Which is better, an MBA in hospital administration or an MBA in healthcare management

It would be unfair to say which is better, each programme is unique, but I can give you a comparison of both and you can decide which is better. Before you read, let me give you an idea about myself, for assuring reliability of my answer. I am have done hospital management some 10 years back and after that worked for 5–6 corporate hospitals and few government hospitals. I also worked for a year in public health field. I also did M.Phil. and doing PhD. Currently I am associated as a faculty at Healthcare Management Programme of Goa Institute of Management.

First of all, these nomenclatures (hospital management or healthcare management) are given by academia and industry, and there is no specific definition to it. So, at lot of places these nomenclatures are used inter-changeably. Individual institutes decide what they want to call their programme and the programme content may vary from institute to institute, even if the degree name is same. Hence, MBA in healthcare management may mean only hospital management in some institute and only public health in another institute, while in few others it may mean combination of both or even inclusion of pharmaceutical management.

So for you to decide, what you want to choose as a career, just looking at the name of degree may not be sufficient. You will also have to refer their programme curriculum (courses they teach), sectors in which their students gets placed and overall objective of the programme.

Having said, some things largely follow when you say hospital management or healthcare management. Below table will give you a comparison based upon what general happens in these two discipline,

I hope above table will give you fair idea about what lies within each of this programme. As I said, earlier that these things do vary from institute to institute. Like at GIM, ISB, IIM-K, etc. healthcare management means significantly different things. Here, the focus is more on producing managers (like general MBA) who are tailored to work in healthcare industry. For them healthcare industry means all organization that play a role in healthcare and it includes medical devices, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, health economics Healthcare IT, besides traditional hospitals and public health.