Specialty Description
Fellowship programs in health care administration, leadership, and management include experiential and didactic education that integrates medical knowledge with health systems science, allowing fellows to develop skills of physician executives who manage patient care operations across medical specialties and health care professions. Consistent with the Quadruple Aim, these fellowships follow a balanced approach to health care quality and safety that optimizes the improvement of population health, patient and family experience, and provider well-being while reducing health care costs.
Health care administration, leadership, and management represents a body of knowledge that addresses the system-based needs of health care environments. Fellowships in health care administration, leadership, and management integrate learning from medicine, business, public health, communication, computer science, economics, law, and other disciplines in a singular educational program. Health care administration, leadership, and management utilizes a health systems science framework that defines the knowledge and skills required of physician executives, and the academic structures of these Sponsoring Institution-based fellowships.
Health care administration, leadership, and management fellowships include experiences that allow fellows to assume progressive responsibility for projects across different areas of health care operations. Fellowship accreditation allows flexibility to customize learning experiences aligned with fellows’ career goals, as well as with the health care system’s needs for physicians with expertise in health care administration, leadership, and management.
Fellows attain competence in essential aspects of administration of complex health care organizations. Under faculty member supervision, fellows obtain practical experience working with individuals and business units that have broad responsibility for health care, workforce, and public safety in health care settings. Programs provide fellows with opportunities to develop skills at participating sites that may include, but are not limited to, hospitals, community-based centers, and government-operated facilities.
Fellows gain experience during rotations in the offices of health care executives and other administrative and operational departments of health care facilities. In these settings, fellows learn to manage institutional systems that are critical to health care delivery, including systems critical for the promotion of patient safety, such as those related to event reporting, event investigations, care transitions, and patient safety education. Rotations also prepare fellows to provide leadership of organizational quality improvement activities in alignment with strategic goals, and through interprofessional team collaboration. Fellows learn techniques for measuring health care quality through the effective use of institutional, population-level data to drive performance improvement and to reduce health care disparities.
Didactic education anchors fellows’ experiences in theoretical and practical knowledge relevant to their subsequent leadership roles. Local, regional, and/or national educational programming introduces fellows to foundational concepts of health systems science and other relevant disciplines. Fellowship programs may also include master’s-level coursework and project-based learning, certificates, or other components that emphasize institutional leadership in the administration, leadership, and management of health care and health systems.