MHA Curriculum

This course focuses on how the U.S. health services system is organized, the internal and external forces on the system, as well as how system services are delivered and financed.

This course examines leadership concepts as they apply specifically in healthcare organizations. Topics such as managing change, intra-organizational communication, and high-level decision making are included. The course focuses on building skills to sort through and make sense of the plethora of information available in making judgment calls. Focusing on leadership, the course goes well beyond management, helping students recognize, build on and enhance their own skills and increase their adaptability. Like other Ohio University MHA courses, this one also stresses the importance of identification, empathy and communication with relevant stakeholders.

Exploring health policy from a systematic approach; linking public health and health care issues to policy processes. Examination of policy formation, individuals, organizations, and systems involved in this processes; in relation to various issues in population health, health promotion, and health care delivery.

The purpose of this course is to acquaint the student with the fundamentals of health promotion program evaluation and research methods related to behavioral science and health education. Although the course emphasizes general evaluation and research methodology, specific health program and health policy applications are used as illustrations.

This course addresses essential financial administration tools and concepts needed to maintain health care organization viability. The course increases students’ ability to discuss with financial professionals various data like financial statement and cost analysis, budgeting, asset pricing models, and valuation methods among others. The course provides practice in consolidating and weighing financial information with data from many other disciplines in making leadership decisions. Attention is also given to the health administrator’s need to translate financial information for other stakeholders whose functions are affected and whose cooperation is needed.

This course delves into the relationship between the legal and health care systems, including the roles and rights of key stakeholders of the U.S. health care system.

This course deals with the practical aspects of human resource leadership in various healthcare settings. Leadership of the human capital in healthcare is challenging because the industry is labor-intensive, has a diverse workforce, and is involved with life-and-death work. This course focuses on the role of the health administrator in working with and through the human resources department to align HR strategy with organizational strategy, to assure well-being of employees, and to assure competitive position.

This last course in the MHA program, taps learning from every other course in a real-life strategic analysis of a health care organization in transition. The course focuses on key processes in planning and delivering health care to the community, such as needs assessment, feasibility studies, strategic marketing design, and implementation and evaluation strategies and methods. This course is an application exercise simulating activities healthcare administrators engage in daily, pulling information from various sources and recombining it for decision making. It is a practical, interesting, exciting, and informative culmination for the MHA program.

This course examines the impact of ethical issues on leadership decision making. It explores dominant ethical theories and principles relevant to every aspect of health care leadership. Both clinical and organizational ethical issues are considered along with communication and stakeholder strategies.

This survey and analysis of healthcare information systems planning and leadership prepares health administrators to communicate productively with information technology and clinical professionals. The course explores the challenges of selecting and implementing information systems to achieve organizational mission. The course focuses on how and from whom health administrators should gather information and judge its veracity. It also considers other organizational data and issues that go into selection decisions and implementation plans. Attention to various stakeholders and how to manage their impact on IT projects.

This course is an overview and analysis of epidemiological principles that provide the basis for setting priorities, allocating scarce healthcare resources, and preventing disease. It recognizes that the health administrator needs to understand information from clinical professionals in making leadership decisions to manage health services to protect health.

This course includes the examination of the core leadership competencies required to serve in contemporary healthcare organizations. Explores key concepts in understanding organizational culture(s) and the skills required to build and sustain effective teams.

This course examines the issues related to the leader’s role in developing and executing quality, safety, and service and the interdependence of these strategies on outcomes in healthcare.

This course examines the basic financial management skills and accounting processes unique to the healthcare delivery system and the responsibilities of managers and leaders in applying them. In addition, this course will explore the specifics of revenue generating strategies through growth and innovation in healthcare.

Data analysis is rapidly becoming a required skill set for today’s managers in competitive environments. As a decision-maker in business, you are likely to be asked to conduct your own analysis of data or to interpret a report that has been derived by others. In this course, you will have the opportunity to learn how to summarize, visualize, and manage data within software environments that are commonly used in business today. Additionally, techniques that help decision-makers reduce risk and identify opportunities that would provide an individual or a company with a competitive advantage will be reviewed.

Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques and applications within a business environment. The primary goal of predictive analytics is to discover and apply relationships found within historic datasets to make predictions about the future or otherwise unknown events. In this hands-on course, students will be introduced to concepts related to constructing, testing, and applying quantitative models in various business settings. From this perspective, students will utilize major software tools to conduct an analysis of continuous, classification, and clustering models. Upon completion of this course, students will gain insight into how models are constructed and how predictive models can improve business.

Some refer to analytics as the new science of winning. It refers to a commitment by top management to the extensive use of data, statistical and quantitative analysis, explanatory and predictive models and fact-based management to drive decisions and actions. This course provides an introduction to analytics and covers spreadsheet modeling for decision-making. It employs techniques from the classical disciplines of statistics and operations research, as well as more recently developed methodologies: data mining, executive information systems, digital dashboards, and online analytical processing. You will be expected to master, at an introductory level, techniques that are at the heart of the competitive posture of many successful organizations.

Project Management I is focused on the core project management processes. This is a pure project management class and a deep dive into the fundamentals that comprise the project management body.

Project Management II is focused on strategic project management. This class allows project managers to apply project management skills and hone skills in select topic areas, such as agile project management.

Change and Risk Management teaches you how to become a master at implementing your projects. The topics of change and risk are taught in-depth to enable you to master two of the most common causes of project failures.