About GPHAP
The Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy (GPHAP) is unique among health administration programs in the United States. GPHAP allows students to earn a Certificate in Health Administration and Policy while earning a master's degree in one of the participating graduate schools on campus: The Graduate School of Business, the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, and the School of Social Service Administration.
The University of Chicago founded the first program of its type in 1934, and since that time, has trained more than 900 leaders in the field—talented individuals now leading major medical centers, healthcare organizations, universities, government agencies, foundations, insurance companies, and consulting firms across the country. What makes the program so valuable is its interdisciplinary focus.
Recent graduates of the program have entered a wide range of healthcare organizations—healthcare consulting firms, federal and local government agencies, teaching hospitals, community-based service agencies, the pharmaceutical industry, and managed care organizations. Graduates consistently tell us their multidisciplinary training gave them the background necessary to operate successfully in the complex healthcare environment.
An Interdisciplinary Approach
By drawing students as well as faculty from business, public policy, social services administration, and medicine, the GPHAP has assembled one of the richest and most diverse set of intellectual resources available to students who wish to enter the field of healthcare management and policy.
Increasingly, the healthcare organizations need individuals with vision and judgment to face various economic, ethical, and social issues as well as the financial demands of the complex field. As healthcare professionals encounter new forms of reimbursement, regulation, and measures of performance, the connection between administration and policy becomes stronger. Managers need to understand healthcare policy just as policymakers need to understand the operating environment of healthcare providers. Thus, the demand for healthcare professionals has broadened as the field has become more diverse, encompassing new environments, alliances, and models of care. As never before, health services are becoming integrated with public health policies, social services, mental health services, and long-term care.
Across the industry, career opportunities abound for leaders equipped to meet the challenges of this complex and growing industry. The next generation of healthcare leaders will require not only a diverse skill set, but a deep interdisciplinary training in policy, management, finance, and social service delivery—the kind of training offered at The University of Chicago—in order to tackle the healthcare management issues of the next century.
The History of GPHAP
By the early thirties, Michael M. Davis had visited hospitals across the country as a privately practicing consultant. Davis had a Ph.D. in sociology and was an innovator in hospital administration, a formidable advocate for new methods of delivering and paying for medical care, and an important participant in the formation of the social security system. His travels as a hospital consultant revealed that many hospital superintendents were inadequately trained for their positions and were absorbed in the details of institutional administration – for instance, in housekeeping – rather than in the larger mission of efficiently and fairly delivering health care to the public. Davis also recognized that most hospital administrators lacked proper training in business – in accounting, administrative statistics, and in managing supplies. To correct these deficiencies, Davis envisioned a systematic teaching program in which successful practicing administrators could disseminate their knowledge under the legitimizing auspices of a university.
Davis found support for his unique idea at the University of Chicago through the deans of the Graduate School of Business and the medical school and from faculty in the Department of Sociology and School of Social Service Administration. He began the Program in Hospital Administration in 1934, the first program of its kind in the world.
The program was placed in the business school, for purely practical reasons, according to Davis; the founder firmly believed that traditional business subjects were crucial to the hospital administrator’s education, but that the primary objective of hospital administration was broader than just organizational management.
Davis believed that the new professional hospital administrator must possess a balance of business skills and social vision and saw, even in 1934, that escalating medical technology would demand more competent and widespread administration of its benefits.
Subsequent directors of the program generally maintained Davis’s original educational model: one year of academic coursework followed by a residency. During the first thirty years of the program, fifteen other universities began hospital administration programs based on Davis’s Chicago model. In 1991, more than fifty graduate programs operate across the nation.
The program began its vigorous alumni association in 1942, and the Chicago program’s alumni and directors have dominated leadership positions in the field’s most important profession associations: for instance, Arthur C. Bachmeyer, M.D., director of the program from 1935 to 1951, headed the Commission in Hospital Care in the 1950s. Andrew Pattullo (class of 1942) was influential in establishing the Association of University Programs in Health Administration, as was Ray E. Brown (class of 1945), the program’s director from 1951 to 1962, who was chairman of the committee that led to the creation of the AUPHA. Brown was also president of the American Hospital Association from 1955 to 1956.
George Bugbee, director of the program from 1962 to 1970, headed the AHA from 1943 to 1954 (the first non-physician in that role). Bugbee was instrumental in the 1946 passage of the Hill-Burton Act, legislation that provided funds to build new hospitals needed after a lapse in construction during the Depression Era and World War II. Bugbee also headed the Health Information Foundation in New York, which was transferred to the University of Chicago in 1962 and renamed the Center for Health Administration Studies – the center that flourishes there today.
Bugbee instituted changes in the emphasis of the program’s curriculum that remain today. The apprentice model – four quarters on campus and about a year of internship in a hospital – changed in the 1960s; business schools across the country strove to teach general business principles that could be applied to all organizations. The trend agreed with Bugbee’s philosophy that two years in residence at a university served the student better than an internship: Bugbee, a highly experienced administrator himself, believed students had the rest of their lives to gain practical experience. This academic orientation continued after Bugbee’s directorship with Bugbee’s protégé, J. Joel May (director from 1970 to 1977), and subsequently, Odin W. Anderson (director from 1978 to 1980) and Ronald M Andersen (director from 1980 to 1990) – both outstanding career researchers in health services.
The University of Chicago Program has expanded to include more emphasis on social service and on public policy – changes Michael M. Davis would have applauded. He wrote, in 1958:
“I do not wish to see the essential business subjects neglected in the curriculum. I do think that much emphasis should be laid on medical objectives, professional organization and relations, and that more time should be given to community organization and relationships. I might add that the teaching of community organization in some of the schools of social work might be studied to advantage, for in my observation it is superior to the teaching of this subject in departments of social science, where the focus is often on analysis instead of on analysis as a tool for action” (“ Development of the First Graduate Program in Hospital Administration,” The Journal of Health Administration Education, vol. 3, no. 2, spring 1985, pp.121-134).