Healthcare Facilities Planning and DesignCornell Certificate Program

Organizational culture is one of the most powerful assets in healthcare, influencing everything from day-to-day operations to long-term strategies. Leaders must take a proactive approach to implementing cultural initiatives that support their organization's vision and values. This course will empower you to rethink how you understand, measure, and lead cultural transformation within your organization.

You will begin by assessing your current culture, identifying strengths and gaps, and mapping out a vision for your ideal cultural state. You'll develop business strategies aligned with your organization's core values and implement the processes necessary to support and sustain cultural transformation. Along the way, you'll explore methods to measure progress, track outcomes, and communicate results to foster alignment across teams.

What is process thinking? How can it help you improve your healthcare organization?

In this course, you'll explore the concept of process thinking and access several reusable tools to help you develop and improve processes at your organization. You'll examine how to spot what's wrong in a process and determine solutions to those problems.

How can you ensure your organization is providing a service that meets the expectations of both patients and guests? Are there ways your organization could improve customer satisfaction while reducing costs?

In this course, you'll explore how to measure quality and diagnose what's causing issues with quality in your organization. You'll also explore methods for improving processes while maintaining quality at your organization.

Effectively applying environmental psychology principles and theories to the design of health care settings can powerfully enhance the quality of life for residents. Whether you're working as a designer of a new health care facility, an administrator of an existing facility, or within the healthcare field, you can use the research to inform decisions about design choices for the space. This relatively new science addresses not only how human beings perceive their surroundings, but also the ways in which good design can optimize people's interactions with the physical world.

In this course, you will explore how to access and analyze design research to evaluate the world around you in order to create environments that support health and wellness.

Even experienced project leaders will ask themselves “Why won't people listen to me?” or “What went wrong with my plan?” Of all the skills critical to project leadership, emotional intelligence may be the most important—and least understood. 

In this course, you will learn to identify, analyze, and manage emotions, both yours and your team members'.

It is a common mistake among project leaders to focus too heavily on the mechanics of project management while neglecting the critical people skills that keep everyone engaged and working harmoniously. In this course, from Robert Newman of Cornell's College of Civil and Environmental Engineering, project leaders will explore concepts of emotional intelligence and practice skills relevant to managing emotions so that they can enjoy better project outcomes. You will focus on five critical aptitudes: communication, relationship management, decision making, conflict management, and motivation.

Healthcare organizations often approach management much like patient care: swiftly identifying symptoms, diagnosing problems, and developing a treatment plan or solution. While this technique works for day-to-day operations, it falls short when it comes to evaluating organizational well-being and planning for long-term growth. To create successful strategic plans, healthcare leaders must adopt a broader perspective — one that balances service delivery with sound business strategies.

This course introduces several proven frameworks to help you build a strategic plan that aligns with your organizational mission and vision. You will map your organization's position by evaluating internal strengths and weaknesses, analyzing external opportunities and threats, and categorizing products and services. By collecting and interpreting the right data, you'll be empowered to set organizational priorities, identify growth opportunities, and ensure your strategic plan drives both profitability and long-term success.

Strategic planning can set the course for organizational success, but many healthcare groups struggle to implement their plans effectively. Common issues, like unclear accountability, lack of measurable outcomes, or inadequate reporting, can stall even the best ideas. To overcome these barriers, leaders must create strategic plans that translate vision into action.

In this course, you will apply organizational insights to develop a comprehensive and actionable strategic plan. You'll begin the course by preparing for a strategic planning retreat, including identifying key stakeholders, collecting data, and crafting an agenda. From there, you'll establish clear organizational goals and strategies while determining the who, what, when, and how for achieving them. Finally, you'll explore how to monitor progress, report on outcomes, and refine strategies to keep your plan aligned with the organization's mission and values.

Change is inevitable in healthcare, bringing challenges that test a leader's ability to inspire teams and navigate transitions effectively. With the right strategies, leaders can turn these moments into opportunities for growth and long-term organizational success. By addressing change at the individual, departmental, and organizational levels, they can ensure alignment and momentum through even the most complex transitions.

In this course, you will approach change with a structured and strategic mindset. You'll begin by identifying the internal and external drivers of change and classifying their impact across individual roles, departmental workflows, and organizational systems. You'll also explore how to communicate effectively throughout the phases of change, reducing resistance and building trust at every step. Through the development of a comprehensive change management plan, you'll gain the tools to guide your team through transitions and embed lasting improvements into your organization's culture.