The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health offers two formal health economics training programs at present.  The Department of Health Policy and Management offers a PhD in economic evaluation and policy, and the School offers a certificate in public health economics.  The school is in the final stages of receiving approval for an MHS program in health economics that will be offered through the Departments of Health Policy and Management and International Health.  This allows students interested in health economics to have multiple entry points for their studies.  In the future, other formal options may be made available.

The formal PhD program in the Department of Health Policy and Management offers students two options.  In either case, they receive a basic understanding of epidemiology and biostatistics.  Students then choose whether to focus more on economic theory and econometric analysis for policy or whether to focus on economic evaluation.  Students in the first group spend a significant amount of time in the Department of Economics.  Students in the second group spend a significant time in the Departments of Epidemiology and Biostatistics.  While the other Departments in which health economics faculty are located (International Health; Mental Health; and Population, Family and Reproductive Health) do not have formal programs at the moment, students in those Departments working with the relevant faculty can structure their studies in ways that are similar to the HPM curriculum.  Other departments may provide formal programs using a unified curriculum in the future.  In addition, students in other Departments (e.g. Epidemiology, Biostatistics, and Health, Behavior and Society) have taken substantial portions of the health economics courses that are available and incorporated economics into their research. 

Original doctoral research conducted by students focuses on explaining individual health behaviors or organizational behavior using primary or secondary data and applying state of the art econometric techniques.  Students can also develop new methods to contribute to economic evaluation sciences (i.e. cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analyses).  Students are required to include and economic theory section in their dissertations.  The research opportunities for doctoral student span all departments of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing in addition to the Departments in which students are directly trained and the Department of Economics. The faculty of the health economics program are involved in research with colleagues all across the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions campus and can facilitate access to faculty in all parts of the institution who may provide links to data necessary for research on the economics of nearly any aspect of health of interest to potential students.

The certificate program is available to students in all Departments in the school and can be completed while a student completes the MPH program.

A nine month shared MHS curriculum is in the final stages of approval to be offered by the Departments of Health Policy and Management and International Health.  This intense, quantitatively focused program will prepare students for working in research environments or further studies in health economics policy and cost-effectiveness research.  We anticipate that other Departments may offer entry into a unified MHS program in the future.  The coordination across Departments allows us to incorporate the strengths of the faculty in multiple departments in the core curriculum.