Health Services Policy and Management (HSPM) is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the promotion of personal and public health through planning, organizing, directing, controlling, coordinating and evaluating health services.
Career opportunities exist in hospitals and clinics, state and federal health care agencies, physician practices, long-term care facilities, professional organizations, consulting firms, insurance companies, health departments, and hospital and medical associations. Individuals from a wide range of undergraduate majors can expect to succeed in health administration, given the many career opportunities the field offers.
The MPH program emphasizes the management of public health agencies and public sector health services. Graduates from the MHA program find jobs in finance and business development, operations management, information technology management, human resources, patient and community relations and other fields. The Ph.D. prepares students to conduct health services research and/or teach at a university level.
The Department of Health Services Policy and Management’s mission is to be actively involved in improving quality, safety, efficiency and effectiveness of health services and health systems locally and globally. (Adopted Fall 2021).
We offer seven advanced degrees related to health services policy and management. Each graduate degree has specific application deadlines and requirements.
A study led by Elizabeth Crouch, associate professor of health services policy and management and director of the Rural and Minority Health Research Center, has found a connection between children's living conditions and their oral health.
Gabriel Benavidez (Epidemiology and Biostatistics), Maggie Carson (Environmental Health Sciences), and Valerie Yelverton (Health Services Policy and Management), are recipients of three of these prestigious honors.
Jan Ostermann, an associate professor in the Department of Health Services Policy and Management, has been awarded $374K from the National Institutes of Health's Fogerty International Center.
Highly selective, this program is designed to support data/computer scientists/engineers who improve public health by tackling challenges related to biomedical data.
Graduate students from across the Arnold School have earned 2022-2023 SPARC Graduate Research Grants from the USC Office of the Vice President for Research to fund individual scholarship initiatives.
Five Arnold School faculty members and three graduate students have been recognized with 2023 Breakthrough Awards. They have been honored with Breakthrough Leadership in Research, Breakthrough Star (Peiyin Hung) and Breakthrough Graduate Scholar (Valerie Yelverton) Awards.