Hospital Operations: Principles of High Efficiency Health Care

A. Management Principles

A.1. Introduction

Managing complex organizations, such as businesses, government agencies, and hospitals, is a challenging endeavor that requires deep domain knowledge, sound judgment, creativity, leadership, and a host of other skills. Fortunately, experience and research have revealed certain basic insights about the performance of complex organizations. In this appendix, we give a summary of key management concepts that are relevant to improving the operations of a hospital.

We do this by encapsulating major ideas as principles. A principle is a “comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption” (Webster’s Dictionary). Consequently, only ideas about which we are confident can be so classified. To qualify ...