Towards evidence-based health administration education: the tasks ahead

The vision of a more objective, patient-oriented and quantitative evaluation of medicine motivates much current activity in health care, and has come to be called "evidence-based" medicine (Atkins, Kamerow and Eisenberg 1998). A similar vision underlies this special issue. It derives from the 1998 AUPHA annual meeting theme of teaching management technology and the work of an AUPHA task force. The task force is seeking support for a collaborative program to develop measures of educational outcomes and use them in the systematic improvement of member programs (Stephen F. Loebs, PhD, Chair. Members include Ray Davis, PhD; Jeptha W. Dalston, PhD; Gary Filerman, PhD; Barry Greene, PhD; the author; and Douglas Wakefield, PhD.) The task force calls this effort "evidence-based health administration education." It intends a systematic, outcomes-oriented, evaluation and improvement of the educational process, as the evidence-based medicine movement does of medical care. Evolution of member programs using measured performance and continuous improvement is implied, rather than dramatic change (Griffith 1998). Just as evidence-based medicine relies on a disease-oriented taxonomy, evidence-based education must rely on an agreed-upon set of specific skills, knowledge, and abilities (SKAs) that can be learned by students and tested in graduates. This paper discusses what lessons can be learned from the papers reported in the issue, identifies the components necessary to implement the vision, and suggests how AUPHA can proceed in the near future to implement evidence-based education.