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 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 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.

This course focuses on the value of various research methods and resulting data for running an efficient and effective organization. The course focuses on development of skills to be good consumers of research information. The course acknowledges that most health administrators will not be designing and running research projects but that they must be able to communicate with researchers in a variety of disciplines. They must be able to recognize quality research protocols and select findings that can complement data from other disciplines in leadership decision making.

In this course, students will develop an understanding of the basic principles of how health-related policies are developed, implemented, and evaluated by governmental and community-based agencies and organizations. Throughout the course, students develop skills in the use of "systems thinking" methods to analyze how policy and other factors influence the effectiveness of the public health system's responsiveness to a particular public health issue.

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 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 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.