The US political system has come to depend upon money too much. The US health care industry spends the most on political lobbying among all the 13 industrial sectors in the US economy. The government regulatory agencies at both federal and state levels have been "captured" by the health industry interest groups meaning that the regulatory agencies respond to the interests of the industry but not those of citizens. This book employs a broad theoretical framework of crony capitalism to understand US health care system dysfunction. This framework has not been applied before in any serious manner to understand the shortcomings in the US health care system. Specifically, the book examines the role of seven key players using this framework - politicians/interest groups, pharmaceutical companies, private health insurers, hospitals/hospital networks, physicians, medical device manufacturers, and the American public. Crony capitalism is a destructive force and is rampant in US health care system, causing much waste, inefficiencies, and malaise in the system. Current efforts and initiatives, such as patient-centered medical homes and precision medicine, for improving/reforming the system are of mere academic interest and tantamount to taking aspirin to treat cancer. They do not even pretend to address the root cause of the problem, namely, crony capitalism. Offering prescriptions to fix the U.S. health care system based on a comprehensive diagnosis of the dysfunction, this book will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of health care management, public and non-profit management, health policy, administration, and economics, and political science.

The ABC of Clinical Leadership explores and develops the key principles of leadership and management. It outlines the scope of clinical leadership, emphasising its importance in the clinical context, especially for improving patient care and health outcomes in rapidly changing health systems and organisations. Using short illustrative case studies, the book takes a systematic approach to leadership of clinical services, systems and organisations; working with others and developing individual leadership skills. This second edition has been fully updated to reflect recent developments in the field, including current thinking in leadership theory, as well as a focus throughout on workforce development and working in multidisciplinary healthcare teams. International examples are used to reflect global practice and two new chapters on leading projects and followership have been added. Combining theory and practical clinical examples, and written by clinical educators with a wealth of experience of leadership in the clinical and educational environment, the ABC of Clinical Leadership is an ideal resource for all healthcare professionals, both during training and for continuing professional development.

Healthcare economics is a topic of increasing importance due to the substantial changes that are expected to radically alter the way Americans obtain and finance healthcare. Understanding Healthcare Economics, 2nd Edition provides an evidence-based framework to help practitioners comprehend the changes already underway in our nation's healthcare system. It presents important economic facts and explains the economic concepts needed to understand the implications of these facts. It also summarizes the results of recent empirical studies on access, cost, and quality problems in today's healthcare system. The material is presented in two sections. Section 1 focuses on the healthcare access, cost and quality issues that create pressures for change in health policy. The first edition was completed just as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was debated and passed. This new edition updates the information about access, cost, and quality issues. It also discusses the pressure for change that led to the passage of the PPACA, evidence that shaped the construction of the act, evidence on the impacts of the PPACA, and evidence on the pressures for future changes. Section 2 focuses on changes that are underway including: changes in the Medicare payment system; new types of healthcare delivery organizations such as ACOs and patient-centered medical homes. It also discusses the current efforts to help patients build health such as wellness programs and disease management programs. And finally, health information technology will be discussed. The new edition will maintain the current structure; however each chapter will be updated to discuss post-PPACA evidence on each type of type. In addition to the updates previously mentioned, the authors will present a series of data explorations to several chapters. Most of the new data explorations present summarized statistical information based on de-identified data from one hospital electronic data system. These data explorations serve two purposes. First, they illustrate the impacts of the pressures for change - and some of the changes - on healthcare providers. For example, the data illustrates the financial impact of pre-PPACA uncompensated care. Second, explanation of the data will require explanations of standard coding systems that are used nationwide (DRGs, CPT, ICD) codes. Other data explorations provide detail about other sources of data useful for health policy analysis, and for healthcare providers and insurers.

