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Southern New Hampshire University
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The field of healthcare administration offers numerous career choices. Those who take this career path may know only a few of the specialties that exist within its many disciplines. There are numerous specialties that you may focus on in this field.
Here are just a few of specialized fields that an MHA may lead you into.
MHA Degree Job Paths
- Financial Management – If you love to handle money, this position is for you. The medical industry features some of the most complicated finance structures in the world. When you get involved in healthcare administration financial management, you will take years of rigorous accounting classes. Your responsibilities will include budget creation, mapping spending projections, and considering investments in new medical equipment. You will become closely involved with insurance companies and other finance related firms.
- Manpower Systems Analysis – One of the greatest challenges healthcare organizations face is ensuring the proper utilization of workforce resources. Many facilities lack the staffing they need to do their job effectively. A manpower systems analyst monitors access to personnel resources and devises work schedules to ensure proper personnel coverage for the patients in a facility. This challenging and rewarding job will place you with some of the brightest medical minds in the industry.
- Hospital Management – Once you begin a career in healthcare administration, you will grow familiar with the needs of hospitals and similar facilities. The challenges of running such an organization will give you a deep sense of responsibility that’s hard to match in any other facet of healthcare administration. With that sense of responsibility comes a great sense of accomplishment when things go according to plan. Hospital managers are considered to have achieved a pinnacle of healthcare administration. You will need to spend many years gaining the necessary experience to be successful in this all-important administrative position.
- Hospital Human Resources – A manpower analyst’s job is to determine what to do with personnel resources. It is the hospital’s human resources professional who goes out to recruit the talent needed to fulfill the expectations of a large hospital. When you become involved in hospital human resources, you will discover that you will need a broad and far-reaching educational background so that you will be able to differentiate good from bad candidates for the jobs you seek to fill. This position requires an education in human resource studies, healthcare admin. and services. The rewards include traveling to prominent healthcare seminars and meeting some of the more innovative and influential thought leaders in the industry.
- Patient Financial Specialist – If you like the idea of working in a very specialized sector of the healthcare industry, you may choose to pursue a career as a patient financial specialist. This administrative role entails working with families to ensure they understand their financing and insurance options. You will need a robust understanding of the medical insurance industry, banking, and government health services. The reason that this is such a tremendous part of healthcare administration is that you will have the opportunity to help people find ways to access needed medical attention. If you like to solve problems and help others, then this may be an ideal career for you.
- Program Management – The best healthcare administration jobs are the ones tied to other aspects of the organization into a centralized function. Program management specialists work with department heads to ensure all project information is properly integrated into the facility’s IT network. These professionals incorporate all of the elements of IT systems integration and project management. To perform this job, you need advanced computer experience and the ability to manage communications with multiple internal departments. This is job will keep you on the cutting edge of healthcare information technology systems.
- Administrative Manager – If you want to be the “go to” individual, then you will be interested in specializing in administrative management. This position is at the heart of any healthcare system and will help to keep everything running the way it should, smoothly. Your job will include the management of employee schedules, the coordination of staff training and ensuring company policies and procedures are implemented properly at all times.
- Program Director – Healthcare administration program directors perform very specialized duties that require a lot of generalized know how. As program director, you will have the responsibility to make sure one or more of the facility’s processes are running the way they should be. The director of an outpatient program, for example, would be responsible for making sure all the patients get the treatment they need and that the program is running within the hospital’s administrative guidelines.
- Business Manager – Those who wish to reach the top of their employer’s healthcare administration ranking system will seek to become a business manager eventually. A hospital business manager must ensure all business activities within the organization run properly, and efficiently. These professionals are responsible for making certain financial records and accounting functions are in their proper order. They are also expected to be involved with the all business aspects of all departments in the organization to ensure they have the capital and personnel necessary to do their jobs.
- Patient Advocate – This healthcare administration specialty is ideal for those who like helping people to solve their medical financing problems and making sure they have the best chance to receive the care they need. You will be an expert in the inner-workings of the organization, and you will need to have a comprehensive understanding of insurance and public assistance options available to low and medium income level patients. This is a wonderful job for building up your resume in preparation to advance to the higher ranks of healthcare administration.
- Practice Manager – If you have the itch to be on the cutting edge of healthcare administration, you want to become a healthcare practice manager. More than ever, private practices are managing services that were once the sole purview of larger facilities like hospitals. As these practices continue to grow, they need more and more professional administrators to keep things running smoothly.
