Career

Medical and Health Services Manager

A medical and health services manager runs the business side of a hospital unit, a clinic, or a nursing home, so the doctors, nurses, and techs can spend their time on patients.

O*NET profile

Median pay (US)

$123,860

2025 · $59.55 an hour

O*NET source

Job outlook

Much faster than average

O*NET's band for this category is 7% or higher, 2024-2034

O*NET source

To get in the door

Bachelor's degree

Most of these occupations require a four-year bachelor's degree, but some do not.

Openings a year

62,100

projected, nationally

O*NET source

What the day actually looks like

Own the schedule and the staffing. Who works which shift, whether the unit has enough people for the patients walking in, and who covers when two people call off.
Run the money. O*NET lists the core task as conducting and administering fiscal operations: planning budgets, authorizing expenditures, establishing rates for services, and coordinating financial reporting.
Supervise and evaluate the staff. O*NET names medical, nursing, technical, clerical, service, and maintenance personnel, so a manager is evaluating a nurse, a records clerk, and a housekeeper in the same week.
Keep the place legal and survey-ready. Track state rules, Medicare rules, and accreditor standards, and fix what an inspection would flag before the inspector arrives.
Live in the record system and the reports. O*NET lists Epic Systems, MEDITECH, eClinicalWorks, Excel, Tableau, and SPSS among the software for this occupation, and managing computerized record systems is a listed task.

Skills you need first

Reading dense rules and writing plainly. Much of the job is turning a regulation or a policy into something a tired staff member can follow at 3 a.m.
Math you can defend out loud. Budgets, percentages, cost per unit, staffing ratios. Not calculus, but numbers you will be questioned on.
Spreadsheets and dashboards. O*NET lists Excel, Tableau, and SPSS as software for this occupation, alongside the electronic health record.
Enough biology and medical vocabulary to follow clinicians without needing translation. This is why a biomedical pathway is a real head start.
Talking to people who are angry, scared, or grieving without losing the room, and telling a respected clinician no when the answer is no.
Organizing other people's time, not just your own. Schedules, meetings, deadlines, and coverage plans that survive a bad week.

How long people stay

The hardest number we could verify is turnover at the very top, and it is four years old, so read it as history rather than as this year's picture. The American College of Healthcare Executives, in a release dated Aug. 8, 2023, reported hospital CEO turnover for calendar year 2022 at 16 percent: the third consecutive year at that rate and the lowest since 2011, down from a 20 percent peak in 2013. ACHE has tracked this since 1981, using CEO changes reported to the American Hospital Association. Ohio came in at 12 percent in that same 2022 data. ACHE's president and CEO Deborah J. Bowen tied the figure to succession planning as hospitals "wrestle with workforce and financial challenges." That is the CEO chair only. We could NOT verify published tenure, burnout, or retirement figures for department-level medical and health services managers, and neither BLS nor O*NET publishes them. Long hours, evenings, weekends, and on-call coverage are widely described in this field, but we could not confirm that from a source we were able to open, so treat it as unverified.

Where it is needed, and the different ways to do it

Demand is real and BLS puts a number on it. The BLS Employment Projections table, read at the data.bls.gov endpoint shows employment for SOC 11-9111 going from 616,200 in 2024 to 759,100 in 2034: 142,900 additional jobs, 23.2 percent growth, and about 62,100 openings a year on average once replacements are counted. Every one of those figures is printed in that table. It is one of the fastest growth rates of any large occupation, and O*NET flags the code with its "Bright Outlook" designation. On whether there is a declared shortage: we did not find a quantified shortage figure for this specific occupation from a source we could open, so we are not claiming one. The closest verified statement from a professional body is ACHE's, whose president and CEO said in the Aug. 8, 2023 turnover release that succession planning is critical to ensuring healthcare organizations have a pipeline of prepared leaders.

Hospital department or unit

Nurse manager or clinical director inside a hospital. Both of those titles appear in O*NET's reported job titles for this code. The BLS list of example job titles for the same code includes Hospital Administrator and Nursing Service Director. In Cleveland this is the Cleveland Clinic, University Hospitals, and MetroHealth world.

Physician group or clinic

Practice manager for a group of doctors. Smaller building, smaller budget, wider job. You may be doing hiring, billing, scheduling, and the copier all in one afternoon.

Nursing home, assisted living, or hospice

Administrator over an entire building of residents. BLS lists Nursing Home Manager, Hospice Director, and Hospice Plan Administrator among the example titles for this code. Note that many states license nursing home administrators separately, which we did not verify for Ohio.

Health information management

Running the records, coding, and data side. BLS and O*NET list Health Information Services Manager, Medical Records Administrator, and Chief Medical Information Officer under this same code. This is the branch you can enter through a two-year Tri-C degree.

Public health and community health

Public Health Administrator and Wellness Director appear in the BLS example titles. Think a county health department or a community health center rather than a hospital.

