High Performance Healthcare: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve Quality, Efficiency and Resilience - Hardcover

by Jody Hoffer Gittell (Author)

In her groundbreaking book The Southwest Airlines Way, Jody Hoffer Gittell revealed the management secrets of the company Fortune magazine called "the most successful airline in history." Now, the bestselling business author explains how to apply those same principles in one of our nation's largest, most important, and increasingly complex industries.

High Performance Healthcare explains the critical concept of "relational coordination"--coordinating work through shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. Because of the way healthcare is organized, weak links exist throughout the chain of communication. Gittell clearly demonstrates that relational coordination strengthens those weak links, enabling providers to deliver high quality, efficient care to their patients. Using Gittell's innovative management methods, you will improve quality, maximize efficiency, and compete more effectively.

High Performance Healthcare walks you step by step through the process of:

• Identifying weak areas of relational coordination within your organization
• Transforming work practices that are creating barriers to relational coordination
• Building a high performance work system to foster consistent relational coordination across all disciplines

The book includes case studies illustrating how some healthcare organizations are already transforming themselves using Gittell's proven tools. It concludes by identifying industry-level obstacles to high performance healthcare and showing how individual organizations and their leaders can support sweeping change at the highest levels.

Policy changes and increased access to care will not alone answer the healthcare industry's problems. Timely, accurate, problem-solving communication that crosses all organizational boundaries is a powerful response to business as usual. High Performance Healthcare explains exactly how to achieve this crucial dynamic, providing a long-awaited cure to an industry in crisis.

Back Jacket

A proven business remedy for our ailing healthcare industry

"Healthcare delivery systems work only when the people in them--line workers and leadership alike--are in highly functional, trustworthy, and productive relationships. High Performance Healthcare is both theoretically sound and eminently practical--a rare combination!"
-Thomas S. Inui, ScM, MD, Relationship-Centered Care Initiative Codirector and Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Health Care Research, Indiana University School of Medicine

"Dr. Gittell shows how a relatively small number of communication and relationship-building elements have a direct relationship to successful performance in both healthcare and the airline industry. Her ultimate accomplishment in healthcare may be a simple tool that builds the individual reliability mandatory for safe patient care."
-Robert S. Hendler, MD, Vice President, Clinical Quality, Tenet Healthcare Corporation

"Gittell's book raises important issues and options that need to be addressed in any national healthcare reform effort."
-Thomas P. Glynn, PhD, Chief Operating Officer, Partners HealthCare

"This is a must-read for improving organizational performance."
--Earll M. Murman, PhD, MIT Ford Professor of Engineering Emeritus and coauthor of Lean Enterprise Value

"High Performance Healthcare points compellingly to a direction for change."
--Christine Bishop, PhD, Atran Professor of Labor Economics, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University

"Every healthcare leader needs to read this book."
--Gene Beyt, MD, MS, Senior Vice President of Medical Quality, Clarian Health

"This is an important work for clinicians, educators, and administrators."
--John Wright, MD, Attending Orthopedic Surgeon, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Author Biography

Jody Hoffer Gittell teaches Human Resource Management, Operations Management, and Organizational Theory at Brandeis University's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She serves as a cochair of the Health Care Industry Council, and is the author of The Southwest Airlines Way and over a dozen articles on healthcare management. Prior to joining Brandeis, Gittell earned her PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and taught for six years at Harvard Business School.