There's a lot of great information to be found on the internet! However, you must be careful which websites you use when gathering information for your research.
This page provides listings of high-quality websites to help you learn more about health care administration.
How can you tell whether you're looking at a good source or a bad one? Here are some tips:
Look at the name:
Find the contact information:
Look for sources:
These tutorials will help you understand what to look for (and avoid!) when evaluating websites and other information sources:
Simply defined, health care administration is the professional field of managing a variety of health and medical systems. These systems may consist of individual for-profit and non-profit establishments such as hospitals, clinics, mental health facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and other medical-clinical-research environments, including entire networks within which these establishments are a part. For example, administrators might manage a single department within a hospital, manage an entire hospital, or oversee an entire network of hospitals.
Other areas that administrators may manage can include entire public health and health care systems. Level of management may be at local, state, or national levels. Administrators may work for private or public sectors and may hold positions at governmental and non-governmental agencies.
Health care administrators must be excellent managers; they must be leaders who can oversee entire departments, facilities, and/or networks. Often, the duties of an administrator will include fluent knowledge of and ability to apply principles of accounting, budgeting, economics, finance, human resources, marketing, organization, policy analysis, strategic planning, technology, and more. Administrators must anticipate and plan for change and implement a long-term vision for the workplace. They must be knowledgeable in organizational, informational, and systemic productive workflows.
You can read more about health care administrator duties, salaries, and job outlook here: Medical and Health Services Managers. This entry comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook for Management Occupations.
Here are professional organizations and associations that may be of interest to you. Many of them provide free resources, but membership is often required to utilize all services.
Consider joining professional organizations now or in the future, as membership opens opportunities for conferences, networking, and professional development!
If you're using Google to find websites, try including one of the following domains in your search to ensure the most high-quality results.
EXAMPLE
A search for government websites only involving the term "hospital management" looks like this:
A search for institutions of higher education websites only involving the term "hospital survey" looks like this:
In either case, you simply follow your search terms with the word "site," a colon, a period, and the domain you want.
You can also try site:.org and site:.int, but sometimes those sites can still be questionable.
Keep in mind that international higher education sites (for example, those from Canada, the U.K., Australia, etc.) do not use the .edu domain. Instead, try looking for the .ac (academic institutions) domain.