Many healthcare organizations treat their real estate as liabilities rather than assets and overlook opportunities to generate significant additional revenue and reduce costs. An Ernst & Young Study found that to maximize the return on investment in their real-estate holdings, healthcare organizations need to include property management in their strategic ...

The techniques of managing a medical practice are no different from those required to manage any other business. Planning is the first step, and establishing a realistic budget is essential to creating a successful plan. Knowing your patients and the sources of your revenue are next. Understanding the weaknesses within ...

This article discusses the result of a study we conducted to investigate the factors that facilitate or impede healthcare management career opportunities and satisfaction from the perspective of racially and ethnically diverse healthcare managers. These healthcare managers were invited to participate in focus groups wherein they engaged in a structured ...

Disease management is a strategy of organizing care and services for a patient population across the continuum. It is characterized by a population database, interdisciplinary and interagency collaboration, and evidence-based clinical information. The effectiveness of a disease management program has been measured by a combination of clinical, financial, and quality ...

A medical practice is a business and as such is governed by the principles of good business management; these include planning, budgeting, and supervision. A benchmark comparison of a practice is the first step in identifying the factors that determine the financial performance of the practice. However, it is only ...

The challenges of managing up in a merging organization that is structured as a matrix and provides services to others in a network organization are described. Managing up in the merging organization, which may be characterized by instability, jockeying for position, conflicts of organizational cultures, inconsistent or conflicting policies, and ...

A logical sequence of seven steps is proposed as a generic template to design plans for monitoring and evaluating fish and wildlife in the Columbia River ecosystem. Management programs for these resources fail to include coordinated monitoring and evaluation plans. This short-coming is indicative of pervasive management conflicts detected from ...

The use of managing up in an institution's time of financial crisis is described. The goals of crisis management include survival, maintaining quality and service, learning issues and impacts, supporting the team, and preparing for the aftermath as the crisis subsides. Survival calls for a commitment by leaders to remain ...

In this paper, we highlight the involvement of Knowledge Management in a healthcare enterprise. We argue that the 'knowledge quotient' of a healthcare enterprise can be enhanced by procuring diverse facets of knowledge from the seemingly placid healthcare data repositories, and subsequently operationalising the procured knowledge to derive a suite ...

Managers who recognize that Generation X employees are looking for workplaces that allow them to develop their competencies as well as have a balance in their personal and professional lives, are more successful in attracting and retaining employees in this age group. Savvy managers understand that adapting to meet the ...

Often, individuals take personal delegation skills for granted and assume the presence of expertise with the practice of delegation, which may not be the case. Those assumptions can be found at both ends of the process, with the manager and the employee. Every time a manager places an employee in ...

Hospitals and healthcare systems are facing increased financial difficulties because of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 and managed care. As a result, healthcare executives face the challenge of reducing costs while maintaining quality patient care. One of the strategic tools healthcare executives use to meet this challenge is outsourcing. ...

Many healthcare organizations have lost money on their employed group practices. The solution to this dilemma is not necessarily divestment of the group practices. Instead, some healthcare organizations should view their physicians as an asset. Healthcare organizations and physicians need to develop a new framework for their relationship to optimize ...

Determining the discipline or discharge of an employee is one of the most important and imperfect tasks a manager will probably ever have to do. It is tricky because there are so many questions to answer. Who did what and when? Who's telling the truth and who's bending it? Who ...

Many healthcare organizations that acquired group practices to enhance their market share have found that the practices have not met their financial goals. Turning around a financially troubled, hospital-owned group practice is challenging but not impossible for healthcare organizations that take certain basic actions. Direction, data, desire, dedication, and drive ...

An effective and realistic approach to HIPAA compliance requires healthcare organizations to achieve a fundamental shift in attitude, awareness, habits and capabilities in the areas of privacy and security. They must create a sense of accountability among staff, and even patients, for the safeguarding of patient information. Only when this ...

The adaptive management leitmotiv of "learning to manage and managing to learn" sets out an attractive agenda for dealing with the overwhelming complexity of environmental phenomena that humans have problematized. To ensure that this rallying cry translates into effective action, it is important to give consideration to structures and procedures ...