This third edition presents and dissects a wide variety of HIT failures so that the reader can understand in each case what went wrong and why and how to avoid such problems, without focusing on the involvement of specific people, organizations, or vendors. The lessons may be applied to future and existing projects, or used to understand why a previous project failed. The reader also learns how common causes of failure affect different kinds of HIT projects and with different results. Cases are organized by the type of focus (hospital care, ambulatory care, and community). Each case provides analysis by an author who was involved in the project plus the insight of an HIT expert. This book presents a model to discuss HIT failures in a safe and protected manner, providing an opportunity to focus on the lessons offered by a failed initiative as opposed to worrying about potential retribution for exposing a project as having failed. Access expert insight into key obstacles that must be overcome to leverage IT and transform healthcare. Each de-identified case study includes an analysis by a group of industry experts along with a counter analysis. Cases include a list of key words and are categorized by project (e.g. CPOE, business intelligence). Each case study concludes with a lesson learned section. Thought provoking commentary chapters add additional context to the challenges faced during HIT projects, from social and organizational to legal and contractual.

Healthcare transformation requires us to continually look at new and better ways to manage insights - both within and outside the organization today. Increasingly, the ability to glean and operationalize new insights efficiently as a byproduct of an organization's day-to-day operations is becoming vital to hospitals and health systems ability to survive and prosper. One of the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics has been the ability to deal with the sheer variety and volume of disparate healthcare data and the increasing need to derive veracity and value out of it. Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare investigates how healthcare organizations can leverage this tapestry of big data to discover new business value, use cases, and knowledge as well as how big data can be woven into pre-existing business intelligence and analytics efforts. This book focuses on teaching you how to: Develop skills needed to identify and demolish big-data myths Become an expert in separating hype from reality Understand the V's that matter in healthcare and why Harmonize the 4 C's across little and big data Choose data fi delity over data quality Learn how to apply the NRF Framework Master applied machine learning for healthcare Conduct a guided tour of learning algorithms Recognize and be prepared for the future of artificial intelligence in healthcare via best practices, feedback loops, and contextually intelligent agents (CIAs) The variety of data in healthcare spans multiple business workflows, formats (structured, un-, and semi-structured), integration at point of care/need, and integration with existing knowledge. In order to deal with these realities, the authors propose new approaches to creating a knowledge-driven learning organization-based on new and existing strategies, methods and technologies. This book will address the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics and provide pragmatic recommendations on how to deal with them.

Issues surrounding business complexity plague organizations throughout the world. This situation is particularly true of the numerous complex projects and programs upon which organizations embark on a regular basis. Current project management processes and standards are based on Newtonian/Cartesian principles, such as linearity, reductionism, and single source problem causation. However, complex projects exhibit both Newtonian/Cartesian characteristics and complex systems characteristics, such as emergence, self-organization, non-linearity, non-reductionism, and multi-source problem causation. To conduct successful projects, complementary ways of approaching projects are required, and new competencies for those who manage projects and for those on project teams are required as well. There are a number of books available to help project managers and teams address the issue of systems behavior. However, there are none that approach complex projects from a neuroscience-based approach to human behavior and ambiguity. This book does exactly that in order to reduce project complexity and thereby increase the probability of project success. Cognitive Readiness in Project Teams looks to the concept of cognitive readiness (CR), first developed by the United States Department of Defense to better prepare and manage teams of individuals in complex battlefield situations. Its intent is to make project managers and teams more focused, responsive, resilient and adaptive through self-mastery and the mastering of interpersonal relationships. It introduces a CR framework for project managers and teams. This framework has neuroscience fundamentals and theorems as the foundation for the three pillars of CR: mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. The book is a compendium of chapters written by renowned authors in the fields of project management, neuroscience, mindfulness, and emotional and social intelligence.