Insurance and managed care

O*NET's definition explicitly includes managed care organizations. Here the work is utilization review, contracts, and network operations rather than running a floor.

AI and this career

exposure: moderate

Moderate exposure, and the shape of it matters more than the level. The paperwork, pattern-finding, and first-draft parts of this job are already being automated in real hospitals. The parts where a name goes on a decision are not. The live change is that governing the AI an organization buys is becoming part of the manager's job description, not an IT problem down the hall.

Tasks likely to change

Clinical documentation the manager is responsible for rolling out. A systematic review in Applied Clinical Informatics (2025) included 11 AI scribe implementation studies and reported that 9 of 10 studies showed improvement in at least one efficiency metric and 7 of 10 showed positive effects on clinician wellness and burnout, while also finding that accuracy varied and manual edits were frequently required. The review reports those subtotals out of 10 of its 11 studies, which is the paper's own wording, not a typo here. A Stanford Health Care pilot with 48 physicians published in JAMIA (2025) measured statistically significant reductions in task load and burnout. Managers pick the vendor, fund it, and own whether it actually helped.
Prior authorization and payment review, which is a manager's daily grind. CMS's Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) Model applies AI and machine learning plus human clinical review to selected Original Medicare items and services, running six performance years from January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2031 in six states. Ohio is one of the six.
Staffing and workload math. Work in the Journal of Health Organization and Management (2024) proposes automated ICU nursing workload estimation explicitly so that management has a workload figure to use for administrative purposes such as staff scheduling.
Routine reporting. O*NET already lists Tableau, SPSS, SQL Server, and Oracle among the software for this occupation, so the dashboard-building half of the job was partly automated before generative AI arrived. Expect the manager to be asked the question rather than asked to build the chart.

Tasks that stay human

Being the person who signs. The Joint Commission and the Coalition for Health AI released Guidance on Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare on September 17, 2025, framed as internal governance, with recommendations on AI policies, appropriate local validation, monitoring, and use, plus a stated plan for governance playbooks and eventually a voluntary certification open to more than 22,000 accredited and certified healthcare organizations. That is work that lands on management.
Catching the model when it is confidently wrong. A Lancet Digital Health model evaluation study (2024) found GPT-4 produced clinical vignettes and differential diagnoses that stereotyped race, ethnicity, and gender, and showed significant association between demographic attributes and recommendations for more expensive procedures ([DOI]00225-X)). Somebody local has to test for that on local patients, and that somebody reports to a manager.
The room. Firing someone. Sitting with a family after a bad outcome. Telling a respected surgeon the answer is no. Negotiating with a union. None of this is a text-generation problem.
Deciding what the data means when the dashboard and the floor disagree, and being accountable for the call either way.

What medical and health services manager work may look like

What this career may look like once AI is genuinely applied to it: the manager likely walks in and the overnight summary is already written, the census is already forecast, the coding queue is already triaged, and three of yesterday's twelve reports never needed a human. What may fill that space is not free time. It is questions with no template. Did the scribe tool drop something clinically important from a note last Tuesday, and how would you know. Does the scheduling model quietly short-staff the unit with the sickest patients because that unit's historical data is thin. When a Medicare prior-authorization review comes back denied through an AI-assisted process, and Ohio is one of the six states where CMS is testing exactly that from 2026 through 2031, who calls the patient, and what do you say. The Joint Commission and CHAI have already put local validation and monitoring inside the organization's own governance, which means a mid-level manager may find herself chairing a committee that decides whether a model is safe on her patients, with a vendor's confidence on one side and a nurse's gut feeling on the other. The plausible version of this job in ten years is less typing and more judgment, less report-building and more explaining, and a heavier load of accountability for decisions a machine drafted. It may also mean fewer entry-level administrative seats under her, which would make the ladder into this career narrower even while the job itself grows. None of that is certain. It is where the verified evidence points.

Sources:[1][2][3][4][5]

Open questions on this career

CORRECTED: "nurse manager" and "clinical director" were credited to both O*NET and BLS. They appear on O*NET only. The BLS list uses "Clinic Director" and "Clinical Services Director" instead. "Hospital Administrator" and "Nursing Service Director" are on the BLS list and stayed.
The ACHE hospital CEO turnover figure is for calendar year 2022, from a release dated Aug. 8, 2023. It is four years old. We could not verify any 2023, 2024, or 2025 update.
There is no published tenure, burnout, or retirement data we could verify for department-level medical and health services managers. The turnover number we cite is for hospital chief executives only. Neither BLS nor O*NET publishes career-length data for this occupation.

Pay and outlook come from O*NET, the US Department of Labor's occupation site, and every figure links back to it. We do not publish tuition or cost figures here: those change often, so use each school's own page and phone number below. Tell Mr. Mendoza if anything looks wrong.

