To the layperson, health care management and health care administration may sound interchangeable, but these career paths differ in focus. Whether you seek a broader role in organizational leadership or want to manage the day-to-day operations of a department or unit, both tracks offer exciting work opportunities.
What Is Health Care Management?
Health care management includes roles in which you’ll be responsible for overseeing the activities of an entire health care organization or a company that runs multiple health care organizations. Success in this area of health care depends on many factors:
- Strong organizational leadership and business skills are key to these roles.
- You’ll need to gather information; plan strategies; manage finances, people, equipment, and facilities; and make decisions that affect the organization as a whole.
- You’ll need specific business strategy skills to analyze information, develop a strategic response, and then work with various teams to implement the strategies.
- Planning how you’ll use financial resources, setting up and managing budgets, allocating resources, and measuring return on investment will be key to your success.
- In some cases, you’ll both develop organizational policies and see that your organization is adhering to health care laws and regulations.
- In providing operational oversight, you’ll need to care about a diverse array of functions, from procurement to human resources to marketing, food services, maintenance, scheduling, and more.
- Value-based care may drive much of your top-level decision-making, as will managing patient outcomes, equity of access, and cost of care.
How Is Health Care Administration Different?
A role in health care administration is still highly focused on management. Yet instead of managing a large organization like a hospital or a group of hospitals, you’ll focus on the details of a specific unit or department.
In this role, you’ll interface with human resources, finance, patient services, facilities management, and more. You’ll need the input of various parts of the organization to effectively manage your department or unit. You’ll serve many constituencies, including upper management, patients and families, doctors and nurses, and operational staff. Your job will be to make sure everything runs smoothly for optimal results.
Typical health care administration responsibilities include:
- Managing staff, including creating a staffing plan, organizational chart, and job descriptions.
- Leading the functions around hiring, training, supervising, and staff development.
- Working within your department and the rest of the organization to ensure that operations are smooth and efficient.
- Staying on top of equipment, facilities, and supplies specific to your department. In addition to capital expenditure planning, maintenance, and obsolescence, you’ll need to monitor everything, plan, and make decisions.
- Providing quality care that leads to superior outcomes, managing patient records, scheduling care, and coordinating tests and procedures, all as part of end-to-end patient experience management. Again, value-based care is now part of the role.
- Leading in regulatory compliance may also be required, tracking requirements and documenting actions, along with maintaining records to prove your department’s adherence to rules and standards.
Which Health Care Path Is Right for You?
Deciding whether you want a career in health care management versus health care administration is a highly personal decision. Here are some key considerations:
What drives your sense of accomplishment? If you like having a broad impact, you may enjoy managing a facility or larger holding company that manages many facilities. If you enjoy making a difference in a specific area and with people you interact with directly, becoming an administrator may be more appealing.
What are your interests? If you enjoy business, health care management will be satisfying. If you have a specific area of interest, such as improving the trauma experience, advancing cancer care, or working in specific treatment areas, like joint health or pediatric care, administering these departments will be rewarding.
How important is money and advancement? It is a fact that health care management positions more directly lead to upper management roles and higher salaries. You certainly can make good money in administration, too, but you’ll have to move out of a departmental role if you’re seeking a bigger title and more money.
Whichever path you choose, your career will benefit from earning a master’s degree in health care administration. And to get started on either track, it helps to earn your bachelor’s degree in health care management. You may also pursue this field with other health sciences undergraduate degrees. The right undergraduate degree will give you a solid foundation for further study and professional development.
