Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 66 - May 2020): Health Care Management

This book offers a practical introduction to healthcare analytics that does not require a background in data science or statistics. It presents the basics of data, analytics and tools and includes multiple examples of their applications in the field. The book also identifies practical challenges that fuel the need for analytics in healthcare as well as the solutions to address these problems. In the healthcare field, professionals have access to vast amount of data in the form of staff records, electronic patient record, clinical findings, diagnosis, prescription drug, medical imaging procedure, mobile health, resources available, etc. Managing the data and analyzing it to properly understand it and use it to make well-informed decisions can be a challenge for managers and health care professionals. A new generation of applications, sometimes referred to as end-user analytics or self-serve analytics, are specifically designed for non-technical users such as managers and business professionals. The ability to use these increasingly accessible tools with the abundant data requires a basic understanding of the core concepts of data, analytics, and interpretation of outcomes. This book is a resource for such individuals to demystify and learn the basics of data management and analytics for healthcare, while also looking towards future directions in the field.

This book addresses the relationship between high school students' HIV and AIDS knowledge and their stigma-related attitudes/perceptions of people living with HIV (PLHIV) in the Caribbean and South Pacific, with a view to designing effective stigma-reduction combined intervention programs. Presenting an international cross-sectional study using a purposive sample of high school students from Fiji (South Pacific), Vanuatu (South Pacific), Guyana, and Antigua & Barbuda (Caribbean) to assess HIV and AIDS knowledge and stigma-related attitudes by gender, age, religion, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, the book shows how stigmatizing attitudes and beliefs negatively impact interventions to prevent and treat HIV and AIDS.

This book provides practical applications of statistical and mathematical concepts to resolve common issues in hospital management. Each chapter discusses a key component of hospital operations, such as maximizing hospital profitability through pricing optimization, forecasting facility requirements from historical data, and determining optimal patient schedules to fully utilize hospital resources in order to eliminate over-crowding in the emergency department. Structured by the degree of mathematical complexity, this professional book utilizes problem-solving methodologies ranging from basic statistical concepts (means and standard deviations) to more advanced statistics (Poisson distributions and queuing theory). Concluding with computer applications and simulations, the practical examples will help hospital managers to optimally and innovatively make use of linear programming. The book's main goal is to make hospital personnel more aware of the benefits of management science methodologies that are not usually employed in today's hospitals.

This textbook on Healthcare Management provides a systematic and comprehensive overview of the organisational forms and management instruments implemented in managed care. Within the international discussion on the structure of healthcare systems, managed care is an increasingly important topic. Over more than twenty years managed care approaches have fundamentally influenced healthcare systems in terms of patient orientation, efficiency, and quality. Experts assume that up to 20% of healthcare expenses can be saved by applying high-quality managed care approaches. By using suitable organisational forms and management principles, not only can costs be reduced, but the quality of medical service provision can be augmented. Managed care is therefore much more than a cost-cutting strategy.  Advocates consider managed care to be a logical and necessary developmental step in modern healthcare systems. An increase in quality and at the same time a reduction of costs is not seen as contradictory but rather as consistent. Therefore, managed care is a response to changed challenges in the provision of healthcare.​

This innovative book analyses the evolving nature of leadership, exploring an ever-increasing range of theoretical concepts and applying these to practices within healthcare organisations. A wide range of theories are covered, from behavioural to attitudinal, socio-cognitive to contingency, and social exchange to team. By identifying the common underlying characteristics that are present in leadership styles and approaches, the author successfully crafts a useful model that is adaptable to different scenarios and contexts within the realms of healthcare management. Offering a series of detailed case studies from around the world, this book proposes three crucial concepts for leadership within the health sector: leadership credibility, professional credibility and organisational dynamics. Both scholars and practitioners will find the theoretical framework provided in this book insightful and applicable in real-life situations.

This volume is the first to address multilingual healthcare communication around the globe and focuses on institutional, social and linguistic challenges and resources of the healthcare industry. It comprises studies from Canada, Australia, South Africa, Greenland, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, and aims to introduce new paths of communicative and methodological agendas, casting a critical view on current linguistic practices in healthcare, nursing and medical interactions.  With increased personal mobility in a global society, the need for multilingual staff is on the rise in medical institutions and healthcare organisations, and communicative competencies and practices involving different languages pose challenges for medical doctors, healthcare staff and patients alike.  Many studies have highlighted the crucial role played by interpreters and interpreting staff, but the diversity of language situations in different countries requires very different approaches and solutions. Additionally, it may not be possible to develop a single agenda of language services for different medical areas with different needs for counselling, with various forms of treatment that require explanation and the patient's informed consent and with varying approaches to the relationship between medical professionals and patients. How to best organise medical (digital) language services in countries as different as South Africa, Greenland, Germany, Belgium and Australia calls for a diversity of possible solutions. The current volume makes a variety of such solutions and practices available for medical staff and healthcare institutions faced with international patients and working with international medical staff. It makes the challenges palpable on an international scale in a way that comparisons may be drawn between different solutions as well as their socio-cultural and institutional implications. This volume is intended for policy makers, medical and healthcare practitioners, institutions, interpreters, teachers and students in professional multilingual healthcare.

Patient-oriented approaches to healthcare management have been brought to the fore in recent years, yet this book underlines how even further change is needed in order to fully mobilise the experiential knowledge of patients, and ultimately improve our healthcare systems. With contributions from scholars and patients across the globe, this collection brings together a comprehensive overview of major achievements in patient engagement, analysing political, organizational and clinical contexts. By understanding the concept of care partnership, the authors explore how this patient revolution could transform, improve and innovate the ways in which care services are organized and delivered. Looking closely at the role of new technologies, this timely book will undoubtedly be of use to patients, managers and professionals within the healthcare industry, as well as those researching health policy and organization.

This book examines the nature of service design and service thinking in healthcare and hospital management. By adopting both a service-based provider perspective and a consumer-oriented perspective, the book highlights various healthcare services, methods and tools that are desirable for customers and effective for healthcare providers. In addition, readers will learn about new research directions, as well as strategies and innovations to develop service solutions that are affordable, sustainable, and consumer-oriented. Lastly, the book discusses policy options to improve the service delivery process and customer satisfaction in the healthcare and hospital sector. The contributors cover various aspects and fields of application of service design and service thinking, including service design processes, tools and methods; service blueprints and service delivery; creation and implementation of services; interaction design and user experience; design of service touchpoints and service interfaces; service excellence and service innovation. The book will appeal to all scholars and practitioners in the hospital and healthcare sector who are interested in organizational development, service business model innovation, customer involvement and perceptions, and service experience.

This book covers several areas, such as immunology, infectious diseases, physiology, general nursing, and medicine as well as measurement accuracy and the history of our understanding of fever. This book employs an interdisciplinary approach to exploring our concept of body temperature and specifically fever. The present volume revolves around thermometry, taking the reader on a journey from the past to the present. Yet while the emphasis is on the clinical importance of obtaining accurate, quantitative measurements of body temperature, the reader is also introduced to the most recent clinical work on the subject. This book represents a truly cross-disciplinary collaboration, using evidence-based practice to integrate physiological and immunological knowledge. The authors' intention with this volume is to help readers gain better insight into the importance of using knowledge from different disciplines to develop an appreciation of the different aspects of body temperature. In addition, the reader will come to understand the concept of fever in a broader perspective than is traditionally adopted.