The 1999 collapse in California of practice management giants FPA Medical Management, Inc. and MedPartners, Inc. has caused healthcare provider organizations, particularly independent practice associations (IPAs), to examine critical issues related to financial solvency. Problems such as declining membership, ineffective management, weak contracting, and lack of strategic vision frequently are ...

Practically every medical practice finds itself short-staffed at one time or another. In some cases, a temporary employee is all that is needed to keep the practice running smoothly. Because of this, many temporary employment agencies today gear themselves specifically to filling both administrative and clinical positions in medical practices. ...

Employees have an enormous amount of business information at their fingertips--more specifically, at their desktops. The floodgates are open; profitable possibilities abound. But having to handle all that information has pushed downsized staffs to the brink of an acute attention deficit disorder. To achieve corporate goals, business leaders need their ...

This article provides an overview of the disciplines involved in managing a dermatology practice today. Several key management processes, including strategic planning, financial analysis, advertising and public relations, information systems management, and compliance program development and monitoring are addressed. This article explores several possible tactics that can be used to ...

Managers and nurse leaders can enhance skills and techniques to manage conflict and subsequent counseling of employees in the workplace. Stress, conflict, issues of miscommunication, and a poor job performance can be handled in a focused, orderly manner. Corrective action plans and documentation of counseling sessions are suggested. A framework ...

Healthcare is a rapidly evolving industry where firms face constantly changing conditions and an ever-increasing demand for services. As competition in this sector continues to grow, managers must assess their organizations and develop methods to improve firm performance and productivity. Successful managers are constantly searching for tools that will motivate ...

This paper explores some recent healthcare reforms within the Canadian healthcare sector. As in most countries across the world, healthcare managers in Canada have been faced with the dilemma of how to achieve a balance between equity of provision and expenditure control. This study explores the external and internal pressures ...

Caouette, John P.; Kramer, Marc G.; Nowacki, Gregory J. 2000. Deconstructing the timber volume paradigm in management of the Tongass National Forest. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-482. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. 20 p. (Shaw, Charles G., III, tech. coord.; Conservation and resource assesments ...

There are many useful benchmark sites on the Internet for healthcare leaders, and many others that can provide the information healthcare leaders need to do their jobs. During this summer, Healthcare Leadership and Management Report will be redesigning and upgrading its Web site at www.integrated report.com. The new site will ...

Financial managers who want to distinguish themselves in their organizations need to demonstrate their leadership ability. Because financial managers sometimes overlook the need for leadership skills, cultivating mentors who can teach them specific leadership skills, such as improved communications and entrepreneurship, may be necessary. Healthcare financial managers can sharpen their ...

Managers should not second-guess themselves when contemplating termination of marginal employees, i.e., those with sustained poor attitudes or performances. Poor performers should not be allowed to disadvantage an otherwise successful team; management ought not to retain someone it cannot fully support; and termination may be interpersonally excruciating but is organizationally ...

Akademisk avhandling (Doktorsexamen) - Sveriges Lantsbruksuniv., Umeaa (Sweden). Dept. of Forest Resource Management and Geomatics

There is an increasing interest by the healthcare industry in the post-Soviet nations of Central and Eastern Europe in adopting and applying at least some aspects of Western healthcare management technology, such as TQM, to contain healthcare expenditures and improve healthcare outcomes. However, interest is not enough. There must be ...

Strategy formation involves understanding the environment and strengths and weaknesses of a practice to develop a game plan to achieve goals. It starts with the creation of a mission statement that defines a long-term vision of what the practice seeks to be and the markets it seeks to serve. Once ...

OBJECTIVE: To assess the medical informatics needs of healthcare organizations and the work roles for informaticists in those organizations. METHODS: A 128-item survey was developed and administered as a structured interview to thirty-two information managers in eighteen organizations. The survey included items about medical informatics training, prior work experience, skills ...

The dominant view among academic economists is that the financial markets value financial securities "efficiently," in the sense that the prevailing prices of widely traded securities fully and properly reflect, at any time, all publicly available information that bears on these securities. Although that theory has great intuitive appeal, it ...

In complying with the HIPAA security regulations, the large, multi-site academic radiology department is quite different from the small, private radiology practice. This article compares and contrasts the methods each of these two model organizations use to achieve compliance. In common between the two organizations is that complete documentation of ...

