Healthcare Management vs. Administration: Responsibilities, Skills & Education
As important as doctors and nurses are, we cannot imagine hospitals without two crucial areas: healthcare administration and management. These two fields ensure assistance is available and provided efficiently in any healthcare facility under their supervision.
If you are interested in pursuing a career related to healthcare and helping others without being the one to provide direct assistance to patients, the good news is you have two options to choose from. Read on as we discuss healthcare management vs. healthcare administration, and help you find the best path for you.
What Is Healthcare Management?
Simply put, healthcare management is the general management of a healthcare facility. It includes managing and providing leadership to the organizations that deliver personal health services, health care systems, and health care networks. Healthcare management directs and coordinates health and medical assistance as well as focuses on the overall improvement of customer experiences in a variety of healthcare environments, including hospitals, doctors' offices, outpatient care centers, and more.
What Do Healthcare Managers Do?
Healthcare managers have a variety of responsibilities to ensure that a healthcare facility is operating as it should. In general, they focus on improving the quality of healthcare services, developing department goals, plans, and strategies, managing department workflow, and ensuring law compliance. Furthermore, a healthcare manager's duties include:
managing budgets and finance
creating schedules
recruiting, training, and supervising staff
attending meetings
overseeing day-to-day operations of a healthcare facility
planning, directing, and coordinating non-clinical activities
communicating with medical staff, department heads, and investors, and more.
In addition, a healthcare manager also acts as a spokesperson for the healthcare facility to the media. They collaborate with medical staff on various matters such as medical equipment or the overall planning of service improvement. They monitor staff performance and may create patient care surveys to ensure that patients receive quality care.
Healthcare managers' responsibilities and duties can vary depending on the size and type of their work setting. Healthcare managers may work in hospitals, doctors' offices, nursing homes, medical laboratories, health insurance companies, and more.
How to Become a Healthcare Manager?
To become a healthcare manager, you need numerous skills under your belt as well as an educational path focused on business and healthcare. Once you have completed the necessary degrees and developed your skills, you will be eligible for various jobs as a healthcare manager.
Skills needed
To succeed as a healthcare manager, you need skills such as leadership, communication, time management, decision-making, stress management, and many more. In this job, you will deal with making decisions daily and communicating with many people. As such, you must be able to communicate clearly and effectively and make crucial decisions that affect people's health. You should be able to manage teams and collaborate with other staff members. Teamwork, budgeting, scheduling, and staff management are also required skills for a healthcare manager.
Education requirements
To be successful as a healthcare manager, you need knowledge in business and healthcare. Pursuing a bachelor's degree is required for most healthcare management positions. A bachelor's in healthcare management would equip you with the necessary skills and knowledge to land a lucrative job in healthcare management. In addition, a master's degree is pretty favored by employers. An advanced-level degree shows a profound commitment to a specific medical area.
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Furthermore, you may be hired as a healthcare manager if you obtain a bachelor's degree in a related field, like health management, a nursing degree, or business administration.
Healthcare Management Job Outlook and Salary
Healthcare management is a high in-demand field, and as experts from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) inform, it will continue to be so for a while. According to their reports, the employment of medical and health services managers is expected to experience a 32% growth from 2020 to 2030. This growth is much faster compared to the average for all other occupations. On average, there are projected to be around 51,800 job openings for healthcare management each year over the decade.
The profession of a healthcare manager is also lucrative, with an average salary of $79,223 per year in the United States. The lowest salaries belong to entry-level jobs and are reported to be around $46,454 per year, whereas senior roles earn up to $135,108 per year.
What Is Healthcare Administration?
Healthcare administration is the field related to administering non-clinical functions within a healthcare facility. It includes various day-to-day operations related to directing the staff and long-term strategic planning to ensure the success of the healthcare system and the services they provide. Healthcare administration shares some responsibilities with the management team as it helps handle numerous aspects of the business side of delivering healthcare services in the entire facility, a specific clinical department, or a medical practice for a group of physicians.
What Do Healthcare Administrators Do?
Healthcare administrators are responsible for ensuring that the healthcare facility is well equipped to assist the patients. Although they are not responsible for personally administering medical treatment to patients, they have a role in what treatments are available to them. Some of their duties and responsibilities include:
Formulating and enforcing policies for the staff
Developing a supply chain administration plan to boost efficiency
Keeping an inventory of the establishment's supplies
Maintaining filing systems for the patients' medical records
Healthcare administrators have to make sure their facility follows regulations and laws by tracking information about the population health of the facility's patients and examining risks of treatments. Furthermore, they are responsible for holding meetings with governmental bodies and communicating with various departments to ensure everything is functioning in agreement with the law and the facility's policies.
The exact day-to-day duties of a healthcare administrator depend on the facility they work at and the number of healthcare workers they have to supervise.
How to Become a Healthcare Administrator?
As with all other professions, the answer to how you can become a healthcare administrator lies in the educational path you follow and the set of skills you develop.
Skills needed
To fulfill your duties as a healthcare administrator, you need to develop a specific set of skills: communication, leadership, multitasking, data analysis, strong planning, and many more. This profession requires you to oversee the work of all staff in the facility, so you must have a strong sense of responsibility and be able to communicate effectively with all employees to ensure they perform to the best of their abilities and in accordance with the policies you prepare as a healthcare administrator.
Education requirements
To become a healthcare administrator, you must first pursue a bachelor's degree focusing on healthcare administration, which typically takes four years to complete. Once you have completed your bachelor's degree, you will be eligible for entry-level positions in healthcare administration. But, if you desire more, you might want to consider pursuing a master's degree, in particular, a Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA), which will open doors for higher-level healthcare administration positions.
To make yourself a more appealing candidate for healthcare administration jobs, pay close attention to the internships you complete and the experience you gain in this field, as it will show potential employers your dedication and understanding of healthcare administration.
Healthcare Administration Job Outlook and Salary
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the employment of administrative services is projected to grow 9% from 2020 to 2030. This growth is about as fast as the average for all occupations. Reports show that there will be approximately 29,200 openings for administrative services each year over the decade.
Pursuing a career in healthcare administration comes with high median salaries and opportunities to grow professionally. The average salary of a healthcare administrator is estimated to be $74,191 per year in the United States. When you first start working in the field, you can expect to earn around $41,515 per year, whereas as you grow professionally, in senior roles, you can make as much as $132,585 per year.
Difference Between Healthcare Management and Healthcare Administration
When comparing healthcare management vs. healthcare administration, we can notice several areas where they overlap. Both can be found in similar settings such as hospitals, care centers, or any other type of healthcare facility, and they are primarily concerned with improving facility efficiency and the quality of care they offer.
However, healthcare management concentrates on a broader perspective, overseeing the facility as a whole, whereas healthcare administrators are generally more focused on the staff working there. Furthermore, healthcare administrators help develop and implement policies, and in contrast, healthcare managers are more focused on the facility's budgets and finance.
The day-to-day responsibilities they have, the education you will have to pursue, skills to develop, their job outlooks, and salaries are other factors you can consider when differentiating between healthcare administration and management.
Conclusion
There's no doubt that society needs an efficient and effective healthcare system; it is crucial to have capable managers and administrators ensuring that everything runs smoothly.
Regardless of the position you choose, you will be helping improve healthcare facilities that, in turn, help improve the patients' quality of life. As one person, you cannot aid everyone, but with healthcare administration and management, you will be supporting doctors and nurses through whom you reach and improve many lives.