Module 20: Leadership & Strategic Management

Throughout your career, you have always been a leader. You lead technicians and students, you lead clinical initiatives on your unit, and you lead patients toward better health outcomes. This clinical leadership, built on a foundation of trust and expertise, is an inherent part of the pharmacist’s identity. This course has given you the technical and analytical skills to become a proficient informaticist. This final module is designed to fuse those new skills with your innate leadership abilities, preparing you for the last and most important transformation: from practitioner to influential leader.

An informaticist with technical skills alone is a valuable technician; an informaticist who combines those skills with leadership is a true change agent. The greatest challenges in health informatics are rarely technical—they are human. They are about managing fear of change, building consensus among disparate groups, communicating a clear vision, and navigating complex organizational politics. These are the so-called “soft skills” that are, in reality, the hardest and most critical to master.

This module is your capstone course in strategic influence. You will learn the formal models of change management that provide a playbook for the human side of implementation. You will explore how to build and lead high-performing, cross-functional teams. You will master the art of communicating with senior executives, translating your project’s value into the language of strategy and finance. This is where we complete your journey, equipping you not just to manage systems, but to lead the very digital transformation of the organization.