Richard Bohmer Unites Medicine and Management to Prescribe New Design for Health Care Delivery
Designing Care: Aligningthe Nature and Management of Health Care by Richard Bohmer BOSTON -- In the face of mounting health care costs, declining quality of care, and an explosion of need, nations around the world are debating how to "fix" their health care systems. Most common solutions have focused on how to fund and reimburse health care, but physician and Harvard Business School senior lecturer Richard Bohmer argues that this focus misses an important piece of the problem. Rather than solely determining how to better fund health care, we must also understand the fundamental nature of care and ask how we could better design, manage, and deliver it. In his new book, Designing Care: Aligning the Nature and Management of Health Care (Harvard Business Press), Dr. Bohmer asserts that health care is essentially a process of applying the best available medical knowledge - both research and clinical - to solve patients' health problems. In recent decades, the knowledge that underpins care has dramatically increased in volume and sharpened in specificity, enabling some treatments to become standardized while others remain highly uncertain. Carrying out these very different types of care processes requires different management systems, resources, tools, and personnel; yet most health care organizations are not set up to do this. The result has been a misalignment between patients' health problems and the processes and treatments applied to solve them. Integrating Dr. Bohmer's experience in both medical science and management practice, Designing Care outlines an approach to health care design and management that enables organizations to deliver proven medical treatments more effectively, and capture valuable clinical learning while treating more ambiguous health problems. In this book, Dr. Bohmer develops an approach to health care delivery that is grounded in the nature of the work required to care for an individual patient suffering from disease.
"In Designing Care,
Richard Bohmer lucidly demonstrates that the delivery of medical care can be made better, safer, and less costly by the sensible application of operational management," said Peter Slavin, President of Massachusetts General Hospital. "Dr. Bohmer has written a compelling prescription for many if the ills of our health care system." Through stories and cases drawn from health care institutions in multinational settings, Dr. Bohmer reveals how health care providers can successfully manage both modes, outlining what organizations look like in practice when "care delivery" and "learning from care" are combined. He describes the six key organizational capabilities required to simultaneously implement best practices for well-understood health issues, create the new knowledge required to solve complex health problems, and embed that knowledge into
About the Author At Harvard Business School he teaches an MBA course on health care operations management, co-directs the MD-MBA program, and is the faculty chair for two executive programs in health care delivery. He teaches and consults on health management issues in numerous locations around the world. Before joining the HBS faculty, Dr. Bohmer was the Clinical Director of Quality Improvement at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was responsible for planning and implementing the clinical quality improvement program. In October, Dr. Bohmer Dr. Bohmer's research focuses on the intersection between medical care and management practice and
concentrates on understanding how best to design and manage the process of patient care in order to improve |
About Harvard Business School
Founded in 1908 as part of Harvard University, Harvard Business School is located on a 40-acre campus in Boston. Its faculty of more than 250 offers full-time programs leading to the MBA and PhD degrees, as well as more than 175 Executive Education programs, and Harvard Business School Online, the School’s digital learning platform. For more than a century, faculty have drawn on their research, their experience in working with organizations worldwide, and their passion for teaching, to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. The School and its curriculum attract the boldest thinkers and the most collaborative learners who will go on to shape the practice of business and entrepreneurship around the globe.