Operations Management in Healthcare: Strategy and Practice

This comprehensive, practice-oriented text illustrates how healthcare organizations can gain a competitive edge through superior operations. Underscoring the importance of a strategic perspective, the book describes how to attain excellence in the four competitive priorities: quality (laying the foundation for performance), cost, timeliness, and flexibility. It stresses the benefits of aligning the entire operations system within the parameters of a business strategy. The text equips students with a conceptual mental model of healthcare operations in which all concepts and tools fit together.

With a hands-on approach, the book clearly demonstrates the how-tos of effectively managing a healthcare organization. It describes how to negotiate the different perspectives of clinicians and administrators by offering a common platform for building competitive advantage. To bring the cultural context of a healthcare organization to life, the book engages students with a series of short vignettes of a fictitious healthcare organization as it strives for and achieves the status of a highly reliable organization. Integrated throughout are a variety of tools with step-by-step instructions to assist in problem solving and process improvements. The book provides mind maps to link competitive priorities and concepts, quick-reference icons, dashboards displaying measurement and progress tracking, quantitative techniques, and boxed features. Also included are several project ideas, team assignments, and creative thinking exercises. A comprehensive Instructor Packet, video tutorials, and other student resources.

Key Features:

• Mind maps to connect competitive priorities, concepts, and tools
• Marginal icons throughout the text to indicate the competitive priorities supported by the concepts and tools being discussed
• Provides an extensive tool kit for problem solving and process improvements
• Emphasizes measurement with dashboards and includes supplemental data files for statistical process control, queuing, and simulation
• Vivid vignettes demonstrate human dynamics, organizational challenges, and how to apply tools
• Boxed features address frequently asked questions and real-world implementations of concepts
• A comprehensive Instructor Packet, video tutorials, and other student resources.

Corinne M. Karuppan, PhD, CPIM, is Professor Emerita of Operations Management at Missouri State University.

Nancy E. Dunlap, MD, PhD, MBA, is Professor Emerita of Medicine at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).

Michael R. Waldrum, MD, MSc, MBA, currently serves as chief executive officer of Vidant Health, a nine hospital integrated delivery system affiliated with East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.