Specialty Tracks in HSPA
Health Economics
While rooted primarily in economics, the health economic track in the HSPA program draws from epidemiology, psychology, public policy, demography and statistics to understand the causal relationship between different aspects of health and the health care sector. With an emphasis on quantifying relationships, health economics covers a broad range of study areas including health production, demand & supply of health services, healthcare financing, behavioral responses to institutional or policy incentives, policy evaluations and other efficiency and equity issues surrounding health. Moreover, the HSPA economics curriculum ensures exposure to multiple aspects and context of health and healthcare. Depending on one’s interest area, coursework can include labor economics, development economics, industrial organization, economic demography or public finance. These diverse topics reflect the broad range of opportunities available in this track. The work of past HSPA students include effects of conditional cash transfer program on food consumption during droughts, the impact of different co-payment structures on chronic diseases management and the demand for flexible staffing of registered nurses.
Organizations
The organizations track approaches the study of health care organizations from multiple theoretical perspectives, methods, and levels of analysis. At its core, organizational theory is an interdisciplinary course of study that seeks to describe and explain human behavior in organizational settings. A principal distinction is often made between the study of "micro" organizational behavior, which refers to individual behavior and group dynamics within organizations, and "macro" organizational theory, which studies whole organizations, how they adapt, and the strategies and structures that guide them.
Rooted in social psychology and sociology, these disciplinary approaches bring a diversity of theories and methods to the study of organizations. Complementing both approaches,political science offers theories to examine power relations and decision-making in both private and public organizations. In the HSPA program, these theoretical perspectives are applied to the study of health services and health delivery reform. For example, past HSPA students have used organizational theory to examine the implementation of new programs in health services organizations, the diffusion of health technology innovations, and management patterns in the delivery of health services. Coursework is drawn from a variety of departments including public health, sociology, psychology, organizational behavior and industrial relations (Haas School of Business), and political science.
Politics/Policy
The politics/policy track is multi-disciplinary in focus, drawing from the disciplines of political science, organizational theory, public policy, and public health. The breadth of this program allows for great flexibility in specialization of study, but at its core is the study of policy formulation, agenda setting, and policy decision-making as it relates to health and health care. The effectiveness of policy-making institutions as platforms for the creation and modification of health policy and the politics of health and health care organizations are taken into consideration. Students may choose to focus their studies on domestic or international health policy, or to take a comparative approach; either way students will leave the program with a grounded knowledge of political science and policy analysis as it applies to a broad array of health issues.
Population Health - new discipline in HSPA
HSPA has traditionally trained students who have entered the field known as “health services research,” which in the past was defined narrowly as relating to medical services, but increasingly has expanded to focus on both medical outcomes research as well as non-medical determinants of health. A parallel converging trend has occurred in the field of epidemiology, with the subfield of “social epidemiology” increasingly focusing on policy analysis. UC Berkeley’s new emphasis in Population Health doctoral-level training aims to fill this gap in training programs by offering an interdisciplinary curriculum at the intersection of HSPA and epidemiology.Students in this emphasis will be trained to understand the theories, methods, and historical bodies of knowledge of both epidemiology and the social-science based HSPA disciplines.