Prepare to lead the business side of health care.
Build the business expertise to pursue management opportunities in health care. Brenau University’s MBA in Healthcare Management combines graduate study in finance, strategy, and managing people with a focused understanding of how health care organizations operate so you’ll be ready to make a difference. You’ll learn to weigh financial decisions, guide teams through change, and assess how policy affects services. Apply that knowledge directly to your career as you work toward a role in health care administration or take on greater responsibility for a practice, department, or organization.
Program at a glance
- Degree
- Master of Business Administration (MBA)
- Program length
- 5-6 semesters
- Format
- Online and on-ground
- Location
- Gainesville & online
Skills you can apply at work
- Evaluate a proposed purchase. Use financial statements and cash flow analysis to assess whether an organization can support an investment such as new equipment.
- Work more effectively with legal counsel. Identify and explain a health care policy or legal concern so you can seek guidance relevant to your organization.
- Anticipate the effects of organizational change. Assess how a different care delivery model or regulatory requirement could affect patients, providers, and the services you help manage.
- Guide a team through change. Apply ethical reasoning, communication, and conflict negotiation as you explain decisions and work through competing priorities.
Your coursework
Four courses make up the 12-credit Healthcare Management major. Each connects a business responsibility with the conditions in which health care organizations operate:
- HC 750: Ethics and Leadership in Healthcare. Examine how you make ethical decisions and how that judgment shapes your leadership. Study communication, conflict negotiation, organizational change, and productivity management to strengthen your approach to supervising others.
- HC 760: Law and Policy Development in Healthcare. Study how federal, state, and local governments shape health policy. Learn to define legal issues in health services so you can make effective use of legal counsel when addressing organizational concerns.
- HC 770: Organizational Systems in Healthcare. Analyze care delivery models and the effects of legislation and regulation on patients, providers, research, and the industry. Build the perspective to consider how a decision in your department could affect other parts of the health care system.
- HC 780: Financial Management in Healthcare. Analyze financial statements, cash flow, and asset purchases in nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Examine how government agencies, managed care, and insurers affect finances, giving you a stronger basis for weighing resource decisions.
Your 33-credit degree combines three credits in Business Communications, 18 in the MBA core, and 12 in the major. Complete BA 507: Business Communications before entering the core. Any required prerequisite study is additional.
The MBA core adds broader preparation in budgeting, managing people, marketing, business law and ethics, and strategy. Together with your health care coursework, these subjects help you connect a department’s needs with the organization’s financial resources and priorities. You’ll also choose Excellence in Operations or Business Analytics.