Healthcare Affordability: Motivate People, Improve Processes, and Increase Performance applies the Theory of Affordability across the Healthcare Enterprise. Affordability is realized when the Value delivered exceeds the Patient's requirements, while the expense for the quality resources required to deliver that Value is at a Cost less than the revenue received from the competitive pricing applied to the care. The aim of healthcare affordability is to attain performance excellence in all areas across the entire Healthcare Enterprise. The Healthcare Enterprise involves 5 types of providers: Healthcare Providers, Medicine and Pharmaceutical Providers, Machine and Device Providers, Service and Supplier Providers, and Insurance and Payment Providers. Obviously, one key focal point of healthcare affordability is affordable healthcare, a condition that has been chased for decades, but has yet to be achieved. This book provides a useful framework and foundation for any organization to pursue and achieve Affordability. Although there are many methods used to accomplish performance improvement, this approach has been proven successful with many organizations. It integrates strategic vision and direction, with operational goals and objectives and tactical targets and tasks. This book also provides a leadership strategy and structure for change and transformation, and a designed plan to execute an 18-month implementation program. Features: Affords patients and providers a better, faster, safer, and more affordable and profitable experience and approach Offers solutions for current state dilemmas, and provides a framework for future state success Increases the speed of delivery, improves the quality, and decreases the cost of care Provides methods and tools for linking and integrating strategic, operational and tactical goals Healthcare Affordability: Motivate People, Improve Processes, and Increase Performance provides readers with methods and means for solving the complex problem of affordable healthcare.

Giving Blood represents a new agenda for blood donation research. It explores the diverse historical and contemporary undercurrents that influence how blood donation takes place, and the social meanings that people attribute to the act of giving blood. Drawing from empirical studies conducted in the United States, Canada, France, Australia, China, India, Latin America and Africa, the book's chapters turn our attention to the evolution of blood donation worldwide, examining: the impact of technology advances on blood collection practices the shifting approaches to donor recruitment and retention the governance and policy issues associated with the establishment of blood clinics the political and legal challenges of regulating blood systems. This innovative examination moves the focus from individual explanations of rates of blood donation to a social, structural explanation. It will appeal to international scholars and students working in the areas of sociology, medical anthropology, health care, public policy, socio-legal studies, comparative politics, organizational management, health and illness, the history of medicine, and public health ethics.

Steep socioeconomic hierarchy in post-industrial Western society threatens public health because of the physiological consequences of material and psychosocial insecurities and deprivations. Following on from their previous books, the authors continue their exploration of the geography of early mortality from age-related chronic conditions, of risk behaviors and their health outcomes, and of infant and child mortality, all due to rigid hierarchy. They divide the 50 states into those that gave their electoral college votes to Trump and those that gave theirs to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and compare the two sets for socioeconomic and public health profiles. They deliberately apply only simple standard statistical methods in the public health analyses: t-test, Mann-Whitney test, bivariate regression, and backward stepwise multivariate regression. The book assumes familiarity with basic statistics. The authors argue that the unequal power relations that result in eroding public health in the nation and, in particular, in the Trump-voting states, largely cascade from the collapse of American industry, and they analyze the Cold War roots of that collapse. In two largely independent chapters on economics, they explore both the suppression of countervailing forces, such as organized labor, and the diversion of technical resources to the military as essential foundations to the population-level suffering that expressed itself in the 2016 presidential election. This interdisciplinary book has several primary audiences: creators of public policies, such as legislators and governmental staff, public health professionals and social epidemiologists, economists, labor union professionals, civil rights advocates, political scientists, historians, and students of these disciplines from public health through the social sciences.

This book explores the hospital via organisational ethnography (OE), an approach that involves a mix of fieldwork methods designed to analyse the hospital which also includes participatory observation, qualitative interviews and shadowing. One way to define a hospital is by its high level of formal organisation, resulting in written or digital communication as the main source of communication in patient journals, minutes and medical and quality guidelines. In contrast, in this book, the aspects of the informal organisation will be the focus. In spite of the many formal regulations of healthcare, hospitals are also chaotic organising places where many different groups of people interact in order to negotiate, to practice and to make sense of daily work tasks. The underlying argument is that, in the mundane everyday life of hospitals, frontline workers and their interactions with patients and local managers remain at the core of organising hospitals. The overall purpose of this book is to report stories back from the field of healthcare, demonstrating how people, spaces and work (as examples of events) become important elements of organising hospitals. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in and across healthcare management, organisation studies, ethnography, sociology, qualitative methods, anthropology, service management and cultural studies.

