This year, all the students in the fifth cohort of Fordham’s master’s degree in health administration program received a valuable connection to that growing field: student membership in the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE)

On Aug. 8, the group co-hosted, along with the National Association of Health Services Executives (NAHSE), the “3rd Annual Better Together: Celebrating Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” event at the Lincoln Center campus. Several members of the cohort were invited to attend.

Shifting from a Clinical to an Administrative Focus

One of them was Su Su Oo, a native of Myanmar who left her home last year to escape political repression and violence engulfing the country.

Oo had graduated from medical school there and worked for four and half years at a hospital before pursuing a postgraduate degree in public health in New Zealand. Before settling in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, she worked as a field support coordinator for the Myanmar Anti-Narcotics Association.

She soon found herself more interested in the administrative side of health care than the clinical aspects of the field. So she enrolled in Fordham’s program, which is offered through the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“The courses are very comprehensive and cover most everything you would need to understand the health administrative field. I loved learning about things like the social determinants of health and the factors that affect the quality of health care overall,” she said.

“My communication skills and negotiation skills have also improved a lot through the group projects we’ve done.”

Developing Skills Beyond One’s Comfort Zone

Jasmine Morales, a native of Co-op City in the Bronx who currently works as a radiology billing associate at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, earned a certified nurse assistant (CNA) license when she was in high school. Nursing was not ultimately in the cards for her, but Morales stuck with the field.

“In my mind, I said, ‘Even if I can’t be a nurse, I can still help people in other ways, as long as I’m still in health care,” she said.

Her capstone project, on opioid addiction in the Bronx, opened her eyes to the reality of the healthcare system disparities in the United States.

“Going through this program, you see the whole spectrum of health care. The disparities are not just in New York either; it’s global,” she said.

She also feels more confident speaking in public now, having successfully presented her capstone findings to her class. It wasn’t easy, though; at the time, she said she was on the verge of tears.

“I had to learn and keep going moving forward, and part of that is getting you out of your comfort zone,” she said.

“As a leader, at some point in your career, you’re gonna have to talk in front of an audience.”

Preparing Graduates for Current and Future Challenges

Caroline Pogge, Dr.P.H., director of the program, said the goal is to develop leaders who will be prepared to manage both current issues in health care as well as future ones, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the continuous reverberations of the Affordable Care Act (known as Obamacare).

Past graduates of the program, which draws on experts from the Gabelli School of Business, the Graduate School of Social Service, the School of Law, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. have included a medical review officer at Con Edison and a care coordinator at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“We want students to be able to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a situation; I know how to dig into a problem regardless of what that problem is,’” she said.

Harding, a native of Idaho who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2018 with a degree in communication and media studies, said the film inspired to pursue her current career.

“I was interested in the power of positivity. I knew I didn’t want to do anything clinical; I don’t think I have the doctor personality in me. But I knew I wanted to help people, and I knew I wanted to work with kids,” she said.

As a care coordinator at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Harding assists children who need procedures such as bone marrow biopsies. In that role, she said, she constantly utilizes the skills she learned as part of the inaugural cohort of Fordham’s master’s degree in health administration.

“In my department, I am trying to make sure our patients not only have a wonderful patient experience, but I’m also thinking of the procedures. In my department, I have to know what codes to use for billing, and I have to know the ethics behind the children going under anesthesia,” she said.

“All of these things are in the back of my mind while I’m at work, and I learned all of that through my introductory course to health care.” The course is one of 17 courses that comprise the program.

An Industry With Potential

As one of 17 students to sign up for the degree, which is hosted in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and taps the expertise of faculty from the across the university, Harding was exposed to all the facets of an industry that is estimated by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to comprise more than one-sixth of the American economy.

It’s an industry that’s in great flux as well. On Sept. 10, the Census Bureau reported that about 27.5 million people, or 8.5 percent of the U.S. population, lacked health insurance for all of 2018, up from 7.9 percent the year before. It was the first increase in uninsured Americans since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

Falguni Sen, Ph.D., a professor of business at the Gabelli School of Business who heads the program and the Gabelli School’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, said that instability was exactly what the program was designed to address.

“Students told us the program really prepared them to address the challenges that the Affordable Care Act had brought into the health care industry, in terms of integrated care, the importance of prevention in primary care, and looking at the patient as a whole person,” he said.

“They’ve been given the tools where they can identify and create solutions to new problems as they come up.”

A Diverse Cohort

A second-year cohort has already admitted 19 students, and except for a small change to one course to help students better use data, the coursework is the same.

