Health Care Industry

Course objectives/ Learning outcomes:

The course focuses on industrial providers in health care (pharmaceutical industry, medical technology industry). After completing this course, students have gained an in-depth knowledge on framework conditions, contents and tasks of healthcare management with regard to pharmaceutical and medical technology industry. The acquired knowledge and skills allow students to assess challenges in the context of management issues as well as to analyse and solve problems in the management of pharmaceutical and medical technology industries and their products. Furthermore, skills of scientific work are further refined.

The course uses different concepts of business management fields, methods of the social sciences as well as medical basics. Lectures deal with characteristics and peculiarities of the management of industrial companies operating within the healthcare sector. As regulatory structures of pharmaceutical and medical technology industry play an important role, there is a special focus on the interface management between R&D (research and development) activities and the management of products and companies. Furthermore, there will be a strong emphasis on marketing and distribution of products. Theoretical background obtained in the lectures is deepened in the exercise.

Selected management issues and problems concerning the operational organization will be analysed on the basis of practical tasks. The practical tasks will be organized in cooperation with a (local) market leader in the portfolio of medical devices where students will be explicitly confronted with important practice-oriented issues from a manufacturers’ point of view. They get an insight into the variety of industrial management tasks.

Content:

Medical device industry: market development and trends (definition of medical devices, expenditures, proportions of different kinds of medical devices across the world), regulatory affairs (market approval, stakeholder and processes, regulating medical devices, financing different kinds of medical devices, the role of innovative medical devices in health care), marketing (price, product, place, promotion, player processes, positioning).

Pharmaceutical industry: market development and trends (definition of pharmaceuticals, different kinds of pharmaceuticals, expenditures, proportions of different kinds of drugs, regulatory affairs (stakeholder and processes in ambulatory and inpatient care, the role of innovative pharmaceuticals in health care), pricing (price determination of pharmaceuticals, co-payments), evaluation and pharmacoeconomics, marketing (price, product, place, promotion, player processes, positioning);

Practice-based seminar paper summarizing theoretical and practical results.