title: Benchmarking graduate health administration programs: stakeholders' perceptions.
abstract: The purpose of this study was to identify and compare among key stakeholders the factors in graduate health care administration education that are perceived to be important for ranking, or benchmarking, based on the opinions of those stakeholders, i.e., program directors, faculty, graduate students, and accrediting agency commissioners. We used an original survey to obtain stakeholders' perceptions and opinions about important process and outcome measures. We sent it to all ACEHSA-accredited graduate health care administration programs in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico; to full-time faculty members in each program; to three current graduate students in each program, and to all ACEHSA commissioners. We performed frequency of responses, Analysis of Variances (ANOVA) tests, and Dunnett T3 tests. A response rate of 32 percent (n = 156) was achieved for all stakeholders. A total of 67 percent of all respondents reported that benchmarking graduate health care administration programs was important. The study results revealed a significant difference between populations on the importance of evaluating certain process and outcome measures related to curriculum, research, student characteristics, and resources. However, most of the stakeholders reported that curriculum, faculty, and graduate student performance were the key quality indicators of a program. The results of this study provide preliminary information for health care administration programs to begin to develop an educational benchmarking effort.
authors.affiliation: Program in Health Care Administration, Texas Woman's University-Houston, 77030 USA.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lakshmanan
authors.forename: S K
authors.initials: SK
authors.lastname: Moseley
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Garza
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sakowski
mesh_terms: D000068:Accreditation; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D019985:Benchmarking; D003625:Data Collection; D004500:Education, Graduate / Q000592:standards*; D006298:Health Services Administration; D006801:Humans; D017146:Models, Organizational; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D015397:Program Evaluation; D014481:United States