The book provides faculty, students, managers, and consultants with the guidance necessary to best engage the health care supply chain.  The book’s objective is to transform the individual’s perception of the supply chain from a series of transactions to a focus of strategic planning. To provide readers with a clear understanding of the options, the book analyzes and succinctly presents the best practices gleaned from progressive health systems.

The project included in-depth on-site interviews with leaders in progressive organizations including, but not limited to, Mayo Clinic, BJC (Barnes/Jewish/Christian) (St Louis), North Shore University Health System (New York), Swedish (Seattle), and HCA (Nashville).

Unique to this book is its systematic view of management options for the health care supply chain.  For the first time, readers will find a systematic analysis of value analysis teams (VATs); learn how strategy relates to choice of group purchasing organizations, develop an understanding of risk issues pertaining to managing the value chain, and get a firm feel for organizational structure and design options. 

Students as well as professional managers will gain from the book’s leading  edge model for assessing the maturity of their value chain – and how to move to achieve a transformational value chain.

The book is divided into chapters that describe and analyze the key aspects of supply chain management in the health sector.  It carefully scrutinizes the centrality of the physician in commanding institutional resources as well as the various strategic issues related to purchasing risk, organizational structure, etc.  It also provides case studies of best practicing organizations in both the US and abroad. 

Among this book’s key strengths, it will :

• Introduce a common language for understanding interactions work across the health care supply chain. This includes common nomenclature and metrics.
• Demonstrate the key role of information technologies to effectively converge the various transactions that characterize the system , including materials and technology, clinical efforts and finance. 
• Clarify the disparate components of the purchasing process and how they are integrated.
• Separate myth from reality regarding waste and the quantification of inefficiencies.
• Examine the connection between individual patient treatment The inefficiencies associated with agency relationships that drive healthcare cost upwards.  In many instances recommendations to patients have no apparent relationship to improving health status, encompassing both the inability to exploit synergies where they exist, and the failure to recognize true cost drivers in decisions relating to patient care.