elivery of health care services to patients is facing extreme levels of change and challenge, ushered in not just by the Affordable Care Act, but also by demands from insurers, payers and employers for improved approaches. At Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La., the goal of our quality improvement efforts is — as always — to improve patient care. But we also want to...

Despite major obstacles, activities to control sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were initiated in Haiti in 1992 in collaboration with local nongovernmental organizations. The approaches included review of available local data, assessment of STD case management practices and constraints, and development of specific STD control activities at the primary health care level, such as systematic s...

The success rate of all organizations irrespective of its nature, service oriented or product oriented; profit based or non-profit based; public or private, is influenced by many factors, where the most critical customer satisfaction is to achieve excellence in business (1). This study has attempted to understand the impact TQM practices in hospital management system where the customer expectat...

Vietnam has had a long history of international mission teams that volunteer needed surgical care to underserved populations for various medical problems. As senior medical students, we joined a non-profit organization's surgical mission trip led by a community practice surgeon and staffed by 32 health care professionals to provide cleft lip and palate reconstructions for 75 patients at a local...

HoSpitalS and HealtH SyStemS are creating new entities to explore and exploit non-traditional solutions to a wide range of systemic health care delivery challenges. Known as innovation centers, the organizations are modeled on similar entities from non-health care sectors and focus largely on quality, access, and cost issues. The California HealthCare Foundation interviewed leaders at health ca...

Both prior literature and reported managerial practices have claimed that the Balanced Scorecard is a management tool that can help organizations to effectively implement strategies. In this article, we examine some of the contributions, dilemmas, and limitations of Balanced Scorecards in health care organizations. First, we describe the evolution of Balanced Scorecards from multidimensional pe...

Health care organizations can magnify the impact of their community service and other philanthropic activities by implementing programs that create shared value. By definition, shared value is created when an initiative generates benefit for the sponsoring organization while also generating societal and community benefit. Because the programs generate benefit for the sponsoring organizations, t...

introductions: due to versatility and wide range of health care services, the social care insurance organizations can not afford undertaking all health care services for the insured. this is why additional services are taken over by private or commercial health care insurance companies. such services are known as complementary insurance. in this study , it was decided to investigate the satisfa...

reducing wastes in the healthcare processes is crucial for developing a high performance health system. adopted from the toyota production system (tps), the lean concept has emerged in recent years as a way of introducing innovative ideas to improve industrial processes. in the context of health care, lean is considered as a continuous improvement model, which provides healthcare organization t...