Health Care Administration Research Guide

Career Cornerstones: Establishing a Foundation for a Career in Healthcare is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that focuses on career skills required for students entering their respective health profession's program. This book is designed to help students be successful not only in their health profession's educational program, but also as they start to intern or work in healthcare settings. This resource is targeted for Healthcare Administration, Health Sciences, and Pre-Professional students.

Whether you are in your first semester, nearing graduation, or long past graduation, this career guide is designed to lead you through the career development process: from building self-awareness, to conducting career research, undertaking a job search, to succeeding on the job. Charting Your Course includes relevant, up-to-date information, interactive and self-reflection-based exercises, as well as online resources to help support you to become more comfortable, flexible, and adept at managing your career.

Exploring the U.S. Healthcare System introduces students to foundational characteristics of the U.S. healthcare system. It begins with an overview of the healthcare system that includes a brief history and a description of the current state of health in the U.S. The second chapter describes health delivery systems, including inpatient, outpatient, post-acute, long-term, palliative, and hospice care. An introduction to health insurance in the third chapter will include an overview of basic concepts, private insurance, public insurance, and recent trends. The fourth chapter presents issues related to the triple aim of improving access to care, increasing the quality of care, and lowering the cost of care. The fifth chapter reviews how the government intervenes in healthcare and presents current policy issues related to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and value-based contracting. The final chapter on the topic of technology in healthcare provides an overview of health information technology, health information legislation, emerging technologies, and the future of health information technology. Chapter content is supplemented with additional material such as reports, briefs, figures, infographics, definitions, and key terms. Chapters two through six end with a “knowledge check” exercise to actively engage students with the content.

CDC Wonder is an online database that allows your to pull public health data.

Census Reporter is a tool developed at Northwestern University that makes census data and data from the American Community Survey easily accessible.

County Health Rankings and Roadmaps: The Rankings are based on a model of population health that emphasizes the many factors that, if improved, can help make communities healthier places to live, learn, work and play. This website allows you to compare your county to your state and the nation.
Just search for Nueces County or your zip code to learn about health indicators in the area.