Northwestern’s Healthcare Administration (MHA) degree prepares students for various leadership roles in the healthcare industry with a focus on the business side of healthcare. Students will engage in coursework that analyzes effective healthcare models and examines how to deliver excellent, innovative, and efficient care while balancing costs. Courses cover strategic planning, leadership, financial management, and human resource responsibilities. Students are required to complete 12 courses to earn the degree.  There are eleven core courses and one capstone course. Current students should refer to curriculum requirements in place at entry into the program.

Curriculum

About the Final Project

This course provides students with opportunities to apply the fundamentals of strategic planning and marketing, human resources, finance, analytics, and operations acquired in previous courses to approach practical problems and decisions faced by real healthcare systems and may include policy or product development and other services innovation.  Ideally, the project will address an applicable and current issue in the student’s current organization such as problem-solving a crisis management issue. For students who do not have this option, senior managers from the program will "pitch" the potential projects to students to choose. Students apply techniques of situational assessment, data analysis, strategy development, problem solving, and critical thinking. As the capstone course, students are expected to integrate their knowledge and to apply it to healthcare case studies. Students analyses will be guided by the practicing professionals, who are their faculty mentors, and consistent with the mission, vision and core values of an organization. The outcome is an improved ability to think from the patient point of view, analyze critically, identify key challenges, complete strategic plan for main business problems, and communicate those clearly and effectively to various stakeholders. Projects will host key elements defined by relevance, realistic, consequential, measurable and include more than two distinguishable stakeholders. Projects will be scoped in a reasonable definition and timeline in order to make a marked impact and change within the student’s own organization. The project is built in concept at the start and continues through the program culminating and a faculty presentation.