Managing The Myths Of Health Care

With a focus on reframing the management and organization of healthcare, this thoughtful resource claims that care, cure, control, and community have to work together, within healthcare institutions and across them, to deliver quantity, quality, and equality simultaneously. --

This provocative appraisal unpacks commonly held beliefs about healthcare management and replaces them with practical strategies and realistic policy goals. Using Henry Mintzberg’s “Myths of Healthcare” as a springboard, it reveals management practices that undermine care delivery, explores their cultural and corporate origins, and details how they may be reversed through changes in management strategy, organization, scale, and style. Tackling conventional wisdom about decision-making, cost-effectiveness, service quality, and equity, contributors fine-tune concepts of mission and vision by promoting collaboration, engagement, and common sense. The book’s multidisciplinary panel of experts analyzes the most popular healthcare management “myths,” among them: · The healthcare system is failing. · The healthcare system can be fixed through social engineering. · Healthcare institutions can be fixed by bringing in the heroic leader. · The healthcare system can be fixed by treating it more as a business. · Healthcare is rightly left to the private sector, for the sake of efficiency. The Myths of Health Care speaks to a large, diverse audience: scholars of all levels interested in the research in health policy and management, graduate and under-graduate students attending courses in leadership and management of public sector organization, and practitioners in the field of health care.

A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. Henry Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. “We should be seeing managers as leaders.” Mintzberg writes, “and leadership as management practiced well.” This landmark book draws on Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine managers, in business, government, health care, and the social sector, working in settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw—the pressures, the action, the nuances, the blending—compelled him to describe managing as a practice, not a science or a profession, learned primarily through experience and rooted in context. But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture and level in hierarchy, even personal style, turn out to have less influence than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg looks at how to deal with some of the inescapable conundrums of managing, such as, How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get things done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it? This book is vintage Mintzberg: iconoclastic, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-breaking. Managing may be the most revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can do it better.

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing premiums—not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets. In Redefining Health Care, internationally renowned strategy expert Michael Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Teisberg reveal the underlying—and largely overlooked—causes of the problem, and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that competition currently takes place at the wrong level—among health plans, networks, and hospitals—rather than where it matters most, in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions. Participants in the system accumulate bargaining power and shift costs in a zero-sum competition, rather than creating value for patients. Based on an exhaustive study of the U.S. health care system, Redefining Health Care lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining the way competition in health care delivery takes place—and unleashing stunning improvements in quality and efficiency. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move health care toward positive-sum competition that delivers lasting benefits for all.

Foundations of Health Care Management Leaders and managers throughout the health care system are facing ever more challenging changes in the way care is delivered, paid for, and evaluated. Foundations of Health Care Management: Principles and Methods offers an innovative, concise, reader-friendly introduction to health care management and administration. It addresses the need for new skills in managers of health care facilities and for those planning to enter health care management positions. The book covers such critical topics as leadership training, change management, conflict management techniques, culture building, quality improvement, and communications skills, as well as collaboration in the improvement of population health. Foundations of Health Care Management also concentrates on innovations and describes steps in the transition to more decentralized and creative approaches to the management of health care facilities. The book covers physician management from the physician's viewpoint, a valuable perspective for health care managers. The book serves important dual purposes for faculty and students by providing both insights into the health care field as well as foundational content on essential management and leadership competencies. A full set of support materials is available for instructors at the book's companion Web site.

Despite intense political focus and debate for the past 10 years, Americans remain deeply worried about the availability and affordability of health care for themselves and their families. In clear and accessible prose, journalist Ryan Holeywell and medical doctor and health policy expert Arthur Garson provide Americans with the tools we need to have an honest, unbiased view of the state of health care policy in America. By fact checking 20 enduring health care myths they move the debate beyond Obamacare v. repeal and replace and give citizens the tools they need to evaluate the major policy issues confronting our health care system.

This book provides an honest, unbiased view of the state of health care policy in America. By fact checking 20 enduring health care myths, Garson and Holeywell give citizens the tools they need to evaluate the major policy issues confronting our health care system.