Associate Professor of Business
Healthcare Management
Minor
What Is Healthcare Management?
Healthcare management is the work of running the organizations that deliver care such as the budgets, the people, the systems, and the decisions that determine whether a clinic, hospital, or health program actually functions.
The Healthcare Management minor at Goshen College is a 21-credit undergraduate minor that pairs real business management with public health. You’ll learn to read an organization’s finances, lead and develop its people, understand how patients and families actually make decisions about care, and see how policy, funding, and social conditions shape what a health system can do.
It’s open to students in any major, and you declare it with your academic advisor. The course catalog lists the current requirements.
What the work looks like
- Run the organization. Budgets, staffing, culture, and operations and the machinery that has to work before anyone receives care.
- Understand the person receiving care. How patients and families search, decide, delay, and follow through, and what that means for how care should be designed and communicated.
- See the system around it. The policy, funding, and social conditions that decide who gets care, where, and whether they can afford it.
You don’t need a clinical background. You need to care how well the system works for the people inside it.
Healthcare is one of the largest employers on earth, and every hospital, clinic, insurer, public agency, and community health program needs people who can manage the operation without losing sight of the patient. That’s a rarer combination than it sounds. Clinical people often haven’t been taught management. Management people often haven’t been taught health. This minor builds someone who has both.
Why Study Healthcare Management at Goshen College?
Because Goshen won’t let you treat a health system as a balance sheet with patients attached.
Every management decision in healthcare is a decision about someone’s body and someone’s money. Which services a clinic offers. Which shifts get cut. Who’s easy to reach and who isn’t. At Goshen, those questions are the curriculum because this college has spent a century taking seriously the idea that institutions are accountable to the people they serve.
So you’ll learn the management tools, and you’ll learn to ask who bears the cost. Which populations does this decision reach and which does it miss? What does it do to the staff who carry it out? What does the community around this organization actually need, as opposed to what’s profitable to provide? Ethics, stewardship, sustainability, and stakeholder engagement are how the work is taught here.
What sets it apart
- Both languages, fluently. Business and public health in one credential. You’ll be able to sit in a budget meeting and a care-delivery conversation and be useful in both.
- Care as the point, not the byproduct. You’ll be pushed to ask who a decision serves, who it misses, and what it costs the community.
- It goes with the majors you’re already considering. Nursing, public health, exercise science, biology, social work, sport management, business.
- Faculty who know your name. In classes this size, you’ll be asked what you think and expected to have an answer.
Healthcare needs people who can make the numbers work and keep the mission intact. Whether you end up in a hospital, a rural clinic, a nonprofit, an insurer, or a public health department here or abroad, this minor makes you the person who can do both.
Common Questions About the Healthcare Management Minor
No. The minor is designed to be added to any major and starts from the beginning in both halves. Students come to it from nursing, exercise science, biology, social work, business, and beyond.
Three things. You’ll understand how patients and families actually make decisions about care and what that means for the organizations serving them. You’ll understand the socioeconomic, behavioral, and environmental factors that shape health outcomes in a community. And you’ll be able to apply people-management, organizational behavior, and leadership approaches to the workforce challenges healthcare organizations genuinely face.
Especially well with nursing, public health, exercise science, biology, social work, sport management, and business — but it strengthens almost any major. Wherever your field touches clinics, wellness, insurance, or health programs, this minor adds the management and public-health side that turns good intentions into an organization that runs.
No, students completing the Healthcare Management concentration within the Business major aren’t eligible for the minor, since the two cover overlapping ground. If healthcare is where you’re headed and you’re a business major, talk with your advisor about which path fits your plan better.
Twenty-one credit hours. How much of that is new work depends on your major — bring it to your academic advisor with your current plan and they can map it in one conversation. You’ll need to meet the minimum grade standard in the courses that count toward the minor.
Scholarships make up a large portion of Goshen financial aid packages, which average almost $26,000 per student, not counting work-study or loans. Enrolled business students may also qualify for endowed awards including the Sauder Scholarship and the Gorsline Scholarship. Run the net price calculator to see your own number, then talk it through with a real person in the financial aid office.
Jason Harrison
Assistant Professor of Business
Andrew Hartzler
Professor of Accounting
Michelle Horning
Professor of Accounting
Program Director
Department ChairAlysha Liljeqvist
Associate Professor of Business
Jorge Montenegro Martinez
Assistant Professor of Business
Jerrell Richer
Professor of Economics
Carl Kreider Chair and Co-Director of Global EngagementEyob Zeleke
Assistant Professor of Information Technology