This book explores the changing landscapes of the commercialisation of medical care in China. It is the first work of its kind, and discusses how the rise of market socialism, coupled with decollectivisation of agriculture and autonomisation of hospitals in rural and urban China, have fragmented the health service system. The book examines public hospital reforms; the rise of the medical-industrial complex; the emerging public-private partnerships in the health sector; the challenges of financing; and the growing inequalities in access to health services, to present a comprehensive view of the Chinese health care system over the last four decades. This topical book will be useful to scholars and researchers of Chinese studies, Chinese economy, public health, health management, social health and medicine, medical sociology, sociology, political economy, public policy and public administration as well as policymakers and practitioners.

Healthcare in the U.S. is a critical juncture. We face a sharp upward rise in the number of people with chronic diseases and disabilities. As demands on our current health system grow, so will costs. But as a society we are approaching the upper limit of how much we are willing (or able) to spend on health care. Health care policy makers know this. That is why major health reform measures are focused on population health and value-based care. These are the so-called second curve objectives. But these initiatives are doomed to failure. We are asking a system to do things that it was not designed to do. In fact, we don't have a health care "system" as such. We have a parts bin of disconnected silos. Fragmented delivery systems. Specialized caregivers. Professional groups. Trade associations. All with distinct cultures. Each with their own motivations and agendas. Our payer and regulatory structures have evolved over the decades in response to political and policy initiatives. However well intentioned (or not), these structures defy logic. They reward and reinforce counter-productive industry behaviors. They pose formidable roadblocks to achieving needed changes. Current reform initiatives are an implicit recognition that our health model is flawed. The attitude seems to be, "Yes, we know the overall health system is a problem, but we can make failure less severe if we implement these measures." We are at a critical juncture. We can continue to place additional demands on an industry model that has outlived its functional utility. Or we can take more of a clean slate approach and move toward a model that is in keeping with today's needs. The outlook is not good if we stay on the current curve. The demands on resources will continue their upward trajectory. The default scenario will be one of rationing and less to invest in new cures and new technologies. The good news is that we are within sight of a future state of health care that can really work. In this future state, we have gotten rid of the artificial barriers to effective and efficient patient care. Physicians and other health professionals work in a coordinated, inter-disciplinary fashion. They have accountability for the whole care cycle. Caregivers have both the flexibility and encouragement to innovate and come up with optimal delivery approaches. And because they are in a risk-reward relationship with payers, they have the incentives to provide true value. Patients feel intimately connected to a system that is focused on their specific needs. The key to this future state is good old-fashioned market discipline. Other delivery models must either improve or get out of the way. The market will demand cost-efficiencies and won't tolerate waste. Much of our regulatory structure will be rendered unnecessary. There will be not rewards for poor performance. This book takes a unique macro-level perspective of clinical, economic, and regulatory problems and possible solutions. It takes an objective and something scathing look at current industry structure: a silo-driven culture and entrenchment that is driven by self-interest; as well as the complicity of government in preserving the status quo through regulations, licensure, payment systems, etc.

It has been almost 20 years since the Institute of Medicine released the seminal report titled, Crossing the Quality Chasm. In it, the IoM identified six domains of care quality (safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-centric) and noted a huge gap between the current state and the desired state. Although this report received a great deal of attention, sadly there has been little progress in these areas. In the U.S., healthcare still has huge disparities, is inefficient, and is fragmented with delays in care that are often unsafe. Most U.S. citizens are expected to suffer from a diagnostic error sometime during their lifetime, not receive a large fraction of recommended care, and pay for one of the most expensive systems in the world. Much has been written about quality improvement over the years but many prominent quality and safety experts. Yet progress has been slow. Some have called on the healthcare professions to look outside of healthcare to other industries using examples in nuclear power and airlines for safety, the hotel and entertainment industry for a 'customer' focus, and the automotive industry, particularly Toyota for efficiency (Lean). This book by Dr. Oppenheim on lean healthcare systems engineering (LHSE) is a fresh approach that brings forth concepts that systems engineers have used in huge national defense projects. What's unique in this book is that these powerful system engineering tools are modified to be able to address smaller sized healthcare problems that still involve similar problems in fragmentation and poor communication and coordination. This book is an invaluable reference for a new powerful process named Lean Healthcare Systems Engineering (LHSE) for managing workflow and care improvement projects in all clinical environments. The book applies to ambulatory clinics and hospitals of all types including operating rooms, emergency departments, and ancillary departments, clinical and imaging laboratories, pharmacies, and population health. The book presents a generic rigorous but not mathematical step-by-step process of integrated healthcare, systems engineering and Lean. The book also contains the first major product created with the LHSE process, namely tabularized summaries of representative projects in healthcare delivery applications, called Lean Enablers for Healthcare Projects. Each full-page enabler table lists the challenges and wastes, powerful improvement goals, risks, and expected benefits, and some useful descriptions of the healthcare system of interest. The book provides user-friendly solutions to major problems in healthcare delivery operations in all clinical environments, addressing fragmentation, wastes, wrong incentives, ad-hoc and stove-piped management, lack of optimized processes, hierarchy gradient, lack of systems thinking, "blaming and shaming culture", burnout of providers and many others.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. In the last several decades, international traffic volume has significantly increased, raising the risk of infectious diseases and their spread. In this important volume, the impact of health issues is explored in connection with travel. Not only does the book explore the risk of diseases such as H1N1 (otherwise known as swine flu), malaria, salmonella, and Legionellosis, it also addresses health regulations for travel to foreign countries, alcohol use and hospitality-related health problems and issues, medical tourism (patients seeking less expensive medical procedures in countries other than their own), and much more.

