Our leadership curriculum provides a combination of coursework, professional coaching, and mentored practice that enables you to apply knowledge and skills to become an innovative disruptor in your healthcare practice field. Faculty experts in healthcare finance, policy, systems, leadership, evidence-based practice, and improvement science will guide you through 9 credit hours each quarter for 12 months. Focusing your capstone project on interprofessional teamwork and improvement and collaborative change management, will prepare you for exciting leadership positions in a variety of healthcare settings.
Course Sequence
Curricular Components
MHA200A
Advanced Scholarship in Health Systems Research
This foundation course introduces research design, methods and skills essential to translate evidence into interprofessional practice, leadership, and policy. Students will critique the scientific and practical merit of research studies, including elements of design, sample selection, bias, data collection procedures, metrics, and interpretation of findings. The course provides a foundation for using evidence to develop, implement, and evaluate the capstone project during the student’s two-quarter practicum at the worksite.
MHA200B
Health Finance and Economics
This foundation course presents an overview of the healthcare financial landscape, players, mechanics, and characteristics of reform. The course introduces core concepts of financial management, including balance sheets, income statements, cash flow streams, and the managerial accounting building blocks of budgeting and planning. Students will participate in interactive and targeted assignments and case studies to translate financial concepts into tangible tools to assess, manage, and improve healthcare operations.
MHA201
Leadership: Forces of Change
This course introduces students to leadership theory and practice by focusing on what it means to be a good leader in relationship to healthcare and societal trends. Topics include: recognizing traits, developing skills, creating a vision, listening to out-group members, overcoming obstacles, addressing values and ethics, and leading and motivating through change. Students will critically reflect upon and improve their own leadership performance through interactive exercises and self-reflective activities.
MHA202
Leadership: Environmental Systems
This course educates healthcare leaders about the built environments' impacts on access, affordability, quality, and safety of healthcare delivery. This on-line class covers the full continuum of skills needed to impact environmental change from seeing, to determining, influencing, and innovating. The curriculum progresses from basic spatial concepts to complex ideas with the end-goal of being table to answer the questions: How can I make this a better place? What change needs to happen?
MHA204
Healthcare Economics, Policy, and Decision-Making
This course builds on MHA200B to provide a deeper understanding of healthcare economics, policy, and decision-making. It explores production of health, incentives faced by healthcare organizations, health insurance pricing, health insurance and industry structure in the US, and healthcare costs. Links are made between course content and the role of leaders to increase the value of services, as well as how the organization and financing of systems impact management, strategy, and innovation.
MHA205
Healthcare Quality, Safety and Interprofessional Dynamics
This course prepares students to intentionally and effectively work together to build safer and better, person-centered healthcare systems. Topics include frameworks, core principles and values of team-based care, and managing organizational influences, such as workforce, risk, reliability, and patient engagement to assure safe care. Students will develop and evaluate strategies for managing priorities at the junction of population health, economic and political interests, and forces for social change.
MHA206
Healthcare Systems Management
In an in-depth look at management practices and issues across healthcare organizations, students will evaluate the impact of the mission, values, vision, goals, and objectives on key organizational components, including use of resources, culture change, and decision-making. Special emphasis is placed on management theories and translation to governance, and operational, human capital, financial, and information systems.
MHA208A
Leadership and Healthcare Policy
This course will explore health care and public policy and its impact on health administration. Students will explore the importance of policy analysis and the impacts of policy on decision-making in their role as health administrators.
MHA208B
Strategic Healthcare Leadership
This 5-week course will explore key concepts of strategic healthcare leadership in the larger healthcare system. The purpose of the course is to provide the student with advanced systems knowledge and skills to achieve significant strategic change in healthcare organizations. Leadership and innovation skills are applied to projects. This course will apply key concepts of strategic leadership to include key ideas, constituent engagement, and planning activities for implementation.
Education for leadership in health care systems requires investment in face-to-face, interactive learning in small groups. Session activities will focus on knowledge and skill acquisition, creativity, strategic agility, and interprofessional collaboration to collectively create a sustainable future for health services. You will attend three on-campus sessions as detailed below.
Orientation
Prior to the start of your first quarter, you will attend a full-day on-campus orientation at UCSF where you will meet faculty and classmates and participate in activities to prepare you for your scholarly journey.
MHA207A
Essential Leadership: Foundations for Effective Practice
The first of two on-campus courses introduces core concepts and principles of leadership, teamwork, change management, creativity, and innovation. Using results from standardized assessment inventories, students participate in tailored activities to strengthen their self-knowledge and skill acquisition for leadership development and professional advancement. Students engage in interprofessional group work and structured sessions to initiate their evidence-based project. Preparation for the 2-day intensive includes online pre-work and activities throughout the quarter.
