Competency Model

The MHA program utilizes the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) Healthcare Leadership Alliance (HLA) domains and competencies. Through a thorough assessment and input process from key stakeholders, the program faculty have adopted twenty-five (25) core competencies covering 4 domains (Healthcare Environment; Leadership & Communication; Management; and, Diversity, Equity, Access, & Inclusion). These competencies are developed and addressed throughout the program. Various assessment methods are used to measure competencies, skills, knowledge, and abilities.

Domain 1: Healthcare Environment

This domain encompasses the foundational knowledge and skills required for graduates to work in the healthcare sector.

1-1. Public Health Principles: Understand the role of social determinants, environment, and individual behaviors on the health of populations

1-2. U.S. Healthcare System Structure and Financing: Examine past, current, and emerging issues related to the organization, financing, and management of health and public health delivery in the U.S.

1-3. Health Law and Policy: Discuss compliance with major health laws applicable to health administration stakeholders and the multiple dimensions of the policy-making process

1-4. Community Collaboration: Align the organization’s priorities with the needs and values of the community to move health forward in line with population-based wellness needs and national health agenda.

Domain 2: Leadership & Communication

This domain encompasses those skills that are required to help groups make decisions that motivate others to advance organizational goals that help drive change. In short, this domain includes all the skills and politically savvy necessary to be effective in advancing organizational agendas openly and ethically.

2-1. Communication Skills: Demonstrate effective oral and written communication skills in multiple platforms to convey meaning and build shared understanding

2-2. Team Building and Leadership: Work cooperatively and inclusively with other individuals and/or teams toward shared visions and goals.

2-3. Accountability: Hold oneself accountable to standards of performance.

2-4. Innovative Thinking: Approach one’s work and the organization in new and breakthrough ways to develop creative solutions to complex problems or adapt previous solutions in new ways.

2-5. Professionalism: Exhibit conduct, aims and qualities that characterize a professional person such as competency, honesty and integrity, self-regulation, and the ability to establish, build, and sustain professional contacts for the purpose of building networks.

2-6. Systems Thinking: Assess the potential impacts and consequences of decisions across a variety of system stakeholders.

2-7. Ethics: Recognize ethical frameworks and the role of ethics in organizations and professional communities.

2-8. Change Leadership: Identify strategies and methods to influence and inspire action in others and respond with vision and agility during periods of growth, disruption or uncertainty to bring about the needed change.

2-9. Emotional Intelligence: Develop an accurate view of one’s strengths and limitations, including the impact one has on others and adapt behaviors to environments.

2-10. Critical Thinking: Develop a deeper understanding of a situation, issue, or problem by breaking it down or tracing its implications.

Domain 3: Management

3-1. Human Resource Management: Describe the internal and external factors that affect the healthcare workforce and appropriately employ human resource management processes related to recruitment and selection, job design, feedback and performance management, and managing employee stress and retention.

3-2. Performance Evaluation & Quality Improvement: Apply concepts of process and quality improvement, performance monitoring and reporting to the administration of health care organizations.

3-3. Project Management: Propose a plan to manage a project involving resources, scope and impact.

3-4. Strategic Management & Analysis: Consider the business, demographic, ethnocultural, political, and regulatory implications of decisions and develop strategies that continually improve the long-term success and viability of the organization.

3-5. Organizational Dynamics: Appreciate organization decision making structures and processes to achieve desired outcomes

3-6. Data Analytics: Acquire, analyze and effectively communicate data.

3-7. Financial Management: Evaluate financial and accounting information, prepare and manage budgets, and make sound long-term investment decisions.

3-8. Economic Analysis & Application: Apply economic concepts to the analysis of how stakeholder incentives affect health behavior, decision making, and the functioning of health care markets.

Domain 4: Diversity, Equity, Access, & Inclusion

This domain encompasses the skills required to lead diverse, equitable, accessible and inclusive organizations.

4-1. Identify inequities, understand their causes and strategies to address them. Health Equity Knowledge: Discuss the means by which structural bias, social inequities and racism undermine health and create challenges to achieving health equity at organizational, community and societal levels.

4-2. Health Equity Improvement: Propose strategies for health improvement and elimination of health inequities by organizing stakeholders, including researchers, practitioners, community leaders and other partners.

4-3. Leadership & Management of Equitable Organizations: The ability to accurately hear and understand the unspoken or partly expressed thoughts, feelings, and concerns of others, especially those who may represent diverse backgrounds and very different worldviews.