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.