The Physician-Manager Alliance: Building the Healthy Health Care Organization

This work details an approach for a health-care organization which is designed to create a new dynamic for clinician-manager relations that will restore confidence in the health care system. The book shows how the alliance of managers and physicians can implement effective policies and procedures that will provide health care that is responsive to patient's needs, and is timely, considerate and technologically appropriate. The authors reveal how medicine is actually practiced in today's health care organizations, and offer guidance for needed improvements.

Table of Contents:
The High Stakes of Change: The Need for Physician-Manager Alliances. Our Growing Dependence on Organizations. The Health Care Customer in the New Marketplace. Physicians and Managers: The Search for Common Ground. Moving Toward the Health Care Organization: Identifying the Critical Changes. Measuring Effiiciency, Effectiveness and Satisfaction. Understanding the Physician-Manager Relationship: Five Perspectives. An Open Systems View: A Realistic Framework for the Health Care Organization. The Problem-Solving Approach: Creating Collaboration.

About the Author :
STEPHEN M. DAVIDSON is associate professor of health care management and management policy and former director of the graduate program in health care management at Boston University School of Management. He is the author and co-author of several books, including Medicaid Decisions: A Systematic Analysis of the Cost Problem (1980) and The Cost of Living Longer: National Health Insurance and the Elderly (1980). MARION MCCOLLOM is associate professor of organizational behavior at Boston University School of Management. She coedited Groups in Action: A New Perspective on Group Dynamics (1990). JANELLE HEINEKE is assistant professor of operations management at Boston University School of Management. She has over fifteen years of clinical health care experience, as well as ten years of health care industry management experience in hospitals and HMOs.

Review :
"The authors have written an important book, underscoring the necessity of cooperative and collaborative relationships between physicians and managers. Such partnerships of medicine and management, whose destinies are inextricably intertwined, are essential if organizations are to effectively and efficiently operate for the benefit of the people they serve." --Howard S. Zuckerman, professor, School of Health Administration and Policy, and director, Center for Health Management and Research, Arizona State College of Business