The abundance and transient nature to healthcare knowledge has rendered it difficult to acquire with traditional knowledge acquisition methods. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Management approach, through the use of scenarios, as a mean to acquire and represent tacit healthcare knowledge. This proposition is based on the premise ...

Objective: To assess the medical informatics needs of healthcare organizations and the work roles for informaticists in those organizations. Methods: A 128-item survey was developed and administered as a structured interview to thirty-two information managers in eighteen organizations. The survey included items about medical informatics training, prior work experience, skills ...

Given substantial changes in the marketplace, many physician practices have responded by growing rapidly, merging with or acquiring other practices, or selling the practice to physician practice management companies (PPMCs) or hospital systems. The hoped-for economies of scale, increased market share and profit, or other goals often have not come ...

Effective reward and recognition programs are important in order to retain well qualified hospital employees and actively engage them in satisfying patients, managing scarce resources, and improving performance. The rewards and recognition bestowed may be modest in scale but must be symbolic of genuine caring and appreciation by management. This ...

As physician organizations adapt their incentives, processes, and structures to accommodate the demands of an increasingly competitive and performance-sensitive external environment, the development of more effective administrative and managerial mechanisms becomes critical to success. The emergence of physician practice management companies (PPMCs) represents a potentially positive step for physician practices ...

In 1998 and 1999, unprecedented changes occurred in the U.S. economy: unemployment rates dropped below 4.5%, the stock market soared to more than 11,000, and about 3 million new technology-related jobs were created (1). Faced with worldwide competition and new technologies, many industries and businesses have had to relook at ...

/ Watershed-based planning has been held as a vanguard for integrated ecosystem management based on a collaborative process. Watershed managers, however, must contend with conflicts that run much deeper than interests for economic development versus sustaining ecosystem health. With data from a survey of members of watershed organizations, we characterize ...

It is our objective to provide you with a step-by-step approach to conducting a kaizen blitz within two days and describe how to achieve dramatic performance improvement with employee buy-in through this process. Kaizen blitz has been used dozens of times by the authors, and in some instances the same ...

To successfully obtain capital financing, a group practice should develop a business plan that is tailored to the needs and objectives of the targeted investors. When evaluating possible funding sources, healthcare financial managers need to consider the group practice's growth objectives, geographic scope, intended use of the funding, and cash-flow ...

In today's competitive markets, every company has an action plan. Yet for most managers, the processes used to create these plans don't work. The root of the problem, suggests Campbell, may be that too many companies benchmark their processes and by doing so, prevent managers from focusing on what is ...

Both traditional group practices and IPAs have felt the impact of changes brought about by managed care. Group practices need to ensure that their financial reporting and cost-accounting methods capture information that is key to decision making. An independent assessment of financial procedures helps identify any outstanding issues and maintain ...

Knowledge management provides a means for sharing data, lessons learned, and accumulated knowledge throughout an organization or within an entire industry. Gone are the days of hoarding knowledge to ensure job security; today's workers and managers must work together to find new and innovative ways to use what they know ...

This two-day conference, organized by The Economist, focused on R and D productivity, strategic and innovative methodologies, M and A activities and knowledge management within the pharmaceutical industry. Key speakers within the industry addressed these issues to an audience of approximately 100 healthcare business executives. The first day was chaired ...

A conceptual framework for HMO managers who are evaluating physicians' financial incentives proposes that the incentives vary along five dimensions: (1) the percentage of the physician's income at stake, (2) the organizational level, (3) the synergy between multiple financial incentives, (4) the synergy between financial and nonfinancial incentives, and (5) ...

In this paper we suggest that the healthcare enterprise needs to be more conscious of its vast knowledge resources vis-à-vis the exploitation of knowledge management techniques to efficiently manage its knowledge. The development of healthcare enterprise memory is suggested as a solution, together with a novel approach advocating the operationalisation ...

This research paper reports the findings of the first comprehensive survey of senior executives in Iran's teaching hospitals. It is based on an analysis identifying the continuing professional development (CPD) needs of the total population of the two senior levels of teaching hospitals management-presidents of physician-managers and administrative-managers. Four key ...