See somebody do it

Medical and Health Services Managers career videoCareerOneStop, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor. Verified by direct fetch: HTTP 200, content type video/mp4, 20,499,603 bytes. The filename carries the O*NET-SOC code 11-9111.00 for this occupation.Health Information Management ProgramCuyahoga Community College (Tri-C). Verified live via the YouTube oEmbed endpoint, which returns title "Health Information Management Program" and author "Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C)." It is the video Tri-C embeds on its own HIM program page. Runtime 2:22, posted April 23, 2024.

Where you can train for it

4 programs

Read these as minimums, not targets.Meeting the numbers below is what lets you apply; it is not what gets you in. Selective programs admit far fewer people than apply, and admitted students are usually well above the minimum. Call the program and ask what last year's admitted class actually looked like. That one phone call is worth more than any number on this page.

Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C)

Cleveland, OH · Associate of Applied Science (AAS), 65 credit hours

Health Information Management Technology

What they ask for

Overall GPA of 2.50.
High school diploma or GED, or previous college transcripts.
Completion of ENG-1010 College Composition I (or ENG-101H Honors).
Eligibility for MATH-1410 Elementary Probability and Statistics I.
BIO-2331 Anatomy and Physiology I, HTEC-1050 Introduction to Medical Terminology, and IT-1090 Computer Applications each completed with a grade of C or higher.

Phone 216-987-4247 is the Health Careers Enrollment Center as printed on the catalog page. Accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM). Graduates may sit for the Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) exam. This is the cheapest and fastest door into the health information branch of this career. Be honest with students that RHIT is the technician credential; the manager and director titles usually need a bachelor's added on top, and Tri-C credits transfer. Call the number above or use the college's own cost-of-attendance page for current tuition and fees; no cost figure appeared on the pages we read.

Program page 216-987-4247

Cleveland State University

Cleveland, OH · Bachelor of Science (BS), minimum 120 credit hours

Bachelor of Science in Health Care Management (Monte Ahuja College of Business)

What they ask for

CSU first-year admission requires a cumulative high school GPA of 2.3.
13 core academic units: 4 years English, 3 years math, 3 years natural sciences, 3 years social sciences.
Applicants not meeting these may be considered for pre-admission to a college or admitted to University Studies.
Transfer students must complete at least 50 percent of the Health Care Management major coursework at Cleveland State.

Phone 216-687-3729 is printed on the program page as Undergraduate Programs and Student Services for the College of Business. CSU's admissions office number, printed on the freshman requirements page, is 216-687-5411. Program structure as printed: 27 credit hours of business core, 31 credit hours of health care management core, plus 27 additional credit hours including two Writing Across the Curriculum courses. The 2.3 GPA and 13 core units are the university-wide first-year minimums; the program page itself published no separate GPA. Call the numbers above for current tuition and fees; no cost figure appeared on the pages we read.

Program page 216-687-3729

Kent State University

Kent, OH · Bachelor of Science in Public Health (B.S.P.H.), 120 credit hours

Public Health, B.S.P.H., Health Services Administration concentration

What they ask for

First-year admission on the Kent Campus is selective, based on cumulative grade point average, strength of high school college preparatory curriculum, and grade trends.
Students not meeting Kent Campus standards may be referred to a regional campus.
First-year admission at the Ashtabula, East Liverpool, Geauga, Salem, Stark, Trumbull, and Tuscarawas campuses and the Twinsburg Academic Center is open to anyone with a high school diploma or its equivalent.
International applicants must demonstrate English language proficiency through test scores or completion of ESL coursework.

Phone 330-672-6528 is the contact number printed on the catalog page (listed with contact Gretchen Thomas, gthoma33@kent.edu). The College of Public Health main line printed on kent.edu is 330-672-6500. The catalog page states the B.S.P.H. is accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH). The B.S.P.H. offers four concentrations: Allied Health, Clinical Trials Research, Health Services Administration, and Pre-Medicine/Dental/Osteopathy. The regional-campus open admission route matters for Cleveland families: a student whose GPA is not yet Kent Campus competitive can still start at Stark or Trumbull. Kent State also lists a separate Long-Term Care Administration B.S., which we did not verify in detail. Call the numbers above for current tuition and fees; no cost figure appeared on the pages we read.

Program page 330-672-6528

The Ohio State University

Columbus, OH · Master of Health Administration (MHA)

Master of Health Administration (residential)

What they ask for

Required 3.0 GPA.
Application submitted through SOPHAS/HAMPCAS plus a supplemental Ohio State application.
Priority application deadline November 14.
Regular application deadline February 2.

Phone 614-292-8350 is printed on the page as Admissions and Student Services, College of Public Health. Two years full-time or three years part-time. This is included as the destination, not the starting line: it is the graduate degree many hospital leaders add after a bachelor's and a few years of work, so a 15-year-old should read it as year seven, not year one. We could not verify CAHME accreditation, a credit-hour total, a GRE policy, or a financial-accounting prerequisite from the page we read. Call the number above for current tuition and fees; no cost figure appeared on the page we read.

Program page 614-292-8350

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