Operations Management in Healthcare: Strategy and Practice by Corinne M. Karuppan PhD CPIM, Nancy E. Dunlap MD PhD MBA, Michael R. Waldrum MD MSc MBA

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.