Jul

20

Baylor MHA

Filed Under AFMS Careers, Education | Leave a Comment

How many of you are familiar with the Baylor MHA program? It’s the military’s Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) program that partners with Baylor University. The actual program is conducted at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. It is taught by both civilian Baylor professors and military instructors, and the prerequisites for entry it is pretty tough to get into.

“If you graduate from college with a 2.0 GPA you can still apply to Harvard Business School’s MBA program,” Coppola says. “You won’t get accepted, but you can apply. Here at Baylor, you have to be a top-level performer just to be allowed to apply - and then there is more culling on this end.” (Patrick and Coppola, for example, competed as students against nearly two dozen other soldiers for two of the Army slots).
“The students refer to it as ‘taking a long drink from a fire hose,’” says Lt. Col Nick Coppola, the program’s director. “Typically, the first year they spend about 40 hours in class and another 50 hours studying each week in addition to maintaining all the other military standards required of them. So that’s a pretty appropriate metaphor.”

The program consists of one academic year at Ft Sam Houston totalling 60 credit hours. Courses include strategic planning, quantitative analysis, international health, epidemiology, finance, information systems, health policy, and medical jurisprudence. A grueling year, especially when coupled with military requirements such as physical fitness and team projects.
After completing the academic year, students are sent to year-long residency programs at large hospitals or other healthcare agencies, such as Johns Hopkins, Wilford Hall Medical Center, and Ben Taub General Hospital. During residency, the students observe and learn about managing large healthcare systems, complete various projects for the COO or Administrator, and complete a comprehensive Graduate Management Project.
The academic standards, the comprehensive course of study, and the demanding residency all add up to the Baylor MHA program being ranked #20 in the nation by US News & World Report; it is almost always in the top 25 out of more than 300 programs in the nation.
Also of note: the Baylor MHA program is open to all branches of military service (AF, Army, Navy) and also to civilians in the Veterans Administration. Graduates are largely healthcare administrators (MSC officers), but every class also includes a handful of nurses, at least one physician and one dentist, and a smattering of allied health officers such as pharmacists and podiatrists.
If you’d like to learn more about the Baylor MHA program or the history of it and the alumni, one of the long-time professors in the program, David Mangelsdorff, maintains a large list of links and resources.
And how do I know so much about the program? Why, I’m a graduate, of course! If you plan to make the AFMS a career and have a passion for healthcare administration, then this is the program for you. You will learn things and meet people that simply can’t be duplicated in a “civilian” MHA program.