Person-Focused Health Care Management: A Foundational Guide for Health Care Managers

Provides a decision-making framework and guide to improving the experience of care from the individual patient's perspective.

How might the entire system for producing, delivering, and paying for health care be changed so that the real people who are living inside the role of patient fare better than they currently do?

In general, person-focused care starts with the purposeful escalation of the lived experience of the person receiving or needing care into a management priority for all involved in providing that care. Taken as a whole, a person-focused approach to health care management frames a general perspective for incorporating the personal experience of care into the everyday management responsibilities of health care professionals. Whether working on the clinical or administrative side of health care, the perspective of person-focused care helps professionals throughout a health care organization routinely incorporate awareness into their decision making of how each individual being treated is feeling, thinking, interpreting, and understanding his or her experience as a patient.

Written and edited by distinguished educators, clinicians, and researchers with decades of health care policy and management experience, the text examines how health care managers can initiate and direct the process of system transformation by understanding and using a greater "person focus" in their decision making. The book helps to develop specific rules for improving the experience of care through better managerial decision making. Case studies with discussion questions facilitate creative problem solving based on sound decision making.

KEY FEATURES:

• Describes the framework and tools for using a person-focused approach to improve clinical outcomes and the overall personal experience of care
• Discusses the impact of management decisions on the personal experience of clinical care
• Addresses the personal and clinical problems created through our current system's standard health care delivery and financing
• Fulfills key learning competencies defined by AUPHA, CAHME, and NCHL
• Instructor's manual and PowerPoint slides available for qualified instructors

Donald L. Zimmerman, PhD, is a professor and program director of health care management at the University of New Orleans.

Denise G. Osborn-Harrison, JD, MPH, is a health insurance specialist at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Baltimore, Maryland, and adjunct professor for George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.