Edited by a professor at Harvard Medical School who has extensive experience in this field, this important and timely book presents a variety of perspectives on the organization of patient medical records around patient problems, presenting a more effective problem-oriented approach rather than the traditional data-oriented approach. It is comprehensive, covering the history and importance of the electronic health record, the attitudes toward and use of problem lists, strategies to improve the problem list, and applications in practice of the problem list.

This book provides an overview of the challenges in electronic health records (EHR) design and implementation along with an introduction to the best practices that have been identified over the past several years. The book examines concerns surrounding EHR use and proposes eight examples of proper EHR use. It discusses the complex strategic planning that accompanies the systemic organizational changes associated with EHR programs and highlights key lessons learned regarding health information-including technology errors and risk management concerns.

This important volume provide a one-stop resource on the SAFER Guides along with the guides themselves and information on their use, development, and evaluation. The Safety Assurance Factors for EHR Resilience (SAFER) guides, developed by the editors of this book, identify recommended practices to optimize the safety and safe use of electronic health records (EHRs). These guides are designed to help organizations self-assess the safety and effectiveness of their EHR implementations, identify specific areas of vulnerability, and change their cultures and practices to mitigate risks. This book provides EHR designers, developers, implementers, users, and policymakers with the requisite historical context, clinical informatics knowledge, and real-world, practical guidance to enable them to utilize the SAFER Guides to proactively assess the safety and effectiveness of their electronic health records EHR implementations. The first five chapters are designed to provide readers with the conceptual knowledge required to understand why and how the guides were developed. The next nine chapters focus on the underlying informatics concepts, key research activities, and methods used to develop each of the guides. Each of these chapters concludes with a copy of the guide itself. The final chapter provides a vision for the future and the work required to ensure that future generations of EHRs are designed, developed, implemented, and used to improve the overall safety of the EHR-enabled healthcare system. Taken together, the information provided in this book should help any organization, whether large or small, implement its EHR program and improve the safety and effectiveness of its existing EHR-enabled healthcare systems. This volume will be extremely valuable to small, ambulatory physician practices and larger outpatient settings as well as for hospitals and professors and instructors charged with teaching safe and effective implementation and use of EHRs. It will also be highly useful for health information technology professionals responsible for maintaining a safe and effective EHR and for clinical and administrative staff working in EHR-enabled healthcare systems.

This title includes a number of Open Access chapters. Social Work in Public Health and Hospitals explores a variety of issues related to social work in hospital settings as well as the public policy concerns that guide them. Topics discussed include hospital stays for the elderly, identifying postnatal depression during well-child visits, breast-feeding and awareness of health recommendations, maternal health services in Nigeria, children living with parents with HIV and AIDS, patients' rights in hospitals, harm reduction in hospitals, and more. The book also looks at public health services at rural and community clinics, at university hospitals, and at doctors' offices.

Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency through Technology, Analytics, and Management supplies an understanding of the different types of healthcare service providers, corresponding information technologies, analytic methods, and data issues that play a vital role in transforming the healthcare industry. All of these elements are reshaping the various activities such as workflow and processes of hospitals, healthcare systems, ACOs, and patient analytics, including hot spotting, risk stratification, and treatment effectiveness. A follow-up to Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity, this latest book includes new content that examines the evolution of Big Data and how it is revolutionizing the healthcare industry. It presents strategies for achieving national goals for the meaningful use of health information technology and includes sound project management principles and case illustrations for technology roll-out, such as Computer Physician Order Entry (CPOE) for optimal utilization. The book describes how to enhance process efficiency by linking technologies, data, and analytics with strategic initiatives to achieve success. It explains how to leverage data resources with analytics to enhance decision support for care providers through in-depth descriptions of the array of analytic methods that are used to create actionable information, including Business Intelligence, Six Sigma, Data, and Text Mining.

You got into healthcare because you wanted to help people, but quickly discovered providing high-quality care is challenging. Seemingly impossible demands are placed on you and your team. Some coworkers are constantly complaining; others are in their silos doing only what they must to get through the long days. Collaboration is often lacking, and patients suffer the painful consequences. It's easy to become overloaded with work and overwhelmed with negativity. This is not how the healthcare profession has to be. There is a new science - Positive Psychology - that studies how people are able to perform extraordinarily well in challenging situations. After a dozen years of research in prestigious medical centers, an evidence-based method for applying this science has been developed. That six step program is PROPEL. You will read stories illustrating the experiences of doctors, nurses and administrators who learned to use PROPEL to transform their professional life (and, for many, their personal life as well). You will learn how they were able to attain remarkable results with their teams, units and clinics: * Staff callout and FMLA decreased 75% * Wait times for chemotherapy infusion reduced 6 hours * Staff turnover dropped 80% * Pediatric MRI scheduling driven down from 14 weeks to 10 days * Bone marrow transplant procedures increased by 50% * ED diversion due to psychiatric patient boarding virtually eliminated * Patient fall rate cut by 70% * Use of agency and travelers nurses abolished * Patient satisfaction scores up 50% The cumulative impact to the bottom line has been calculated to be millions of dollars. The most meaningful measure of PROPEL's success, however, comes from the thousands of dedicated professionals who have expressed heartfelt gratitude for having learned how to recapture their joy for working in healthcare.

This book promotes an understanding of the purposeful muddling that health care workers rely on to be better able to function and operate in the multitude of complex ecosystems we call "health care." The book argues the case for the importance of recognising and understanding muddling behaviours, practices and activities in order to create resilient care. The book demonstrates how resilient health care principles can enable managers as well as those on the frontlines to work more effectively towards interdisciplinary care by gaining a deeper understanding of real-world practices that manifest in everyday clinical settings. This is done by presenting a set of case studies, theoretical chapters and applications that relate experiences, bring forth ideas and illustrate practical solutions. Primarily aimed at people who are directly involved in the running and improvement of health care systems, it provides practical guidance. It is also of direct interest to health care professionals in clinical and managerial positions as well as researchers. Jeffrey Braithwaite is Founding Director of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Professor of Health Systems Research and Director of the Centre for Healthcare Resilience and Implementation Science, Macquarie University (Australia). His research examines the changing nature of complex health systems and he has received over 50 different national and international awards for his teaching and research. Erik Hollnagel is Senior Professor of Patient Safety at Joenkoeping University (Sweden). He is a highly regarded international expert with significant contributions to a variety of fields ranging from nuclear power generation, aerospace and aviation to industry, transportation and, most notably, health care. Garthe Hunte is a Clinical Professor and Emergency Physician holding multiple academic and clinical leadership appointments across Canada. His research programme centres around how safety is created in complex socio-technical systems, and in the application of resilience engineering in health care.

In this insightful collection, academic experts consider the impact of neoliberal policies and ideology on the status of care work in Nordic countries. With new research perspectives and empirical analyses, it assesses challenges for care work including technologies, management and policy-making. Arguing that there is a care crisis even in the supposedly feminist Nordic ‘nirvana’, this book explores understandings of the care crisis, the serious consequences for gender equality and the hitherto neglected effects on the long-term sustainability of the Nordic welfare states. This astute take on the Nordic welfare model provides insights into what the Nordic experience can tell us about wider international issues in care.

