Okay, not every healthcare professional. If you’re a nurse, you don’t need to know how to balance the books, but bedside care is just a small slice of what happens within a healthcare system.
Beyond the hospital room, there is an entire ecosystem of decisions that need to be made well. Administrators make high-leverage choices that influence tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives, depending on the service area.
Over the course of an administrator’s career, they could literally touch millions of people. If you’re interested in becoming a healthcare leader, you need to understand the business side of things as well as the patient side.
In this article, we take a look at business skills every healthcare professional with an eye toward leadership and influence should take into consideration.
Financial Management and Budget Literacy
The money side of healthcare is ugly, controversial, and unpleasant, at least in the eyes of the many American consumers who have struggled to pay a hospital bill.
On the organizational side of things, however, it’s through financial literacy and management that the lights stay on.
Imperfect though American healthcare is in the context of affordability, the bottom line is that it’s through this consideration that all other things are achieved.
Hospital administrators:
- Develop budgets. How much money can a department afford to spend? The answer isn’t as much as needed. There’s a specific number. Administrators are the ones who figure out how to keep costs controlled so that care providers can continue delivering the best possible care to patients.
- Conduct financial analysis for decision-making. Do we invest in new machines? What about experimental treatments and procedures? These are choices that need to be made well and made constantly.
- Maintain basic financial literacy. There’s an element of being able to read a profit and loss statement or a balance sheet to understand cash flow. It’s these documents that, simple though they may be in the grander context of business management, signal the health of an organization.
Healthcare leaders who can’t read a budget sheet are going to struggle to understand what their organization needs and how to pilot the hospital toward its intended future.
You can learn these skills largely through an MHA, Master of Health Administration, program. What is an MHA degree, you might ask? These courses teach you everything you need to know about the financial aspects of healthcare.
Strategic Planning and Operations Management
The role of a healthcare manager is to reduce bottlenecks, manage waste, and generally improve the quality of care.
In this way, your role aligns with what most people on the consumer end of things are looking for.
People do have common grievances about, for example, feeling heard by their providers, but often it’s the procedural component of receiving care that creates the most friction on the patient end of things.
Crowded wait rooms. Long wait times for appointments. An inability to communicate directly with their physician in a time-sensitive manner.
A good administrator can and will constantly adjust organizational readiness based on performance metrics.
In administrative educational programs, you will learn how to strategically plan systems based on what resources your hospital has.
There are other logistical considerations, like supply chain management, that are of equal importance that virtually no one who isn’t a hospital administrator gives any thought.
In a post-pandemic environment, or even just a world of ever-complicated trade agreements, understanding how to keep supplies well-stocked is an incredibly important skill that only administrators can apply.
Risk Management
Risk management is an important element of healthcare administrative work. At the most basic level, there are compliance requirements that all healthcare institutions need to take seriously—HIPAA, EMTALA, and so on.
Equally important is to maintain accreditation and certification compliance, and also just generally evaluate processes based on their likely outcomes.
The ultimate idea is to maximize patient safety while optimizing for efficiency.
In a setting where every consumer interaction is of maximum importance, but resources are nevertheless limited, how do you decide what to do?
That’s the ultimate and most pressing question on the minds of any administrator. Finding the answer is a valuable skill that will not only influence many lives, but also shape the direction of your career.
Hospital administrators can make a lot of money—some $200,000 a year or more. This is because the work that they do is high value and of the utmost importance.
Personnel Management
Finally, healthcare leaders focus on managing employee satisfaction and performance. Today, virtually every hospital in the United States is short at least a few nurses—many are significantly worse off than that. 
Not only is this hard on patients, creating bottlenecks and delays in care, but it’s also hard on the staff who do stick around.
Anyone who has worked in a short-staffed environment knows that every day on the job becomes harder when you’re not adequately supported by coworkers.
Strong administrators reduce turnover and improve operations as a result. It’s not an easy job, but it’s an important one.
Doctors and nurses play a vital role in providing care, but it’s administrators who make it all possible.
If you want to have the highest imaginable impact on your local healthcare system, consider approaching the work from a business angle.
