. There's very obvious roles in terms of what they're engaged in. The Medical Technology firm which could be pharma and medical devices is off to the top. Big Business is mentioned there as well, this is emphasized a lot in course one. Because the US, what makes the US system unique is that much of the health insurance system that finances the US health economy comes from large employers, and so they play a critical role. Federal Government up there in that lovely blue building plays a role in the whole space in terms of administrating many of the government programs including the Department of Defense programs,and Veterans Affairs. And then probably the most critical on the rings are you don't have a system unless you actually have patients that are getting care,and patients come to you in all shapes and sizes and walks of life, whether they're coming from Main Street or they're high income individuals. And we kind of emphasize those Issues as well. So course one really talks about the dynamic of all of these actors that are in play. Some of their history over the last 100 years. A common theme is their monopoly rights which define a lot of what makes the US Health Economy unique. And then ultimately you end Course 1 with a sense of a market sizing idea for either concept or innovation in this space that involves the different actors that you've seen. Then we get to Course 2, and Course 2 focuses on the physicians and the hospitals. So physicians and hospitals are really the core of what you would think of for any major health care market per se. And we start with them because they really set the tone for most of the market. Without positions in hospitals, we really don't have much of a system to talk about. Physicians play a key role crafting new medical technologies, innovations. Many times they're entrepreneurs not just caregivers. They also exercise a tremendous amount of monopoly rights. The hospitals function as their workshop and we talk about that in Course 2. What's great about Course 2 is that it's being lead by a physician who focuses on health care innovation and how diffusion of the physician trade and the hospital trade come together to create really unique health care delivery opportunities. Then we move over to Course 3. Now Course 3 is actually being taught by someone who works in the medical technology space, namely in the pharmaceutical space. And the emphasis there is going to be on medical devices, say like implantable cardiac defibrillators literally bringing you back to life, with a CPR machine, essentially, in your chest. Talk about pharmaceuticals, which is well known, and also biotechnology for advanced personalized medicine and genetics that really fine tune just to you. And many of the coming, and actually emerging, cures for cancer, for different site specific cancers, come from that biotechnology space. So in Course 3 what we emphasize is what makes essentially the manufacturing side of whether a device or pharmaceutical so unique. The regulatory issues that go on with the food and drug administration. The US and other regulatory agencies around the world. Also recognizing that the medical technology market where truly a global market where really the US is only maybe 30 or 40 percent of that market and the rest of the developed and developing world occupies the rest of that space. We talk about how these technologies get reimbursed. Very few of the very high tech procedures are ever paid for by cash. They require to be, reimbursement is the keyword from different insurance companies, whether they be public insurance companies like a Medicare or a private insurance company like a Blue Cross Blue Shield. And then we go to a Class 4, and Class 4 is kind of interesting. I know we have the picture here of the Insurers, and you're like, what, is it a course on insurers? Well, no, actually Course 4 is called Medical Technology Evaluation and Market Research. And the reason why that matters is that the Insurers really make the determination on whether a new technology, a major technology is going to get paid or not. And there are really public Insurers as well as private Insurers. Many times actually private Insurers sub contract out their work to the public Insurers. So for example, Medicare which is the largest public insurance program for the elderly and the disabled in the United States, most of it operates through private insurance companies for it's administration. And so in medical technology evaluation, we talk about cost effectiveness analysis, we talk about compared effectiveness, we talk about the criteria that are used not just in the US but also globally to get a medical technology reimbursed by one of these Insurers. And without that reimbursement really you can't go to market. So one of the skills that people learn in Course 4 is really getting a much more in depth of understanding of what the reimbursement strategy will be, as well as competitive analysis or what products otherwise are in that space. Then we wrap the entire specialization with a capstone experience. And a lot of the other actors that we talked about in that landscape now all come into play. So our capstone experience focuses on this idea of having a valuation of an innovation. This is something that we're very proud of at the University of Minnesota, that we work with our students to learn how to do. It's where you take a new idea, it could be a medical technology, it could be a different process for delivering care. And we look at it from the perspective of an investor and saying, is this ready to go to market? Now the reason why we have so many different actors there, whether it's Congress sort of sitting over in terms of the Medicare program. Or Main Street USA or different folks of income is that, to a certain extent, you have to have green lights across the board for almost all of these technologies that are in place for an investor to shell out millions of dollars to take a promising technology, which could be a cure for cancer, and give it to the market. We've actually looked at situations where, literally, cures for cancer are not invested in because there just isn't enough green lights across the board to go forward, so that sort of blue, modern building at the bottom there, that's Medicare. Essentially, they have to agree to pay for the technology. The courts are involved as well, because the courts govern most of the law in terms of the intellectual property restrictions. Intellectual property, if you don't have that locked down, if your patents and copyright, you might as well stop now. The large employers are also involved because they actually set their own terms and agreements for whether the technology would be allowed to come to market or not. And then finally, the voice of the consumer and just Main Street, will they even buy it? Is it actually in the right price point to go and even for folks that in the 1% at the top right there and that 99% category, maybe it's something that they're going to pay cash for. But it's gotta really cure what's going on if it's going to be that unique market. So in the capstone experience, people write a report that basically is that investor document. And we find that that is one of the strongest ways that someone can introduce themselves to the market for a career change once they complete this Specialization in the Healthcare Marketplace. [MUSIC]
