Competency-based healthcare management education: the Saint Louis University experience.

As a follow up to a school-wide initiative to create a common set of competencies for all degree programs in the Saint Louis University School of Public Health, in January 2000 the Department of Health Management and Policy (HMP, renamed from the Department of Health Administration in 2002) began a process to develop a competency-based curriculum for its Master of Health Administration (MHA) degree program with the goal of establishing a foundation for systematically measuring the learning outcomes of its students as they progressed through the program. This article describes how the department developed a set of competencies most appropriate for graduate training in healthcare management, how it incorporated these into its overall MHA program curriculum and content, and how effective this approach has been in measuring student progress in mastering these competencies over the first two years of this initiative. The problems and challenges encountered during this process are discussed, as are the next steps for effectively using competencies to assess healthcare management program learning outcomes. Our experience provides a model for other healthcare management programs considering using an outcomes approach for curriculum development and assessment.

Teaching economics in the graduate health administration curriculum: a mini-case simulation approach.

Training in the discipline of economics has long been recognized as an important component of the curriculum in graduate health administration (GHA) education. Yet economics is a subject that is often considered hard to teach and difficult for students to learn. What is missing is a body of literature that identifies methods that are most appropriate for teaching economics to graduate students aspiring to be health care managers. Moreover, given the keen interest in developing competency-based curricula today, what is also needed is empirical evidence, which systematically links the key skills, knowledge, and abilities economics courses try to develop with the teaching approaches best suited to do so. This paper helps fill this gap in the literature by describing and evaluating the author's "Top of the News" (TOTN) mini-case simulation series piloted in her Health Care Economics course in the Master of Health Administration (MHA) curriculum at Saint Louis University during the spring semester of 2002. This approach combines elements of the case study and simulation methods used by others, but adds several innovations. Although the TOTN method was designed specifically for a course in health care economics, it is one that can be readily adapted for courses across the GHA curriculum. The article concludes that although the TOTN exercises proved to be fairly successful, GHA faculty and practitioners concerned about preparing today's students to meet tomorrow's health care leadership challenges need to not only identify effective teaching methods, but also have a lot more to discover about the learning styles of the students they teach.