Chaos and Organization in Health Care


Book Description

Two leading physicians' prescription for solving our health care problems: organizing the fragmented system that delivers care. One of the most daunting challenges facing the new U.S. administration is health care reform. The size of the system, the number of stakeholders, and ever-rising costs make the problem seem almost intractable. But in Chaos and Organization in Health Care, two leading physicians offer an optimistic prognosis. In their frontline work as providers, Thomas Lee and James Mongan see the inefficiency, the missed opportunities, and the occasional harm that can result from the current system. The root cause of these problems, they argue, is chaos in the delivery of care. If the problem is chaos, the solution is organization, and in this timely and outspoken book, they offer a plan. In many ways, this chaos is caused by something good: the dramatic progress in medical science—the explosion of medical knowledge and the exponential increase in treatment options. Imposed on a fragmented system of small practices and individual patients with multiple providers, progress results in chaos. Lee and Mongan argue that attacking this chaos is even more important than whether health care is managed by government or controlled by market forces. Some providers are already tightly organized, adapting management principles from business and offering care that is by many measures safer, better, and less costly. Lee and Mongan propose multiple strategies that can be adopted nationwide, including electronic medical records and information systems for sharing knowledge; team-based care, with doctors and other providers working together; and disease management programs to coordinate care for the sickest patients.




How Physicians Can Fix Health Care


Book Description

How Physicians Can Fix Health Care: One Innovation at a Time Professor Chris Trimble Dartmouth College Penicillin, wonder drug of the 1940s, delivered a dramatic double win. It improved medical outcomes and simultaneously slashed costs. Today's cheap and curative elixirs, however, are not pills. They come instead in the form of innovations in the way care is delivered. Fee-for-service medicine has stood as a formidable barrier to these innovations for decades. Now, thanks to the ongoing transition to value-based payments, there are tens of thousands of opportunities for dramatic double wins. They are found in every hospital, in every clinic and in every medical condition. Policymakers have done their part. The rest is up to innovators on the front lines. Innovators will emerge from every health profession. There will be little progress on the largest opportunities, however, without one essential ingredient: physician leadership. For years, many physicians have felt like mere captives in the game of fixing health care. Physicians are no longer pawns, they are prime movers. A groundswell of physician innovators, determined to rebuild care one step at a time, is exactly what the system needs. The innovations that have the greatest potential are of a certain minimum size. They are characterized by the creation of small multidisciplinary teams - a few people to a few dozen - that are dedicated full time to a single effort to redesign care from scratch for a particular patient population. They deploy providers in nontraditional ways. They sometimes invent entirely new roles and team structures for health care delivery. How Physicians Can Fix Health Care: One Innovation at a Time is the essential step-by-step guide for physician innovators, their teams and the senior leaders in their organizations. Chris Trimble has dedicated his career to studying innovation inside of established organizations. This is his sixth book.




Chaos Organization and Disaster Management


Book Description

Chaos Organization and Disaster Management offers a scholarly survey of disaster response behavior and management in the face of natural and manmade catastrophe. The author provides a methodological and empirical platform from which to initiate a critical analysis of disaster management. Sparked by a unique field study of the Israeli experience during the Gulf War, this book demonstrates the massive divide between individual responses to disaster and the actual functioning of disaster management organizations. It exposes the fundamental flaws of disaster management agencies, analyzing disasters from the perspectives of both agencies and potential victims. Formulating an alternative approach to disaster management that draws upon the advantages of privatization, this volume appraises methods of measuring disaster agency effectiveness, emphasizing the citizen vantage point and stakeholder evaluations. It outlines the intrinsic bureaucratic constraints that impede the efficacy of government agencies, and reveals the disconnect between organizational and victim perceptions of disaster. By highlighting a new empirically based understanding of disaster behavior, the book recommends moving the focus of disaster management to a social process model that will save lives.




Complexity and Healthcare Organization


Book Description

Statistics and evidence-based medicine are assessed in most postgraduate and undergraduate medical examinations and degrees in health sciences. All clinicians have to acquire skills in this area. This book aims to provide a brief overview of basic medical statistics and the numerical aspects of evidence-based medicine to give realistic worked examples to illustrate the interpretation of studies relevant to clinical practice and to allow examination practice. It aims to cover all major topics covered in the undergraduate and postgraduate examinations. Each chapter begins with an overview and summary of the main points followed by worked examples and exercises with full answers. It will be ideal for all postgraduate medical examination candidates. Other clincians and undergraduate students in medicine and health sciences will also find it useful.




