Close Encounters

Back in the School of Public Health, Master's in Healthcare Administration students will train with the practitioners with whom they'll one day collaborate.

By Andrew Bacskai

Tomorrow’s health-care administrators face the formidable challenge of helping cure an increasingly unhealthy industry.

“We pay more for a health-care system in this country than any other nation in the world, yet our outcomes are nowhere near the top,” says John Finnegan, Jr., interim dean of the School of Public Health. “Most people out there—regardless of what side of the political spectrum they’re on—are looking at the U.S. healthcare system and saying there is something fundamentally wrong.”

To help make it right, the next generation of health-care administrators must be willing and able to drive improvements in clinical process, says Sandra Potthoff, director of the Master’s in Healthcare Administration program. Clinical process is an area in which administrators traditionally have deferred to practitioners, she explains, but one in which procedural waste and inefficiency have contributed mightily to the dramatic increase in national healthcare costs.

Next-generation administrators, Potthoff says, “need to understand policy. They need to understand technology. And they need to understand clinical practice. Clearly, they’ll all still need to be strong in finance and strategy and operations. But health-care delivery is unique compared to that of a basic manufacturing setting. So you turn out a student who’s far better prepared to be a leader in the administrative realm if they really have a much deeper gut-level understanding of the clinical process.”

To better equip its students for today’s marketplace, the University this fall will move its Master’s of Healthcare Administration program from the Carlson School of Management, its home for the past seven years, back to the School of Public Health, where it was founded in 1946. The move will position M.H.A. students back under the same Academic Health Center roof that houses students in medicine, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, and other disciplines. Consequently, M.H.A. faculty members will be able to enrich the program’s curriculum by emphasizing interdisciplinary study.

“We train nurses, physicians, pharmacists, and administrators in their own silos,” Potthoff says. “Then they graduate and we tell them, ‘The concert starts tomorrow at seven—come ready to play.’ It just doesn’t work.”

Physicians and administrators, for example, have tended to be more combatants than collaborators. “If you ask any administrator, they’ll tell you that one of the biggest issues today is physician-administrator relationships…,” says M.H.A. student Josie Muigai. “Given that it’s one of the biggest challenges, there is tremendous value in interdisciplinary study.”

By helping foster more productive administrator-practitioner relationships, M.H.A. faculty and students hope to produce more positive patient outcomes—and a healthier system. “They really need to work to develop a system that produces maximum-quality health care with high patient safety at the lowest cost possible,” says Potthoff. “That’s the challenge.”

Independent Study-International Scope

The ISP Off-Site Executive Study program, an independent-study program for working health-care administrators, will move with the M.H.A. program back to the School of Public Health.

Students are introduced to the program during a two- to three-week summer session on campus. “They then go home and do three years of study, while employed, altering the organization in which they run,” explains Vernon Weckwerth, who founded the program in 1968. Students earn a Credential of Advanced Studies or may earn an M.H.A. by returning to campus for a three-week session capped by final exam.

Though the program originally was designed to provide much-needed distance-learning opportunities for administrators in Greater Minnesota, it has since gone global. “I have 3,017 former and current ISP students in 44 nations,” including Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, South Africa, and Spain, Weckwerth says. “I’ve got them all over the world, so whatever we’re doing wrong with health care here,” he quips, “I’m spreading worldwide.”