Current changes in the Canadian health system, including most prominently changes in the accountability requirements on health system organizations have renewed interest in strategic planning techniques more common to private sector organizations. A number of strategic planning tools such as balanced scorecards and scenario planning are used in Canada, but there is varied understanding of how they can be adapted to a Canadian context that has different characteristics from the competitive marketplace that stimulated their uptake elsewhere and how these concepts affect institutions within the Canadian health system.

This course endeavours to show how these tools can be used to understand and respond to critical issues in Canadian health system management. Students taking this course explore a number of issues around the application of strategy and performance measurement frameworks to cases from the for-profit, government, and broader public sectors in health care. This is a survey course that touches on a number of issues and examples in the management of health system organizations.

Objectives: 1) To increase students' ability to synthesize different pieces of information on competitive forces in the environment to support the development and evaluation of strategy. 2) Enable students to apply industry and corporate strategic analysis and performance measurement techniques to address common health policy topics through organizing disparate sources of information on an organization's competitive environment.

Learner competencies: achievement orientation; analytical thinking; communication skills; financial skills; initiative; innovative thinking; organizational awareness; performance measurement; self-confidence; strategic orientation.