OVERVIEW
What Is a Hospital CEO?
Hospital CEOs maintain quality, consistent hospital operations, implementing operational strategies that comply with current policies and promote long-term success. In meeting with other hospital executives, you will also ensure that individual departments are fully optimized to satisfy any hospital needs.
The role of a hospital CEO is a highly specialized career option. In addition to a master’s degree, you will need extensive experience in the healthcare industry. Many hospital CEOs also maintain several active certifications to keep their skill sets fresh and relevant as the industry changes.
RESPONSIBILITIES
What Does a CEO of a Hospital Do?
Hospital CEOs fulfill a variety of executive tasks. You might meet with hospital stakeholders, communicate with healthcare administrators, visit one or more hospital department floors, or revise hospital operational procedures to better accommodate current healthcare trends.
- Implementing hospital protocols that promote hospital-wide safety and accommodate any state or federally mandated healthcare standards.
- Staffing departments with executives who understand their roles and leverage past healthcare experiences for the benefit of their current hospital.
- Tailoring financial plans to ensure continually appropriate spending habits across the hospital’s departments.
- Reviewing hospital procedures and operational standards across individual departments to identify opportunities for more efficient processes.
- Ensuring patient satisfaction by reviewing performance indicators submitted by past and current patients.
- Protecting patient safety and dignity through safe healthcare organizational standards that create a nonjudgmental environment for all hospital clients.
- Planning for the hospital’s current and future success by developing operations that are tailored to specific strengths and weaknesses of your facility.
These and other essential healthcare tasks keep a hospital CEO busy exercising the principles of leadership to better fulfill a patient-first mission.
EDUCATION & BEST DEGREES
What Education Does a Hospital CEO Need?
Before you can assume a healthcare leadership role as a hospital CEO, you will need to complete a variety of educational requirements. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in healthcare management or a similar field, you’ll need to continue your education with an applicable master’s degree.
A Master of Healthcare Administration or MBA healthcare management program can put you on the right path toward success, teaching you indispensable risk management, healthcare analysis, and healthcare systems skills that are immediately applicable once your hospital CEO career begins.
When determining the right healthcare leadership degree for you, consider your preferred position. If you’re looking to become a hospital CEO or fulfill a similar healthcare leadership position, you’ll want to prioritize degree paths with management-heavy curriculums. This type of curriculum will be crucial in understanding specific intersections of business and healthcare and give you the key leadership and strategy skills you will need to succeed.
Best Degrees for a Hospital CEO
Health & Nursing
Master of Healthcare Administration
A master's focused on managing comprehensive, value-based care, directly...
A master's focused on managing comprehensive, value-based care, directly in line with innovations in health and healthcare.
- Time: 60% of grads finish within 21 months.
- Tuition: $4,995 per 6-month term.
- Courses: 12 total courses in this program.
Skills for your résumé that you will learn in this program:
- Collaborative Leadership
- Healthcare Models and Systems
- Healthcare Financial Management
- Enterprise Risk Management
- Healthcare Information Technology
Your rich experience in a health-related field can mean more when you bring a master's level of understanding to the problems that organizations need to solve.
Compare degrees
This program is not the only degree WGU offers designed to create leaders in the field of healthcare. Compare our health leadership degrees.
Business
MBA Healthcare Management
Prepare for a career leading private or public healthcare organizations....
Prepare for a career leading private or public healthcare organizations.
- Time: WGU lets you set a schedule so you can finish your MBA in just one year.
- Tuition: $4,755 per 6-month term.
- Courses: 11 total courses in this program.
Skills for your résumé you will learn in this program include:
- Regulatory compliance
- Patient care improvement
- Service line development
- Healthcare trends
- Health policy and legislation
Healthcare is big business in today's complex economy. Steer your career with this specialty MBA.
Compare online business degrees
This program is not the only online business degree WGU offers that is designed to create leaders in the field of healthcare. Compare our health leadership degrees.
How Much Does a Hospital CEO Make?
$153,770
The exact income of a hospital CEO can vary based on a number of factors, including their employer, employer’s location, public or private funding, bonuses and profit-sharing structures, years of experience, education, and active certifications.
On average, the salary of a hospital CEO is $153,770, with a range of roughly $73,000 to $307,000 earned each year.
What Is the Projected Job Growth?
32%
As one of several in-demand healthcare leadership positions, hospital CEOs are expected to experience a favorable job outlook in future years. The employment of medical and health services managers is expected to grow 32% from 2019 to 2029, a growth rate well above average across all occupations.
Hospitals fulfill a critical societal need, housing patients who require more immediate medical attention. Despite the fact that many hospital services are now offered by outpatient clinics, hospitals remain a pillar of modern healthcare in their ability to provide full-service urgent care.
SKILLS
What Skills Does a Hospital CEO Need?
No matter their leadership style, each hospital CEO puts a diversified skill set to use. These individual skills help them guide medical facilities toward continually improved results, while staying true to a mission of patient-first care.
- Executive management: The ability to operate with a leadership attitude while implementing hospital business strategies, to connect patients with high-level care, and to ensure that hospital operations contribute to future success.
- Risk management: The ability to protect a hospital’s core assets while avoiding risks that could compromise progress or corporate outlook.
- Financial management: The ability to appropriately manage a hospital’s finances, allocating budget spend across departments in a way that fosters significant financial returns.
- Interpersonal communication: The ability to correspond with fellow hospital executives, as well as all healthcare staff members, patients, and members of the media.
- Delegation: The ability to correctly distribute tasks to healthcare department administrators and coordinators.
- Organization: The ability to prioritize high-level tasks in order of importance, while delegating less important tasks to appropriate department administrators.
- Public speaking: The ability to confidently address a group of healthcare employees and relay messages and updates.
- Teamwork: The ability to work well alongside other hospital employees, complete projects, and inform future hospital operations.
- Technological proficiency: The ability to fully use all necessary technology, including any computers, tablets, phones, electronic health records (EHRs), internet resources, and online communication tools.
- Problem-solving: The ability to identify and creatively solve issues that are facing a hospital, its employees, or its patients.
These and other skills inform a hospital CEO’s daily leadership responsibilities and help to create a healthcare environment where patients meet favorable outcomes and healthcare professionals are sufficiently motivated.
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