Deneen Richmond, MHA is the vice president for Quality & Performance Improvement at Inova, Northern Virginia’s leading not-for-profit health system. She is also an award-winning MHA@GW instructor, as well as an alumna of the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health’s MHA program.
She explains on this video why she believes that this is an interesting and exciting time to study health administration. Her reasons include the current focus on value-based health care, because studying health administration helps hospital administrators understand the intersection between quality, cost, and the patient experience. Administrators can help to coordinate care across the continuum of health care offerings and thereby reduce the fragmentation that individuals often encounter in dealing with health care, Richmond says.
“In health care, we are a high-risk industry,” Richmond says. “We have people’s lives in our hands, [and] we have so many opportunities to perfect the way that we deliver care.”
“I believe that an MHA degree is one of the best things that can equip you with that solid foundation, the core knowledge base,” Richmond concludes. The degree gives alumni “the ability to look at how to apply the information to continue to help our communities, particularly if we want to improve quality, operational efficiencies and cost—and make sure that we are a patient-centered industry.”
View the video here