MHA207B
Leadership in Action: Inquiry to Innovation
In this culminating on-campus course, students will demonstrate core program competencies through the integration and application of leadership, social, economic, and theoretical underpinnings of interprofessional and healthcare administration. Students will present their evidence-based capstone project in four formats: scholarly papers, a podium, and a poster presentation, and an advocacy discussion.
MHA 401
ADMINISTRATIVE PRACTICUM
This course is the first in a series of two devoted to the successful completion of an evidence-based, quality improvement project. Each student will critique, develop, and implement a capstone proposal that will be evaluated in the following quarter. The practicum will include individual and group sessions with faculty coaches, a mentored practice of leadership skills, and application of learned material from the foundation courses.
MHA 402
ADMINISTRATIVE PRACTICUM
The goals of this second practicum are to continue building a professional identity as a healthcare leader in the work setting under supervision of a mentor and in sessions with faculty coaches to implement and to evaluate an interprofessional evidence-based project. This practicum includes an online component, mentored practice of leadership skills, and application of learned materials from foundation courses. Faculty coaches support students in leadership and project development goals.
It was a pleasure serving as a mentor. My mentee has significant potential and I feel this program has helped him realize it. The MS-HAIL program offers an opportunity to further develop healthcare administrators’ skills in policy, economics, and leadership and create organizational change in the dynamic field of healthcare delivery.
Andrew N. Goldberg, MD, MSCE, FACS, Professor and Vice Chair
Director, Division of Rhinology and Sinus Surgery
Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery
and Neurological Surgery
University of California, San Francisco
Worksite Mentor
In addition to working with UCSF faculty, during your practicum you will work with a mentor at your organization during your practicum to help you achieve interprofessional proficiency, develop leadership competency, and shape your identity as a healthcare professional.
The program has developed the following guidelines for selecting an appropriate mentor:
- Holds a master’s degree or higher and serves in a leadership position within the organization
- Is not your direct supervisor
- Is able and willing to serve as a role model and meet with you on a bi-weekly basis to:
- provide guidance and feedback to help you achieve interprofessional proficiency, develop leadership competency, and shape your identity as a healthcare professional, and
- supervise and evaluate your leadership development experience and capstone project during the two-quarter practicum series.
During the Healthcare Administration program, you will complete an evidence-based quality improvement (EBQI) project that is conducted in your healthcare organization. The project will address a significant problem and align with the mission and vision of your organization. The project will be a small test of change that can be accomplished within a 6 to 7 month period of time.
During the Healthcare Administration program, you will complete an evidence-based quality improvement (EBQI) project that is conducted in your healthcare organization. The project will address a significant problem and align with the mission and vision of your organization. The project will focus on making a measurable and meaningful improvement.
This project should be one that interests you, allows you to develop leadership and project management skills with an interprofessional team, and be supported by your worksite mentor.
As an interprofessional project, you must embrace working with multiple professionals in your organization with the goal of developing knowledge, skills, and attitudes that result in effective team behaviors and competence.
This evidence-based quality improvement project will serve as the basis for the comprehensive examination required for conferral of a Master of Science degree. To successfully complete the project, you will be required to search for and critique relevant evidence to develop, execute, and evaluate a small test of change during the two-quarter administrative practicum series. During the practicum series you will work with your organizational mentor to develop leadership capacity and interprofessional proficiency as well as complete your EBQI project.
Past EBQI Project Titles
- Decreasing Patient No-show Rates through Transportation Access
- Ensuring a Dignified End-of-Life Care for Veterans: A Nurse-Led Intervention
- Financial and Other Impacts of Supply and Implant Charting Errors
- Identifying and Filling Gaps in Rural Access to Care
- Impact of Virtual Reality on Preoperative Pediatric Echocardiograms
- Improving Outcomes for Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) in Rural Mendocino County
- Reducing Emergency Department Use by Addressing Social Determinants of Health
- Reducing the Number of Visits Made by High Utilizers of the Emergency Department
- Regionalized Diagnostic Clinics in the Eastern Caribbean
- Standardizing Tissue Data Collection: Effectiveness & Relevance in Healthcare
- Using Transitional Support Plans to Reduce the Rates of Psychiatric Readmissions
- Utilization of Bilingual Navigators to Reduce Cancer Patient Distress Levels
Tips for Selecting a Project Topic
It should...
- Matter to the organization, the people you serve, and the people that work in the organization.
- Address a problem/opportunity for improvement.
- Focus on something that happens frequently enough to see improvement in the 6-8 months of the program. For example, addressing an issue that happens only two to three times a year is not a good project topic, but shortening the time from COVID test to results from 3 days to an hour would be.
- Have scientific evidence in the form of research studies supporting it.
- Involve multiple professions.
- Allow you to take a leadership role if possible.
