The Health Services Management (HSM) program uses an innovative, instructional approach specifically designed to prepare students to manage the business and operational side of healthcare delivery and related industries. This approach emphasizes the development of “soft” (non-technical) and “hard” (technical) skills necessary to achieve professional success. This is not a writing intensive program. Instead, we focus on preparing students for real world scenarios facing Health Services Managers. This is accomplished largely through case studies as opposed to traditional term papers, book reports, and annotated bibliographies. More specifically, we require students to produce professional deliverables consistent with that typically expected in industry, such as informal and formal business correspondence, action plans, root cause analyses, contingency plans, white papers, and the like. The emphasis is not on the quantity, but rather the quality of the submissions.
All HSM courses are delivered entirely online and leverage a collaborative meeting platform to conduct team meetings, deliver presentations, and interact in real time with industry leaders. We employ an 8-week term format as opposed to a traditional 16-week semester for the 3000 and 4000 level courses. This accelerated model allows students to focus on fewer courses while becoming more immersed in the discipline. In order to aid students in judging the amount of time necessary to fulfill course requirements, the HSM courses employ a standardized structure that balances one’s individual effort with that of his or her team. The program welcomes students from a wide array of professional backgrounds and academic preparation and is geared to non-traditional, working adults.
Finally, Brazosport College offer the country’s first 4+1 program between colleges and universities. This program allows eligible seniors to take up to 12 credit hours of graduate coursework from a partnering college or university whereby those earned credits are reverse transferred into the bachelor’s program as electives. This allows students the opportunity to complete up to one-year of graduate school and even earn a Graduate Certificate by the time they complete their 4-year degree. The graduate programs make their curricula available entirely online.