Health Services Administration: Home

Health services administration is a phrase that describes the career opportunities for individuals with a college education—often a master's degree—who choose to work in a health-related arena as a manager or administrator.

The roles of individuals in health services administration are most commonly site specific but in general include skills in leadership, financial management, health informatics, marketing, and human resources. Because the health field is so diverse, an individual can choose to specialize in one division of a hospital, for example surgery, or in a specialty area in outpatient services such as managing an independent primary care center. An individual who is hired as a surgical health services administrator would function under the direction of either a hospital administrator or a surgeon. Coordination of services for surgical patients, acquisition of supplies, scheduling of surgical procedures, financial billing, and evaluation of quality outcomes would likely be job expectations. For the individual who is hired as a manager of a primary care center, responsibilities might include coordination of the hiring and firing of clerical staff, instituting community outreach, marketing the services of the center within the community, financial planning, and overseeing the billing sequence. In both these examples, the roles are site specific in that the needs of the different types of health services determine what responsibilities logically belong to the administrator.

Birdsall, C. (2013). Health Services administration. In Gale (Ed.), The Gale encyclopedia of nursing and allied health (2nd ed.). Farmington, MI: Gale. Retrieved from http://www.libproxy.wvu.edu/login?url=http://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/galegnaah/health_services_administration/0?institutionId=735