Core Health Care Management Courses
Foundations of Health Care Management
This course provides you with essential knowledge needed to work in health care management jobs in hospitals, outpatient clinics, doctors’ offices, treatment facilities, and other medical settings. Starting with an overview of the U.S. health care delivery system, you learn how nonprofit organizations, for-profit businesses, and public service agencies are structured, financed, regulated, and monitored for quality; and how they employ information technologies to secure electronic health records and deliver health services to diverse populations.
Critical Issues in Health Care Management
This course provides an overview of issues that influence health care delivery and how to respond to related challenges as a health care manager. Learn about health disparities and patient demographics, access to preventive care, public health risks such as infectious disease, natural disasters, terrorism, technological complications in financial systems, regulatory health care bodies, and the impact of politics on health policy.
Writing and Communication in the Health Sciences Professions
This course covers professional writing, speaking, and presentation skills that help you succeed in interviews for health care jobs and clearly communicate with clients, co-workers, and supervisors in health organizations. Learn how to write concise and persuasive summaries and reports; how to use best practices to inform communication with clients, colleagues, supervisors, and community members; how to manage meetings; how to design and talk through visual presentations; and how to interact with diverse groups.
Legal and Regulatory Environment of Health Care
Find out how your job as a health care manager is impacted by federal and state laws, regulations, and legal policies and processes that govern health care administration in the United States. This course teaches you how to meet legal requirements and respond to clinical situations involving constitutional protections, informed consent, patient privacy, employee rights, organizational conduct, and malpractice. Learn how to apply industry practice standards to evaluate actionable options when faced with ethical dilemmas related to child abuse, elder abuse, care of patients with communicable diseases, reproductive therapies, organ donation, and euthanasia.
Organizational Behavior
This course offers an overview of human behavior in work organizations. It examines theoretical, empirical, and applications issues from individual, interpersonal, group, and organizational perspectives. Topics include the overview and history of the field, perceptions, attituded, learning processes, personality, motivation, stress, performance appraisal, group dynamics, leadership, communication, decision making, job design, organizational structure and design, organizational change, and development.
Budget and Finance in Health Care Organizations
Required for health care management majors, this course gives you the financial knowledge and departmental budgeting skills you need for your career as a manager. Learn how to communicate your department’s fiscal need for resources, and how to prepare and manage capital and operating budgets by completing practice assignments such as budget-related Excel spreadsheets, and submitting a major case study of a health care administrator.
Economics of Health Care
Grasp the principles of microeconomics as they apply to your work in health care management, and learn how health care differs from other economic and labor markets. This course covers supply and consumer demand; break-even, cost-benefit, and regression analysis; public and private health insurance; cost and funding of health care; risk management; competition and profits; government regulation; and payment systems for hospitals, physicians, and other care facilities. Assignments include two case studies and a manager’s economic proposal.
Core Business Courses
Students are required to select one course or exam in the areas listed below. Except for Research, which must be completed at the upper-level, the Business Core Component may be completed at the lower level.
- Accounting
- Principles of Management
- Research
- Human Resources Management
- Marketing
Business or Health Sciences Electives