Although all students admitted to the program were required to show that they had a passion for the field consistent with the Jesuit tradition of service for others, Sen noted that differences among the members of the cohort were important too. Not everyone was a recent college graduate like Harding.

“We had members of the group who have been in the medical profession for more than 30 years. They shared information and opportunities with each other, and we see that reflected in the types of new jobs and promotions that these students have ended up getting,” he said.

Jeffrey Moskowitz, M.D., a medical review officer at Con Edison who earned a doctorate of medicine in 1977, was one of them. One of his previous jobs was as an administrator of a large outpatient surgery center, and he said he wanted to learn more about how larger trends in the health care field affected his work.

“My perspective on the field has totally changed. The only thing I knew was what I had personally seen. Here, we got a world viewpoint, which was much greater than anything I’d known before,” he said.

“This was an eye opener in terms of how things work on different levels—not just on a practitioner level, but the hospital level, the lab level, and how government policy affects everything.”

Focusing on Patients, Not Paperwork

For his capstone project, Dr. Moskowitz designed a wellness program for ConEd focused on preventing employees from getting sick. In terms of coursework, he noted that courses on marketing and ethics were particularly useful.

“We reviewed how to look at situations from various viewpoints and make reasonable decisions while keeping moral and ethical thoughts in mind, which is really what health care administration should be about,” he said.

“If the focus is the patient, and nothing is black and white, how do you best choose among the different options? I liked that ethics course a lot.”

And while it’s true that the Affordable Care Act has ceased to continually increase the number of Americans with health insurance, other changes that it inspired live on, he said.

“One of the modern revolutions in health care is actually listening to the patient. Traditionally health care revolved around what worked for the doctor, which is why most health care is delivered between 9 and 5, when it’s inconvenient for people to get there,” he said.

“Now many hospitals now have patient experience coordinators, and Medicare is reimbursing doctors based in part on patient surveys. This was all brought out in terms of the course.”

That renewed focus on patients is evident in the way the degree is structured, he said.

“As a Jesuit university, Fordham cares a lot about people,” he said.

“So it makes sense that this degree is about keeping people healthier, rather than just the simple administration of rules and regulations that help an institution make money.”

To answer the industry’s pressing need, Fordham has created a new multi-disciplinary master’s degree in health administration that will launch in fall 2018.

The degree taps expertise from across the University, including the Graduate School of Social Service and Fordham School of Law. Befitting that multidisciplinary approach, the degree program is hosted in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and headed by Falguni Sen, Ph.D., professor of business at the Gabelli School of Business.

“People are beginning to understand that health care is not something that is just owned by business, or regulatory services, or social service people, or by ethics experts,” said Sen, who heads the business school’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center. “It’s something that everyone has to come together to really deliver.”

Sen said the 12-month degree program is meant to appeal to the burgeoning field of mid-level practitioners with titles like care coordinator, case manager, hospitalist, physician assistant, information technology assistant, nurse practitioner or medical entrepreneur.

The field is also drawing liberal arts undergraduates looking to join a growing sector of the economy. “They may never have to create a balance sheet but since they’ll be tasked with putting into action many of the changes under health care reforms, it’s important that they’re able to read one,” Sen said.

That’s because even though the industry has embraced “patient-centric care,” it still operates from a surplus-generating business model, he said. Those two models—one focused on doing whatever it takes to keep a person healthy and another with an eye on the bottom line—need to be balanced delicately.

“Ideally, we can achieve proper health care if we can bring together the clinical model and the business model to focus on patient centric care” Sen said.

“This master’s degree will help you understand how to make your organization work for both of these models.”

Of the 14 courses required for the degree, nine are brand new. They include Strategy and Operations in Health Care, Behavior Health, Patient-Centric Care, Population Health, Public Health and Outcome Measures, and Negotiating and Communicating in Health Care.

In the growing field of electronic health records, Sen hopes the new master’s degree will close training gaps among longer-term health care workers.

“We’re not going to make people IT experts or teach them how to create new systems, but we can teach them how to use the systems properly and not be intimidated by them,” he said.

Sen said that other big shifts are underway in the field. Health care companies are looking to increase ways to measure patient satisfaction. They are moving toward “value-based payments,” in which insurers place a higher premium on the quality of treatments over quantity. And they are improving transitional care, which takes into account how patients fare when they return home or their community or are moved to nursing or long-term care .

“These changes are here to stay, and I don’t see anything in the new plans being debated in Washington that will stop them,” Sen said.

“Will we have a greater number of uninsured people who will put a serious strain on hospitals? That’s a possibility, and those are serious issues that are being debated. But these administrators will be in demand and expected to perform.”