How care is organized
Trace the roles of patients, clinicians, health systems, insurers, and public agencies across a care journey.
Mentorship ProgramResearch · Mentorship · Public Health
Learn to study health, care, and evidence.
The curriculum combines health systems thinking, rigorous research methods, population awareness, and ethical leadership. Students learn how these lenses work together before applying them to an original question.
Explore the foundationsThe learning model
A strong study needs more than a method.
Every health research question sits inside a system, affects people and populations, requires defensible evidence, and carries ethical responsibilities. The four foundations help students examine all of those dimensions together.
01Curriculum foundation
Health systems
Understand the structures behind every patient experience.Students examine how care is organized, financed, and delivered—and learn to connect policy, quality, safety, access, and health equity.
What you learn
Financing & access
Explore how insurance, payment incentives, resource allocation, and practical barriers influence who receives care and when.
Quality, safety & equity
Learn how outcomes are measured, why quality varies, and how policies can affect communities differently.
02Curriculum foundation
Research methods
Build a defensible path from question to evidence.Students develop fluency in literature evaluation, study design, biostatistics, epidemiology, and evidence-based reasoning.
What you learn
Read the literature
Search strategically, compare sources, evaluate study quality, and identify the gap a new project could address.
Design the study
Define a population, comparison, measures, and outcomes while choosing a design that fits the research question.
Reason with data
Interpret descriptive statistics, epidemiologic measures, uncertainty, bias, confounding, and the limits of causal claims.
03Curriculum foundation
People & populations
Study patterns without losing sight of people.Students explore how disability, aging, community violence, and other public health challenges shape health, care, and patient experience.
What you learn
Patient experience
Consider how illness, disability, treatment, caregiving, and healthcare encounters affect everyday life and decision-making.
Population patterns
Examine how health and access vary across age, geography, race and ethnicity, sex and gender, and socioeconomic context.
Community context
Connect individual outcomes with community conditions, violence, environment, resources, and systems of support.
04Curriculum foundation
Dignity & leadership
Practice the judgment that responsible research requires.Students practice ethical decision-making, intellectual humility, teamwork, communication, and service to communities.
What you learn
Ethics & dignity
Consider privacy, consent, risk, benefit, and respectful representation when research involves people and communities.
Intellectual humility
Recognize uncertainty, state limitations, revise a claim when evidence changes, and separate findings from interpretation.
Collaborative leadership
Give and receive feedback, communicate across experience levels, share responsibility, and lead through service.
From learning to original work
The foundations become a research practice.
Learn together
Seminars and journal clubs build shared language across the four foundations.
Find the question
Students identify a consequential problem and narrow it into a workable research question.
Work with a mentor
Individual guidance helps students refine their evidence, methods, analysis, and communication.
Share the work
Projects culminate in a clear research product and presentation at the HSMP Colloquium.
Learn by doing