SPH HPM Program Granted Full CAHME Accreditation.
The Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Management Education (CAHME) has voted to grant full accreditation to the SPH Health Policy and Management program for three years, the maximum allowed.
The accreditation is effective immediately, explained David Rosenbloom, chair ad interim of the Department of Health Policy and Management.
In a letter announcing the news, Rosenbloom thanked Associate Chair Victoria Parker, an associate professor of health policy and management, for helping “build the health management program to this level of excellence and for leading the multi-year process that led to full accreditation on the first try.”
Rosenbloom also announced that Parker was unanimously elected to be a member of the CAHME Accreditation Committee.
Said Parker, “The accreditation is an external endorsement of what we’ve been doing for several years—providing an innovative and comprehensive healthcare management education that is grounded in a public health approach and the school’s mission to serve vulnerable populations.” Many HPM graduates now work at Boston Medical Center and other safety net hospitals, she added.
Parker explained that the accreditation process began with a systematic review of the overall HPM curriculum, particularly the specialization (now sub-concentration) in management. “This meant developing a comprehensive competency model, mapping it to existing curriculum, and developing and refining curriculum where needed to ensure that our program could really deliver on the promise of the competency model,” Parker said.
CAHME is an interdisciplinary group of educational, professional, clinical, and other health sector organizations devoted to quality improvement of education for healthcare management and administration professionals.
According to CAHME, it is the only organization recognized to grant accreditation to individual academic programs offering a professional master’s degree in healthcare management education and is recognized by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation. CAHME accreditation is one of the major standards of measurement of graduate healthcare management education.
This accreditation enables SPH graduates to compete for post-graduate fellowships that are restricted to graduates of CAHME-accredited programs, Parker said, and also means that the HPM program will be ranked among healthcare management masters programs in the next round of those upcoming rankings. Moreover, she explained, students interested in healthcare management who search for programs via the CAHME and/or AUPHA websites will now find SPH listed as an accredited program.