How do business students fit into the nexus between health innovation and regulation?

The United States will spend an estimated $4.9 trillion on health care in 2024, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, with more than $1.67 trillion coming from government-funded programs. A patchwork of public and private entities provides vital health care services with the government regulating drug approvals, licensing, and hospital bed capacity. With health care spending now greater than 17 percent of the U.S. GDP, the connections between the public and private sectors have never been more important. 

“There’s an increasing need for business students to understand health policy and students of health sciences to understand business,” said Emilia Simeonova, a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School.

To fill the gaps, Simeonova and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Policy and Economics Melinda Buntin are developing a new course to help graduate students dive deeply into the health care sector through the perspectives of investors and regulators. The new pilot course, Regulation and Policy’s Influence on Investment in Health Care, builds on the Health Valuation Lab that Buntin co-developed at Vanderbilt University, and will focus on the home health sector, an area that is rapidly gaining interest from private equity firms. The three-day course intensive will be available in January 2025 at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., for teams of Hopkins students from Carey Business School, the School of Medicine, and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The course is one of 40 wide-ranging projects funded through the Johns Hopkins Nexus Awards, a university-wide initiative launched in 2023 to support convening, research, and teaching anchored at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center at 555 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, in the heart of Washington D.C.

The Hopkins Bloomberg Center serves as an ideal setting for teaching, Simeonova notes, since it will provide access to leading policy experts based in the nation’s capital who serve as a natural complement to the Flexible MBA student residencies, many of which are at the Bloomberg Center. The location is also home to the Center for Health Systems and Policy Modeling that Buntin founded after she arrived at Johns Hopkins in 2023.

“During the course, students will gather and analyze data to produce insights in the form of final reports that summarize trends, the impact of current payment and regulatory reforms, and considerations for investors,” note Simeonova and Buntin in their proposal. Each graduate student team will focus on a specific aspect of the potential market, such as the regulatory environment, or the business environment. Guest lecturers’ insights will further inform their work.

“Our course will give students real-world skills, introduce them to prospective employers, and help to create a community around the business of health care,” said Simeonova.” 

Based on the success of the extremely popular Health Valuation Lab at Vanderbilt, the Hopkins duo is confident that the pilot course will serve as a springboard for students to pursue internships and job opportunities in the nation’s capital.