Practical Solutions for Healthcare Management and Policy (Collection)

Chapter 7. The Hunt For Reengineering Opportunities

By now you know that the delivery of health care can be transformed for the benefit of patients, physicians, and the people paying the bills. Almost every area of health care offers opportunities for improvement, and no area is free of error, inefficiency, or escalating costs. Clinician after clinician has bemoaned care failures only to describe inspirational success stories that address the systemic causes of the breakdowns.

So where should a clinician, hospital, payer, integrated health care system, or physicians’ practice begin to tackle its own challenges? As with all reengineering efforts, targeting specific areas of opportunity is both an art and a science. Where you begin will, in part, ...