MU Department of Health Management and Informatics Receives Educational Sustainability Award

The Department of Health Management and Informatics (HMI) at the University of Missouri School of Medicine recently received a prestigious national award. HMI’s master of health administration program won the 2020 Canon Solutions America Award for Sustainability in Healthcare Management Education and Practice from the Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management (CAHME).

CAHME recognized HMI for being part of a university successfully committed to sustainability initiatives and for the emphasis on sustainability education within health management and administration.

“We are educating builders of sustainable health systems,” said Sue Boren, PhD, director of academic programs for the Department of Health Management and Informatics. “All health systems face the dual challenges of increasing demand and diminishing resources, and that can lead to an unsustainable system. We teach our students how to do more with less. Our master of health administration program has been accredited by CAHME and its predecessors for 50 years.”

“It is a privilege to have a CAHME-accredited master of health administration program situated within a school of medicine,” said Steven Zweig, MD, MSPH, dean of the School of Medicine. “Not all MHA programs are housed within schools of medicine, so our structure here in Missouri is unique. I am proud of our department and congratulate our faculty and students on this well-deserved award.”

Srinivasan Raghavan, MU’s sustainability manager, said the university uses a benchmarking protocol called STARS, which stands for Sustainability Tracking and Rating System. Within the system, MU is one of 130 institutions in the nation that has a gold star rating.

“Students bring a wealth of information to the classroom,” said Eduardo Simoes, MD, chair of HMI. “Each one of those students are actually faculty in a way because they bring so much from their professional lives. The peer-based learning, strategic curriculum, along with our faculty and their diverse backgrounds, enable our students to think critically about health care strategies to improve the public health and learn how to be a leader in this field.”

“Everything you learn in this program will teach you about how to make good decisions for a department or an organization,” said TJ Sweet, program alumnus and practice manager at MU Health Care’s Ellis Fischel Cancer Center. “This program will prepare you for any role so that you can be an asset to an organization right from the beginning.”

This is MU’s third award from CAHME. Previously, it received the CAHME Cerner Award for Excellence in Healthcare Management Systems Education and the CAHME Aramark Innovation Grant for Driving Innovation and Excellence in Healthcare Management Education.

“Wherever you go in health care, you’re sure to find someone from the University of Missouri,” Boren said.

The award was going to be presented during the 2020 CAHME Awards Luncheon on March 22 in Chicago. Because of the COVID-19 threat, the event was canceled. The CEO of CAHME and a representative for Canon Solutions America will visit MU to present the award at an undetermined date.