Refocusing health care management: education and training for national health reform

Today's health care professionals must deal with problems of financial viability, competitiveness, quality control, and consumer focus. The major theme of this article is how appropriate is the education system that trains and prepares health care managers for these challenges. Because we are not in the health care business, but rather in the business of managing health care, the authors suggest that a new educational paradigm that incorporates indepth study of business disciplines be the health administration educational model for the 21st century. Whether or not the proposed model is alien to our basic traditional concepts of health care management, the viability of our institutions will be at stake if they do not implement a healthy business protocol to the services they provide.