There is no required textbook.
Syllabus, tentative schedule, 2009 course homepage, McCormick Healthcare Engineering website

References

The Science of Scientific Writing

Medical Literature
Two ways to search the medical literature are PubMed and Google Scholar.
The impact factors of journals give a very rough guide to their importance. (For comparison the impact factor of Operations Research is 1.995.)
Online epidemiology slides (the Supercourse at Pitt)

Healthcare Modeling Overview
OR's next top model by Elisa Long and Margaret Brandeau
Larry Wein describing four of his recent projects.
Compartmental models of disease spread: Wikipedia page and an example spreadsheet model

A Global Perspective
Hans Rosling gives a short talk on developing countries at the TED conference.
Global Burden of Disease by the WHO.
report on noncommunicable diseases by the WHO
Northwestern's Global Health center

Cost-Effectiveness
Overview of cost-effectiveness by Weinstein et al.
The CEA Registry is a resource to find cost-effectiveness studies, cost-effectiveness values, and quality of life adjustment factors.
An Empiric Estimate of the Value of Life. Discussion in Time including a QA with the chair of Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence.
Medical care component of the CPI-U should be used for inflation adjustment (see column 5 here).

HIV
UNAIDS report
WHO Towards Universal Access
Circumcision
Safety-stock for HIV drugs, by Sarang Deo and Charles Corbett
Men who have sex with men (MSM) by Goodreau et al.
New Haven needle exchange program
Special issue of Science on HIV in Eastern Europe
Methadone substitution therapy for injection drug users (IDUs)
Drug resistance
WHO survey of drug prices
WHO Guidelines

Influenza (flu)
Google flu trends: preprint, Nature paper, and supplementary info.
CDC weekly flu report
Dirk Brockmann: Swine flu forecasts, book chapter, and article

MRSA
overview, hospital-community interaction, networks, cost-effectiveness, laws

Malaria
Drug resistance model

TB
network model, other models

Smallpox
Halloran paper and Kaplan paper

Operations
20-year plan for nurse staffing in British Columbia. It gives a Canadian perspective on long-term planning: paper and report
Selecting the patient panel size for a GP
Anesthesia risk by Pate-Cornell et al.

Diabetes
Screening and allocating prevention funds

Transplants
Cadaveric liver transplants: optimal timing and the price of keeping the waiting list private
Kidney transplant policy (in OR and in the American Journal of Medicine)
Paired kidney donations: JAMA and MS
Kidney: basics, transplants, data, and essay.

Cancer and IMRT
Surgery vs chemo vs radiation OR paper and the medical publication
A column generation approach for IMRT optimization: paper.

High-Level Look at Payments
Health of Nations an American Prospect article by Ezra Klein on the health care systems of other developed countries.
Health Care Rationing Rhetoric Overlooks Reality by David Leonhardt in the New York Times makes the simple point that resources are constrained, even if only by a budget constraint.
Presentation by Peter Orzag, head of the Congressional Budget Office. See slides 12 and 13 on the connection between quality and cost.
The Cost Conundrum a New Yorker article by Atul Gawande examining why the US system is so expensive

Medicare Payments
A short article by the AMA explaining how Medicare payments to physicians are calculated.
A series of blog posts by Jason Shafrin I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, and VIII giving an overview of Medicare reimbursement based on MedPAC's Payment Basics.
Dialysis contract design