By Leslie Doyle | 02/03/2026
If you’re looking to gain useful business skills and eventually seek a management role, you may want to consider an MHA or MBA degree. However, there are key differences to each type of degree.
A Master of Health Administration (MHA) degree offers you the chance to learn leadership skills for the healthcare sector. A Master of Business Administration (MBA) prepares students with the knowledge needed to pursue leadership positions across a variety of industries.
Choosing a Master’s Degree Program
It may not always be clear whether an MHA or MBA is the right choice for you, because there is some overlap in these graduate programs. Both will deepen your experience with managing people and prepare you for environments where you’ll be expected to make important decisions.
MHA vs. MBA: Understanding Key Differences
Your choice of an MHA vs. MBA will depend on your current experience and future career goals.
An MBA may be an appropriate choice if you’re not sure what industry you’re looking to work in or if you’d like to acquire a broad range of skills. Many working professionals choose this degree program because they want to seek career advancement or want to switch careers.
Business administration courses generally offer a comprehensive understanding of various topics such as:
- Corporate finance
- Operations management
- Regulatory compliance
The MHA is ideal for you if you’re interested in healthcare finance, health policy, or population health. Students in this degree program build on their strategic thinking, decision-making, and operations management capabilities needed to run an organization in the healthcare industry.
By honing their management skills, healthcare administration students can gain an understanding of how to manage a diverse workforce and improve the quality of patient care.
MHA Degree Learning Objectives
In a healthcare administration program such as the MHA, students can expect to learn how to:
- Apply business concepts such as health economics in healthcare organizations
- Understand what’s involved with ethical and effective leadership
- Advocate for healthcare policies and healthcare laws that improve healthcare delivery
- Apply legal and ethical decision-making to health administration
- Build relationship management skills that can be used across health systems
- Use technology applications such as health information management
Additional MHA Competencies
Leading in the healthcare industry is no easy feat. Master of health administration students must excel at a wide range of skills, such as:
- Grace under pressure – Healthcare administration positions tend to be high-pressure. Ideally, MHA courses expose students to real-world settings to prepare for these challenges. Degree programs may offer this experience through simulations or internships.
- Healthcare system knowledge – The U.S. healthcare system is highly complex. If you want to seek a leadership role in health administration, you’ll need to be familiar with how healthcare is delivered and paid for. Understanding healthcare finance and healthcare administration can be useful for making future health policy decisions.
- Comfort with ever-changing technology – Another challenge for healthcare administrators is understanding the shifting set of technologies they encounter in their work. Healthcare leaders must understand relevant technology platforms and current trends in healthcare technology, as well as the legal, operational, and ethical principles that apply to these tools.
- Leadership – One of the most important skills for healthcare administrators is leadership. An MHA program can help you be prepared to understand the difficult ethical decisions you may face in your work as well as guiding principles for decision making. Administrators typically serve as role models, inspiring other healthcare professionals to achieve specific goals related to safety, quality, and efficiency.
- Talent management – As with any management role, healthcare administrators need a strong grounding in human resources (HR). Understanding the nuances of managing and motivating other people in a healthcare environment is essential.
- Public health systems – MHA programs often provide students with an appreciation of public health concepts and population health management.
MBA Degree Learning Objectives
MBA students typically seek to acquire leadership and strategic skills, so they can pursue high-level management roles or run their own business. MBA courses usually provide students with career-relevant perspectives across the corporate world as well as the public sector.
Core courses of a master of business administration program include:
- Marketing
- Management
- Analytics
- Human resources
To prepare for real-world situations, MBA students may be required to complete exercises such as writing a business plan. Business schools also offer experiential learning through case studies and simulations.
Typically, MBA students learn how to:
- Use financial analysis tools to make informed decisions
- Build an effective corporate strategy
- Analyze regulatory and legal aspects of an enterprise
- Choose an effective management approach
Collaboration is often a large part of the MBA. MBA students have opportunities to connect with peers and instructors and can also build their professional networks.
Additional MBA Competencies
MBA students gain a variety of useful skills that they can apply to a wide range of corporate settings or government agencies, including:
- Strategic thinking – MBA programs teach students about business strategies. This work includes driving innovation, conducting competitive analyses, and developing customer acquisition and retention programs.
