The Health Care Strategy Consulting Practicum is a 16-week course where students utilize classroom knowledge to create lasting solutions for real-world challenges and identify opportunities to make a valuable impact in the health care space. Students enhance their business education through collaborative consulting engagements with businesses and nonprofit organizations to address existing and emerging challenges. This course is open to part-time Master of Science in Health Care Management students and MBA students pursuing a pathway in health care. These diverse backgrounds bring valuable perspectives to the team.
With close ties to Johns Hopkins Hospital system as well as external partners spanning the health care industry, project challenges take many shapes and forms. All challenges strive to provide a space for students to work closely with a client partner and develop lasting solutions. Examples of previous challenges include working with various internal and external stakeholders to create a strategy to advance geriatric care, developing a strategic plan for health education for women in the city of Baltimore, and creating a market strategy for an innovative triage headset that relays real-time vitals to medical professionals off-site.
Students apply marketing, operations, organizational management, feasibility, and competitor analysis skills to address the client’s challenges in the health care industry.
“This program helped us dig into specific business scenarios that our team did not have the time or capacity to invest in. This resulted in us receiving relevant business insight beyond our own planned capacity."
Nick Culbertson, SCEO and Co-founder, Protenus
“We had the pleasure of working with two teams from the Health Care Strategy course. The teams identified ways to support the long-term sustainability of our school-based health care program and potential new streams of funding that we hadn’t considered before. The students’ experience and expertise in a broad range of health and health care fields made this a great opportunity for us.”
Sara Johnson, Director, Rales Center for the Integration of Health and Education
Dr. Bonnie Robeson developed the signature experiential learning course for the part-time health care management program in 2019, which is offered to students every fall and spring semester. Drawing from a variety of work experience across the health care industry and years of directing experiential learning projects in the United States and India, Dr. Robeson guides students through this two-part course to prepare them for consulting in health care.
Dr. Bonnie Robeson
“The Health Care Strategy Consulting Practicum course is an opportunity for students to learn the process of implementing a strategic approach to an organization’s issue. This course has multiple levels of learning which includes the team collaborative process, formulating recommendations in an unfamiliar area often with ambiguity, applying business tools to the client’s challenges, and developing and practicing the skill of probing the client effectively to obtain the necessary understanding for providing realistic and achievable recommendations. Content and skills learned in this course are applicable to anyone interested in the health care industry. The projects, all relating to a health care area, have included feasibility and competitive analysis, growth strategies, management organizational recommendations, pricing models, and identifying marketing channels and strategies. Students complete the two-part course with a sense of accomplishment and increased confidence in their abilities to apply the knowledge gained throughout their programs in a work environment.”
Bonnie Robeson, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
“This class was one of my favorites at Carey because it allowed me to use everything I’ve learned in the program to make a difference for a client and their patients. From business communications and statistics and leadership, to strategy, financial analysis, and marketing, this class was the perfect culminating experience in the MBA program."
Christopher Wells, MBA '22
“This course provided me with the necessary insight and experience to further my career capabilities and allowed me to recognize my worth and value as a new budding consultant. I look forward to using this new knowledge to help evolve my career down a path that I honestly would not have known to be available to me.”
Joseph Wilson, MS in Health Care Management, '22