What is a Good Choice of Internship Along with a Healthcare Administration Degree?

An internship is an important part of any healthcare administration student’s undergraduate or master’s degree experience. It provides practical skills, opportunities and insight into a health administrator’s day-to-day activities that simply cannot be found in a classroom setting. Here are a few different industries and entities that would provide any eager healthcare administration student with a rewarding, enlightening internship experience:

Hospitals, Health Networks and Other Health-Related Organizations

Healthcare facilities, networks and other related organizations hire healthcare administration students to work in management and policy-making positions. Health administrators attend to such duties as formulating and approving budgets, performing internal audits of the entity’s policies and procedures, communicating with patients, negotiating with suppliers and sponsors, soliciting donations from individuals and organizations, attending continuing education events and conferences, providing the public with education about the particular entity for which they work and meeting with subordinates.

Government

There are abundant employment and internship opportunities for healthcare administration students in government at the federal, state and local levels. The federal Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Labor and THIS all claim a number of health administration graduates among their employees. State and local departments of health are also hotbeds of opportunity for healthcare administration students. Legislators and lobbying firms also hire healthcare administration students. The former utilize these students’ expertise in crafting legislation to be proposed, opposing unfavorable legislation and providing them with both oral and written briefing on the day’s most important health-related issues. Lobbying firms, on the other hand, hire health administration students to persuade legislators that their clients’ interests should be served in any upcoming legislative sessions, votes and committee meetings. Lobbyists must have detailed knowledge of the issues in which their clients are interested in order to persuade legislators to take

Consulting Firms

Large consulting, audit and professional services firms—for example, Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte and PwC, most commonly referred to as the “Big Four” professional services firms—are doing everything in their power to become one-stop shops for their large, wealthy, powerful clients. These clients, which are usually large businesses with hundreds or thousands of their own employees, must make sure that they comply with federal, state and local healthcare-related laws, regulations and ordinances. Performing an audit of a large business’ internal health-related rules and procedures requires these consulting firms to employ personnel who have an in-depth knowledge of health law and policy at all levels of government. These firms also provide healthcare administration students with generalized business knowledge that will serve them for the remainder of their professional lives, not to mention the fact that they routinely make many publications’ “best places to work” and “best places to start a career” lists.

Conclusion

Healthcare administration students would be well served to seek out internships in the private, public or nonprofit sectors. Each will provide them with a number of different opportunities to perform the duties and responsibilities of a healthcare administration professional.