Healthcare Organizations offer significant opportunities for change and improvement in their overall performance. Hospitals and clinics are generally large, complex, and inefficient, and need serious development in process workflow and management systems, which will ultimately lead to better patient and financial outcomes. The National Academy of Medicine has stated that hospital systems are broken, and that they must begin by "... improving hospital efficiency and patient flow, and using operational management methods and information technologies." In fact, costs and quality are two of the important aspects of the "triple aim" in healthcare. One area that offers significant potential for improvement is through the application of performance improvement methods to patient and process flows. Performance improvement has a significant impact on a hospital's over financial and strategic performance. Performance improvement involves the deployment of quantitative and scientific methods to model and influence the functioning of organizations. Performance improvement professionals are tasked with managing a variety of activities, such as deploying new information technologies, serving as project managers for construction events, re-engineering departmental process workflow, eliminating bottlenecks, and improving the flow and movement of patients between resource-intensive clinical areas. All of these are high risk, and require use of advanced, sophisticated methods to improve efficiency and quality, while minimizing disruptions from change. This updated edition is a comprehensive and concise guide to performance improvement in healthcare. It describes the management engineering principles focused on designing optimal management and information systems and processes. Case studies and examples are integrated throughout all chapters.

Without new ways to think and manage itself strategically, academic healthcare faces terminal deterioration. Heightened competition and changing dynamics have brought turbulence to teaching hospitals, and the main impact has been financial. Langabeer and Napiewocki give health care executives the tools and concepts of strategic management they need and ways to strengthen analytic skills, all based on up-to-date empirical research, cast in language they can grasp and relate to, and specially tailored to help teaching hospital administrators cope successfully with today's marketplace challenges. Board members, trustees, and others with decision- and policy-making responsibilities will also find the book essential, as well as their teaching colleagues and students on their way up in the hospital industry.

The authors maintain that if nonprofit teaching hospitals are to compete successfully with private for-profit hospital chains, not only must they learn the terrain of the playing fields, they must also learn how the game itself is played. Langabeer and Napiewocki offer that knowledge, and in doing so have written the first book of its kind to address comprehensively the entire realm of strategic management aimed clearly at teaching hospitals and major academic medical centers. With findings from primary empirical research into a large sample of teaching hospitals and focusing on the statistical relationships to economic performance, they provide crucial insights into why certain hospitals are more effective than others. Their book will also help healthcare executives relate strategy research on industrial organizations to their own teaching hospital environments. In doing so, their book fills a void in the literature on business strategy that for too long has caused consternation among healthcare administrators and aspirants alike.

Healthcare Organizations offer significant opportunities for change and improvement in their overall performance. Hospitals and clinics are generally large, complex, and inefficient, and need serious development in process workflow and management systems, which will ultimately lead to better patient and financial outcomes. The National Academy of Medicine has stated that hospital systems are broken, and that they must begin by "... improving hospital efficiency and patient flow, and using operational management methods and information technologies." In fact, costs and quality are two of the important aspects of the "triple aim" in healthcare. One area that offers significant potential for improvement is through the application of performance improvement methods to patient and process flows. Performance improvement has a significant impact on a hospital's over financial and strategic performance. Performance improvement involves the deployment of quantitative and scientific methods to model and influence the functioning of organizations. Performance improvement professionals are tasked with managing a variety of activities, such as deploying new information technologies, serving as project managers for construction events, re-engineering departmental process workflow, eliminating bottlenecks, and improving the flow and movement of patients between resource-intensive clinical areas. All of these are high risk, and require use of advanced, sophisticated methods to improve efficiency and quality, while minimizing disruptions from change. This updated edition is a comprehensive and concise guide to performance improvement in healthcare. It describes the management engineering principles focused on designing optimal management and information systems and processes. Case studies and examples are integrated throughout all chapters.