Tamiko Gheen: Taking Healthcare Administration Above and Beyond in the Air Force

Tamiko Gheen (MHA 2017) is an active-duty United States Air Force major and the comptroller at the San Antonio Military Health System. In her current role, Gheen provides resource operations oversight to a market with nine Army and Air Force treatment facilities staffed by 12,000 employees servicing 240,000 beneficiaries.

In nearly nine years of military service, Gheen has managed teams at inpatient and outpatient treatment facilities across a broad range of disciplines. Her long-term interest in the business side of health care led her to apply to become a Medical Service Corps officer during her senior year at the Air Force Academy. The job closely resembles an administrator role in civilian health care settings.  

The jobs that are closest to the patient, like those managing teams directly involved in customer service, are always my favorite,” Gheen said. “It brings me great joy in knowing that the work we do positively impacts patients.”

While many aspects of her job are like those in the civilian sector, the career trajectory is quite different according to Gheen.  

“We have expectations and a flight path to follow; we often have to move every two to four years, and we have a natural promotion progression. We are forced to move up and move on,” she explained. 

Gheen emphasized that the military health care system presents opportunities for rapid career growth and exposure to new responsibilities and disciplines. 

Another aspect of the military health care system is the expectation that airmen maintain readiness for deployment.  

“We have specific assigned jobs that we would do overseas if deployed that we must be trained and ready to support,” Gheen said. “For example, some hospital administrators in the Air Force may be assigned to an EMEDS team with multidisciplinary clinicians; on these teams, you will run operations in a stand-alone modular (tent) hospital with surgery, radiology, laboratory, an emergency room, and ICU capabilities.”

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gheen was deployed domestically to support civilian hospital relief and later to stand up Community Vaccination Centers. 

Gheen was first sent to El Paso as the liaison officer between three civilian hospitals and 60 Air Force clinicians, ensuring both her team and the hospital had the right support needed to tackle some of the highest COVID-19 censuses in the country at that time.  

After the peak of the pandemic, she was sent to stand up six Air Force-run Community Vaccination Centers nation-wide, supporting 720 Air Force personnel delivering 345,000 COVID-19 vaccines to civilians during her short five-week tasking.

Gheen always knew that she was dedicated enough to the profession that she wanted to be board certified in health care management and wanted a specialized Master of Health Administration (MHA) degree to set her apart from her peers. She decided to pursue an executive MHA (EMHA) while taking a brief leave from service to start her family. 

“I chose SLU over other options because of the flexibility of the EMHA program, but I like that it did not completely take away the benefit of in-person networking. It was a great opportunity to be surrounded by multidisciplinary professionals,” she said.

Gheen stresses that the ability to actively network with clinicians, business and finance managers, information technology professionals and others working in the health care space is a great way to hone your people skills. 

“Checking in on people, doing rounds, asking the right questions, being approachable – that’s all part of leadership that enables you to get to the root cause and just not put band-aids on problems,” Gheen said.

College for Public Health and Social Justice

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