Managing the Unknowable


Book Description

It's What You Don't Know That Counts Discover the important roles chance and uncertainty play insuccessful strategic planning. In this ingenious work, author RalphD. Stacey shows managers how their companies can benefit from theunexpected developments that impact their business and how they canprepare to creatively leverage the opportunities such developmentspresent. He explains how an appreciation of conflict and teamdialogue can help managers discover and build on the innate energyof their organizations. And he illustrates his theories withreal-world examples from Sony, Kodak, Federal Express and othernoted market innovators.




Advances in Health Care Management


Book Description

Features reviews and research on topics in the field of health care management. This work also contains papers from the Health Care Management Division of the Academy of Management.




Enabling Creative Chaos


Book Description

In the summer of 2008, nearly fifty thousand people traveled to Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to participate in the countercultural arts event Burning Man. Founded on a commitment to expression and community, the annual weeklong festival presents unique challenges to its organizers. Over four years Katherine K. Chen regularly participated in organizing efforts to safely and successfully create a temporary community in the middle of the desert under the hot August sun. Enabling Creative Chaos tracks how a small, underfunded group of organizers transformed into an unconventional corporation with a ten-million-dollar budget and two thousand volunteers. Over the years, Burning Man’s organizers have experimented with different management models; learned how to recruit, motivate, and retain volunteers; and developed strategies to handle regulatory agencies and respond to media coverage. This remarkable evolution, Chen reveals, offers important lessons for managers in any organization, particularly in uncertain times.




Humanizing Healthcare Reforms


Book Description

Looking at the current turmoil facing contemporary healthcare systems worldwide, resulting from relentless imposition of financially-based performance indicators, the author argues that a return to a values-based approach to healthcare will create positive transformation. Writing from the fresh perspective of social anthropology, the author takes a highly pragmatic approach to practice, emphasizing the importance of values such as compassion, solidarity and social justice. He suggests that without being able clearly to identify the values and goals that unite their members, healthcare organizations are unlikely to be able to meet the demands of the constant and varied pressures they face, and explains how individuals at every level in healthcare can contribute in practical ways to positive change within their organizations. This much-needed and very accessible book will be essential reading for anyone interested in a better approach to healthcare reform, from clinicians and nurses, to managers and policy makers, as well as the interested reader.




Eliminate Chaos


Book Description

Eliminate Chaos is a user-friendly system for organizing each room of the house, including the kitchen and pantry, closet, garage, home office, and childrens' rooms. The author’s ten-step system is presented in an easy-to-use, workbook-style layout. Full-color photos demonstrate the various stages of the organizing process, illustrating not just "before and after," but the realistic, messy, all-important steps in between. Leist’s method is based on the underlying principle that "it’s not about the stuff." She touches on the psychological reasons behind clutter and not letting go — such as procrastination, denial, thrift, and family history — but her underlying premise is that being organized is an on-going process, not a one-day event. By learning to sort, prioritize, and make fast, rational decisions about their household goods, readers become more efficient and functional not just at home, but in other areas of life as well.




Health Care Administration


Book Description

Health Care Administration: Managing Organized Delivery Systems, Fifth Edition provides graduate and pre-professional students with a comprehensive, detailed overview of the numerous facets of the modern healthcare system, focusing on functions and operations at both the corporate and hospital level. The Fifth Edition of this authoritative text comprises several new subjects, including new chapters on patient safety and ambulatory care center design and planning. Other updated topics include healthcare information systems, management of nursing systems, labor and employment law, and financial management, as well discussions on current healthcare policy in the United States. Health Care Administration: Managing Organized Delivery Systems, Fifth Edition continues to be one of the most effective teaching texts in the field, addressing operational, technical and organizational matters along with the day-to-day responsibilities of hospital administrators. Broad in scope, this essential text has now evolved to offer the most up-to-date, comprehensive treatment of the organizational functions of today's complex and ever-changing healthcare delivery system.




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