Provides for the first time a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the different types of healthcare robots and the advances that AI brings them. Provides, in an easy and accessible way, essential basic information about the autonomy levels of surgery robots, which is novel. As such, could be very valuable to a broad community that ranges from legal scholars, ethicists, developers, policymakers, students, or non-specialists curious about the topic.

Healthcare in most developed countries face a complex and partly contradictory mix of financial, social and political challenges. Fiscal strains combined with New Public Management agendas have caused severe cutbacks and calls for greater efficiency in public healthcare, resulting in a growing concern about service quality. Co-production and Japanese Healthcare explores a possibility to address these issues from a new perspective that emphasizes greater collaboration between the staff and patients. Here professionals and patients/clients act as 'partners to co-produce healthcare through their mutual contributions'. Japan has a unique system of two user-owned healthcare providers with nearly 200 hospitals, 500 clinics and 50,000 beds. However, they differ from each other and from public hospitals, in terms of their work environment, service quality, governance models and social values. This volume compares cooperative and public healthcare providers at ten hospitals across Japan with survey data from the staff, as well as from the patients and volunteers at four hospitals. It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of healthcare management, public and non-profit management, human resource management.

The Elgar Companion to Health Economics is a comprehensive and accessible look at the field, as seen by its leading figures.' - Joseph Newhouse, Harvard Medical School, US This comprehensive collection brings together more than 50 contributions from some of the most influential researchers in health economics. It authoritatively covers theoretical and empirical issues in health economics, with a balanced range of material on equity and efficiency in health care systems, health technology assessment and issues of concern for developing countries. This thoroughly revised second edition is expanded to include four new chapters, while all existing chapters have been extensively updated. The Elgar Companion to Health Economics, Second Edition intends to take an audience of advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers to the current frontier of research by providing concise and readable introductions to key topics. Contributors: T. Adam, H. Al-Janabi, M.C. Auld, P.P. Barros, A. Basu, S. Birch, D. Bishai, H. Bleichrodt, W.D. Bradford, J. Brazier, F. Breyer, A. Briggs, J.F. Burgess Jr, L. Burgess, M. Chalkley, D. Chisholm, K. Claxton, J. Coast, P. Contoyannis, R. Cookson, G. Currie, D. Dawson, P. Deb, C. Donaldson, B. Dowd, M. Drummond, T.T.-T. Ensor, S.L. Ettner, D.B. Evans, D. Feeny, R. Feldman, E. Fenwick, A. Gafni, P.-Y. Geoffard, K. Gerard, J. Glazer, D.C. Grabowski, H. Gravelle, P. Grootendorst, P.J. Huckfeldt, T. Iversen, A.M. Jones, D. Kenkel, A.N. Kleit, D.N. Lakdawalla, M. Lindeboom, P. Lorgelly, J. Louviere, H. Luras, W. Manning, X. Martinez-Giralt, H. Mason, A. McGuire, T.G. McGuire, D. Meltzer, A. Mills, C. Mitton, S. Morris, J. Mullahy, D. Nair, E.C. Norton, J.A. Nyman, O. O'Donnell, T. Olmstead, N. Palmer, S.J. Peacock, T.J. Philipson, J.L. Pinto, D. Polsky, C. Propper, M. Raikou, R. Rannan-Eliya, N. Rice, T. Rice, J. Roberts, D. Rowen, C.J. Ruhm, M. Ryan, M. Schoenbaum, M.J. Sculpher, P. Shackley, L. Siciliani, J.L. Sindelar, P.C. Smith, R. Smith, A. Somanathan, A. Street, D.J. Street, M. Sutton, R. Thompson, P.K. Trivedi, A. Tsuchiya, E. van Doorslaer, C.H. Van Houtven, D.J. Vanness, S. Venkatapuram, R. Viney, A. Wagstaff, M.C. Weinstein, J.A. Williams, D. Wilson, P. Zweifel