News: MBA in Healthcare Admin.

CCU Presents MBA with Emphasis in Healthcare Administration

As part of a concerted effort between Colorado Christian University's Business and Technology Division and Nursing and Sciences Division, the school is now offering a master of business administration degree with an emphasis in healthcare administration. The MBA-HCA offers management training in a wide variety of healthcare environments.

"The new HCA emphasis gives CCU a strong niche in a growing sector," said Dean of Business and Technology Dr. Mellani Day. "The MBA has always offered professionals broad management techniques and hard-skill acumen to run a business. Adding this emphasis will allow us to tailor classes to the complex and dynamic field of healthcare administration."

The leadership personnel of clinics, hospitals, organizations - and even physicians themselves - are confronting a changing landscape within healthcare, both from the growth of technology and the requirements of the Affordable Care Act. The need for efficiency and lean strategies for improvement are heightening as healthcare costs rise.

"The current fee for service model is a problem in healthcare," mentioned Dr. Dennis Ondrejka, director of nursing programs within the College of Adult and Graduate Studies at CCU, "because it incentivizes running tests and procedures rather than solving patient health problems. To overcome such issues, we need disruptive innovation - where students think about healthcare in entirely new ways."

The MBA-HCA will prepare students for such disruptive innovation by training them in healthcare economics and challenging them to evaluate creative and effective solutions to healthcare issues. By understanding leading practices in the United States today, students will be able to both hone those methods and help create the processes that tomorrow's healthcare environment will demand.

Moreover, with new roles developing within the healthcare system, the job prospects in the field are projected to grow significantly faster than average. And, CCU's unique approach fosters an understanding of the spiritual and emotional aspects of healthcare.

"This specialization will meet the needs of anyone in a leadership role in healthcare," added Ondrejka, "from physicians to policy makers - to not only learn business strategies but to connect those strategies with a person's spiritual self - to bring God into the problem solving."