Reengineering Health Care

Book excerpt: """Reengineering Health Care" gets to the core of transforming our current system by advocating the widespread use of IT, eliminating inefficient practices, and keeping the system focused on a healthy individual and not on a broken process.""--Newt Gingrich, Founder of the Center for Health Transformation, and former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ""This book is a prescription for streamlining health care. Using the techniques that have successfully transformed business into customer-focused and efficient organizations, the authors provide a step-by-step approach to improving health care processes, guiding health care into the next generation of Lean delivery systems.""--Dr. John Halamka, Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center ""In health care, we tend to inundate our people with information, rather than enabling them to have insights. This concise guide will resonate with both senior and front-line managers who know they're engaged in unproductive work. They will see that reengineering is not overly difficult and can enable them to improve patient care and efficiency.""--Trevor Fetter, President and CEO, Tenet Health Corporation, and Trustee, Federation of American Hospitals ""It isn't reform that will fix our ailing health care system, its reengineering. Champy and Greenspun highlight organizations that have transformed, and reinvented, themselves by reengineering care delivery-they've lowered costs, improved care quality and patient safety, and increased the satisfaction of those giving and receiving care. Every clinician, hospital executive, and politician should read this book.""--Bill Crounse, M.D., Senior Director, Worldwide Health, Microsoft Corporation ""Implement health care technology, and you have better health care tools; reengineer with a focus on technology, process, and people, and you have a better health care system. This straightforward guide shows how to transform health care to maximize quality, safety, convenience, and impact the cost of delivery. No one can read this book and not feel a profound call to action.""--H. Stephen Lieber, CAE, President & CEO, HIMSS In their legendary book, "Reengineering the Corporation", Jim Champy and Michael Hammer introduced businesspeople to the enormous power of a revolutionary methodology called "reengineering". Using reengineering, businesses around the world have systematically retooled their processes--achieving dramatic cost savings, greater customer satisfaction, and more value. Now, Jim Champy and Dr. Harry Greenspun show how to apply the proven reengineering methodology in health care: throughout physician practices, hospitals, and even entire health systems. You'll meet innovative and visionary leaders who've been successfully reengineering organizations across the entire delivery spectrum and learn powerful lessons for improving quality, reducing costs, and expanding access. This book doesn't just demonstrate the immense potential of health care reengineering to revolutionize health care delivery: "it offers a clear roadmap for realizing that potential in your own organization""." Deliver Better Care to More People, at Lower Cost How reengineering can lead to more efficient, safer delivery--and sharply reduced costs How to focus on prevention and wellness, as well as chronic disease and hospital care How to earn the trust, contributions, and passion of skeptical physicians and health care professionals How to harness technology to create more seamless, accessible, valued, and sustainable health care systems--and avoid technology's pitfalls How Zeev Neuwirth transformed the Lenox Hill Hospital ER and the 700-doctor Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates practice How Tom Knight is revolutionizing patient safety at Methodist Hospital System, one of America's largest private, nonprofit medical complexes How to start today in your own organization!