Jobs can range from healthcare conglomerates who recruit executive directors, to hospital administrators in large, urban, teaching hospitals, to directors of smaller, rural hospitals, to nursing care facilities. Operation specialists are often hired to manage military or veterans programs, and large physician groups hire operations managers to oversee the details of their multi-faceted practices or outpatient clinics. Some healthcare administrators choose to lead institutions or agencies that specialize in areas such as mental health, rehabilitation, or substance abuse. Salaries can range from $70,000 to $170,000 per year.
The financial end of healthcare operations promises dramatic challenges for those with a passion for crunching numbers and assessing quality versus quantity of care. If you view all primary funding sources (which can run the gamut from government or private grants to Medicaid payments) as tests of your creativity that you can’t wait to tackle, then you belong in the fiscal end of operations. Even as you value the humanistic side of healthcare operations, you cannot allow that viewpoint to obscure the fact that we as a nation are at a crossroads in how we pay for our medical needs, with half of Americans demanding government-regulated healthcare-reimbursement plans and the other half hollering that we’re already doing just that.
Healthcare operation manager jobs also involve growth that enhances patient and process flow, productivity and performance management, change-initiatives and project management, or quality improvement. At the top administrative level, they supervise the managers of human resources, materials and purchasing, accounting, inventory control, safety and security, and pharmaceuticals.
The education required for these types of positions usually entails a Master of Public Health degree. Successful candidates for these programs have majored in a health-related science to attain their bachelor’s degree and then matriculate into a two-year master’s degree program. The first year is often didactic classroom instruction, and the second year sees the student administrator in a year-long internship. In some cases, a master’s student is in the program at the request of his or her employer. Perhaps the employer sees his or her potential and is willing to pay the student’s tuition in exchange for a long-term commitment from the employee.
In the cases of skilled nursing homes or large acute-care hospitals that require a nurse administrator, the candidate begins as a registered nurse and ends with a Master of Science in Nursing degree.
With the right combination of undergraduate and graduate degrees, you can move forward into areas such as health law, health ethics, health research, epidemiology and public-health infrastructure, health care finance administration, and others. Many of these people start out in one area—pre-law, for example—and switch into healthcare operations.
Do you think you can handle a job where you have to be prepared to integrate changes quickly? The healthcare field is on the edge of great change. Healthcare operations managers have to be eager to deal with noncompliant payers, interfering government regulations, and technological innovations that cost loads of money and which redefine ethical limits. Budgeting issues have never been trickier. You have to lead your managers in staff development and act with the conviction that the lowliest janitor is as important as your chief physician is. The inventory of electrode pads is just as important as the log for pharmaceutical distributions.
If you feel passionate about all of these areas, then you belong in this profession. Where can you find the best listings of operation manager jobs? At OperationsCrossing.com, a division of EmploymentCrossing, where experts have searched the Internet for all available openings in healthcare operation manager jobs and have placed them into one easy-to-search database. You can search by area or salary; you can plug in your current credentials; you can look for perks such as relocations assistance. You will form a professional partnership with the staff at OperationsCrossing.com that you will want to maintain even after you find the one position that meets all of your career requirements. Visit OperationsCrossing.com today to see what jobs are available!
