Business Process Management in Healthcare Organizations

This book is an overview of healthcare organization business processes including business process management approaches as well as a discussion of healthcare organization entrepreneurship as a business process. This book is for you if you are interested in the world of business processes and business process management in healthcare organizations in the United States. This book is for those with a developing interest in healthcare organization operations as they pertain to business processes and their management. It is also suitable 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 business processes in healthcare organizations (e.g., improve your ability to facilitate the management of business processes in a healthcare organization, improve your healthcare administration skills, learn more about business processes in healthcare organizations in general). 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. Answering 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 business processes in healthcare organizations. 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 that the most valuable part of this book is the list of resources provided for the reader. These links (more than 550) 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 Associated URL/Link List. The list includes data, management, and research links needed for healthcare administration, management, and operations related to business processes in a healthcare organization.The competency development tasks in this book facilitate content mastery to help you organize your thinking. Such organized thought should help you determine the relationship between the book content, a personal learning path, and achievement of personal goals. Competency development tasks in this book discussion questions, quizzes, and a project. Again, this is a Socratic approach in that the book asks for your thinking on the topics. The included suggested project is intended to help you synthesize content material by developing business processes for a healthcare organization of your choice the way you would have things run in the best of all worlds. The suggested design format to communicate these business processes is an electronic memo format.