Online Bachelor of Healthcare Administration (BHA) Degrees: Finding Top Programs

Before graduation, you should expect to cover several foundational topics, regardless of which program you choose to attend or what electives you decide to take. Examples include:

• Leadership and management
• Organizational communication
• Legal and moral conflicts in healthcare
• Financial considerations of a healthcare organization
• The application of information technology
• Evidence-based healthcare services
• Healthcare policy

Some of these topics may have their own dedicated class. Others might be learned through a combination of courses. Either way, these topics will provide a comprehensive overview of how to successfully manage a healthcare organization.

Expert Insight

Try to keep an open mind when working your way through the program. There may be an area of healthcare you’ve never considered specializing in, and taking these courses may open new doors and opportunities you would have otherwise overlooked.

Abrie Edwards, BSN, MHA

Upon completion of an online bachelor’s program in healthcare administration, graduates can expect to be well-versed in the challenges and necessary duties that come with operating and leading a clinical or medical organization. Some of the unique skills students will have at graduation include:

• Interpersonal and mediation skills to facilitate communication and cooperation among various departments and individuals with wide-ranging talents and educational backgrounds.
• Proficiency with accounting tools to analyze financial statements, projections, and billing processes.
• The ability to recognize ethical and moral dilemmas, as well as how to either resolve them or find experts to help make the best of an unwinnable situation.
• Understanding of federal, state and local regulations and laws and how they apply to the healthcare setting.
• Take statistical and epidemiological data and apply them to an existing clinical setting to improve patient and worker outcomes.

Each school will create its own curriculum for an online bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration. However, there will be some common classes that most students can expect to take, regardless of which school they choose. For example, there will be classes that cover the ethics, legal issues, and financial challenges of the healthcare environment. Let’s take a look at some of these courses in more detail.

Healthcare Finance

This class is a primer for the basic concepts of accounting, budgeting, and billing within the healthcare context. Students learn how to use financial analytics to review expenditures, create management assessments, and measure productivity.

Legal & Ethical Issues in Healthcare

Students learn the fundamental principles and rules concerning laws in the healthcare realm as well as ethical principles that govern management decisions in hospitals and other healthcare settings. Students also study the guidelines that help them navigate the moral and legal dilemmas that commonly arise in a healthcare delivery setting.

Information Technology in Healthcare Administration

By taking this course, students learn the basics of information technology in healthcare-specific environments, including electronic health records, data collection platforms, analytics, and how technology can help identify workflow or population health barriers and streamline processes.

Organizational Behavior

This class examines the theories underlying how workers interact and operate within an organization. Students analyze the principles of group dynamics, human psychology, motivation, culture, politics, work environment, and technology, specifically within a business setting.

Management Principles

This course teaches students the proper and effective management of healthcare human resources. Concepts cover a range of management contexts, including recruitment, hiring, firing, training, increasing diversity, and healthcare operations.

Capstone Project

In this intensive course, students demonstrate the integration and synthesis of concepts learned in previous classes by applying them to an actual issue or concern in the healthcare industry. Capstones may incorporate written work, but they tend to be very hands-on and draw on your experiences as well as your education to-date.

Because the bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration is an entry-level degree, college admissions requirements typically match requirements for other bachelor’s degree programs, such as:

• Completion of an application.
• Payment of an application fee.
• Submission of academic transcripts, such as from high school or other post-secondary institutions.
• Admission exam scores, such as from the ACT or SAT.

Entry into the actual healthcare administration program may be a separate process and require completion of basic general lower-division education coursework and prerequisites with a minimum GPA. There are usually no requirements for prior experience in the clinical or healthcare field. However, such experience will be very useful when looking for post-graduate employment.

Online degree programs offer tremendous flexibility in how and when a student completes coursework. Therefore, the time it takes to complete a bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration can vary greatly.

For example, a full-time student will usually be able to earn a bachelor’s degree in approximately four years of study. In contrast, a part-time student may take five or six years to complete the healthcare administration bachelor’s degree. But this longer timeline has the advantage of allowing students to continue working or take care of other personal or family responsibilities while attending school.