- Decision-making – Beyond leadership, MBA students learn the skills to prepare them to make important decisions, ranging from the ethical use of artificial intelligence to managing crises. Students may also complete courses in topics such as cybersecurity and project management, as well as risk management, quality control, quality improvement, and corporate finance.
- Negotiation – As potential future leaders, MBA students need to master the art of negotiation. An MBA’s courses help students learn tactics such as active listening, consensus building, and persuasion skills.
- Managing a global enterprise – To gain the skills to work in a global economy, MBA students often learn about current and evolving practices that affect worldwide markets. This knowledge helps them to prepare for roles such as managing a global supply chain or supporting a geographically diverse workforce.
Some MBA programs offer concentrations to enable you to delve deeper into a particular topic. For instance, you may gain specialized knowledge about a different industry or discipline, such as sports management or information technology.
Why Choose an MHA?
The core focus of a master of health administration program involves learning what it takes to run a healthcare company in a way that drives efficiency and quality improvement. An MHA may be right for you if you’re looking to:
- Focus your career path exclusively on healthcare leadership roles
- Build on your existing skills in healthcare
- Deepen your understanding of healthcare operations and administration
- Seek a hands-on management career in a hospital or other healthcare setting
Why Choose an MBA?
An MBA could be the right academic path for you if you want to gain:
- Broad management skills you can apply in a variety of environments
- Greater flexibility in choosing your future career path
- Versatile skills
- Knowledge to support a potential executive leadership role
Typical Healthcare Leadership Roles
MHA graduates are typically seeking to eventually serve as healthcare leaders and manage other healthcare professionals. Often, graduates of MHA programs may pursue careers as:
- Clinical directors
- Chief nursing officers
- Healthcare consultants
- Hospital administrators
- Nursing directors
- Patient services directors
- Health services managers
Common Business Administration Roles
People often enter master of business administration programs to gain the knowledge to pursue leadership positions. MBA graduates may seek work in healthcare or virtually any other field.
Common jobs for MBA graduates with the right knowledge and experience include:
- Business operations managers
- Marketing managers
- Financial analysts
- HR managers
- Product managers
- Operations directors
Note: Job titles are only examples and are no guarantee of future employment.
Skills Needed in Healthcare Administration
Ideally, future healthcare leaders will have a strong interest in managing teams and serving the needs of patients. They also need strong decision making and problem-solving abilities.
Roles in this field require a plethora of soft skills, ranging from conflict management to teamwork. If you’re interested in working in healthcare administration, you’ll need the soft skills to manage healthcare professionals on the front lines of patient care while handling the intricacies of healthcare regulations.
Health administration is also rapidly changing. To succeed as a healthcare leader requires the ability to stay ahead of trends and adapt to shifting, often unexpected situations.
Skills Needed in Business Administration
Anyone who is looking to work in business administration will need foundational skills in collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and problem solving. Typically, MBA students can sharpen their business acumen and become decisive, inspirational leaders. Pursuing an MBA also helps students develop their confidence in taking on additional responsibilities.
As potential future leaders, MBA students must learn to:
- Delegate tasks
- Support their staff
- Make objective, often time-sensitive decisions
Core courses in MBA programs help students gain an understanding of organizational behavior and how to foster teamwork. Financial analysis is often part of an MBA program to support future leaders in understanding how to make prudent business decisions.
Choosing a Graduate Degree
It’s normal to experience pressure when you’re choosing a graduate degree program, feeling the choice will make or break your career success. However, both MHA and MBA programs will provide an enriching learning experience, help to prepare you for seeking leadership positions, and teach you a high degree of business acumen.
The Master of Science in Healthcare Administration at APU
For students seeking to improve their knowledge of the healthcare industry, American Public University (APU) provides an online Master of Science in Healthcare Administration. This degree program offers courses in technology applications in healthcare organizations, as well as leadership and management in healthcare organizations. Other courses include human resource management in healthcare, healthcare finance, and organizational behavior.
This master’s in healthcare administration has earned specialty accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME®). This specialty accreditation ensures that the program has been rigorously examined by higher education professionals to ensure adherence to high academic standards.
For more information on this degree, visit APU’s nursing and health sciences degree program page.
CAMHE is a registered trademark of the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education.
