Description
This program prepares students for careers in management, planning, and policy analysis in a variety of settings in the health care field.
Likely Careers
Graduates assume positions in various types of health care organizations, in urban and rural settings, including hospitals, managed care organizations, clinics, public and community health agencies, consulting firms, governmental and legislative arenas, and long-term care service organizations.
Applying
Designed for early-career professionals interested in health care management. Applicants represent a diverse range of undergraduate training and work experience. Competitive applicants have some work experience, preferably in the field of health care/services. Applicants must have an undergraduate degree.
Concurrent Option: MHA/MBA, MHA/MPA, MHA/MD, MHA/JD
Application Deadline: January 15 for Autumn Quarter entry.
Competencies
Upon satisfactory completion of the MHA degree programs, graduates will have developed managerial, financial and leadership competencies in the following areas:
- Accountability: The ability to hold people accountable to standards of performance or ensure compliance using the power of one’s position or force of personality appropriately and effectively, with the long-term good of the organization in mind;
- Achievement Orientation: A concern for surpassing a standard of excellence;
- Analytical Thinking: The ability to understand a situation, issue, or problem by breaking it into smaller pieces or tracing its implications in a step-by-step way;
- Change Leadership: The ability to energize stakeholders and sustain their commitment to changes in approaches, processes, and strategies;
- Collaboration: The ability to work cooperatively with others, to be part of a team, to work together, as opposed to working separately or competitively;
- Communication Skills: The ability to speak and write in a clear, logical, and grammatical manner in formal and informal situations to prepare cogent business presentations, and to facilitate a group;
- Community Orientation: The ability to align one’s own and the organization’s priorities with the needs and values of the community, including its cultural and ethnocentric values and to move health forward in line with population-based wellness needs and national health agenda;
- Financial Skills: The ability to understand and explain financial and accounting information, prepare and manage budgets, and make sound long-term investment decisions;
- Human Resources Management: The ability to implement staff development and other management practices that represent contemporary best practices, comply with legal and regulatory requirements, optimize the performance of the workforce, including performance assessments, alternative compensation and benefit methods, and the alignment of human resource practices and processes to meet the strategic goals of the organization;
- Impact and Influence The ability to persuade, convince, influence, or impress others (individuals or groups) in order to get them to go along with or to support one’s opinion or position;
- Information Seeking: An underlying curiosity and desire to know more about things, people, or issues, including the desire for knowledge and staying current with health, organizational, industry, and professional trends and developments;
- Information Technology Management: The ability to see the potential in and understand the use of administrative and clinical technology and decision-support tools in process and performance improvement;
- Initiative: Identifying a problem, obstacle, or opportunity and taking action in light of this identification to address current or future problems or opportunities;
- Innovative Thinking: The ability to apply complex concepts, develop creative solutions, or adapt previous solutions in new ways for breakthrough thinking in the field;
- Interpersonal Understanding: The ability to understand other people as well as to accurately hear and understand the unspoken or partly expressed thoughts, feelings, and concerns of others;
- Organizational Awareness: The ability to understand and learn the formal and informal decision-making structures and power relationships in an organization or industry (e;g;, stakeholders, suppliers);
- Performance Measurement: The ability to understand and use statistical and financial methods and metrics to set goals and measure clinical as well as organizational performance; commitment to and employment of evidence-based techniques;
- Process Management and Organizational Design: The ability to analyze and design or improve an organizational process, including incorporating the principles of quality management as well as customer satisfaction;
- Professionalism: The demonstration of ethics, sound professional practices, social accountability, and community stewardship;
- Project Management: The ability to plan, execute, and oversee a multi-year, large-scale project involving significant resources, scope, and impact;
- Relationship Building: The ability to establish, build, and sustain professional contacts for the purpose of building networks of people with similar goals and that support similar interests;
- Self-Confidence: A belief in one’s own capability to accomplish a task and select an effective approach to a task or problem;
- Self-Development: The ability to have an accurate view of one’s own strengths and development needs, including the impact that one has on others;
- Strategic Orientation: The ability to consider the business, demographic, ethno-cultural, political, and regulatory implications of decisions and develop strategies that continually improve the long-term success and viability of the organization;
- Talent Development: The drive to build the breadth and depth of the organization’s human capability and professionalism, including supporting top-performing people and taking a personal interest in coaching and mentoring high-potential leaders; and
- Team Leadership: Sees oneself as a leader of others, from forming a team that possesses balanced capabilities to setting its mission, values, and norms, as well as to holding the team members accountable individually and as a group for results.