Health Care Delivery in Healthcare Organizations

Have you ever needed health care and thought that there must be better ways to get or deliver health care? Have you found yourself thinking that there should be a way to get a diagnostic test or treatment at home? Or do you work in a healthcare organization and find yourself thinking that there must be better ways to deliver health care? If you have, this book is for you.This book is for those with a developing interest in the organizational operations, administration, and management of health care delivery in healthcare organizations and for those who have some expertise, but who wish an overview or refresher of these topics.Unlike most other texts, this book has an agenda or purpose aimed at aiding the reader. The book knows that you have your own specific personal goals regarding the healthcare organization's role in the delivery of quality health care (e.g., improve your ability to facilitate the management of health care delivery functions to meet patient/customer expectations, improve your healthcare administration skills, learn more about health care delivery in healthcare organizations in general). It also assumes that readers have different specific goals. The purpose of this book is to enable you to develop your own learning path to reach your learning goal regardless of what that goal happens to be. The intent of the book is to provide you with content and resources to pursue a personal learning path. That content extends past the reading of this text and will help you in your chosen work or study.The unique purpose of the book requires a unique format. The format includes tons of resources (some would say encyclopedic) coupled with the Socratic Method and suggested competency development tasks. The Socratic Method promotes understanding of a topic by posing questions on that topic. An answer to the question requires a learner/reader to think critically and synthesize information. The overall competency goal for all readers of this book is that it enables each reader to think more critically and more independently about health care delivery in healthcare organizations in new and interesting ways.The book is organized into four (4) lessons. Each lesson is organized around competency objectives, questions, readings, competency development tasks (e.g., quiz) to organize your thinking and cement your learning. It is a format which makes extensive use of the resources available on the internet. As such the book provides links to external sites to connect you to the larger "real world" of healthcare organizations to help you better build your own learning path. The links also serve as resources you can use after you complete this book. Many might say that the most valuable part of this book is the list of resources provided for the reader. These links (more than 700) are directly accessible in the content in the e-book version. For the print version - and for reference in the e-book version - the full URL for each link in the book can be found at the corresponding in-text link number (bib#) in the section at the end of the book entitled Bibliography: Associated URL/Link List. The list includes data, management, and research links needed for healthcare administration, management, and operations related to health care delivery in a healthcare organization.And because everyone loves a road trip/field trip, there are also "virtual field trips" to the often hidden places of interest on the web. There are also trivia questions - just for fun - because everyone also loves little known, but interesting, fun facts. This book is dense in the physics sense of the word. One needs to take a break every so often to absorb the material. This is one of the reasons why virtual field trips and trivia questions are provided. Historical and social context is important in healthcare. Many of the links, virtual field trips, and trivia questions provide this context.