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Healthcare Supply Chain Management: Basic Concepts and Principles
According to the health data released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States spends more per capita on healthcare than any other OECD country. Currently, U.S. healthcare spending constitutes $2.5 trillion, or 17.3 percent of GDP, with healthcare costs increasing 9 percent annually. To reverse this alarming trend, the Obama administration recently led the effort to dramatically reform healthcare policy, laws, and regulations. This book provides you (whether a healthcare policy maker, hospital administrator, pharmaceutical company manager, or other healthcare professional) with practical guidance for leveraging supply chain principles to better manage healthcare resources and control healthcare costs. It introduces basic supply chain management concepts, terminologies, and tenets. Other included topics are strategicalliances among healthcare partners, value analysis of healthcare services and products, the impact of healthcare reforms on healthcare supply chains, and the development of performance metrics for the healthcare supply chain and benchmarking.
156 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 4, 2024
It was very informative as it pertains to my job and degree I am about to complete! Just a few more weeks!
June 9, 2020
Having (fairly) recently started a career in healthcare supply chain--an industry totally new to me--I quickly discovered that it is not a super popular subject, and that finding any materials to educate oneself, especially in a book format, can be... difficult. So when I stumbled upon this work of Dr. Min's, dedicated solely to healthcare supply chain management, I was rather excited. After all, Dr. Min is a recognized industry academic, with multiple awards and publications. He clearly knows his stuff.
Unfortunately, the excitement was short-lived. The book is a bit dated (2011), but that is, frankly, the least of its problems. While it starts with the very basics and attempts to cover all aspects of the industry, there just is no soul in it. The more I read, the more it seemed like a publication count stuffer; something you'd quickly churn out to meet your department's publication quota at the very end of the year, or something like that. There is very little insight; the writing is dry, and consists mostly of unending lists, inventories of banal enumerations, and comma-separated recitations of closely related terms loosely connected to the topic being covered in that particular section. Many pages consist of little other than paragraphs and paragraphs of lists, with an occasional full-page diagram illustrating the same lists in a flowchart format. That, and the author is certainly not shy when it comes to quoting and referencing his own other works. I don't know if that's a standard academic practice--it very well may be--but after encountering a certain number of such self-references it's just jarring. All in all, if you know literally nothing about the industry, you won't learn anything that you can't otherwise figure out using simple logic and common sense. It's that bad. The book reads more like an overblown freshman's paper on healthcare supply chain, rather than something that came from an actual Ph.D.'s head.
You can probably use this book as a learning map, to give you a sense of what areas you need to cover, but to actually cover those areas it is, I am sad to report, no help at all. I certainly hope Dr. Min's other works are of better quality, but at this point I'm a bit hesitant to check them out.
Unfortunately, the excitement was short-lived. The book is a bit dated (2011), but that is, frankly, the least of its problems. While it starts with the very basics and attempts to cover all aspects of the industry, there just is no soul in it. The more I read, the more it seemed like a publication count stuffer; something you'd quickly churn out to meet your department's publication quota at the very end of the year, or something like that. There is very little insight; the writing is dry, and consists mostly of unending lists, inventories of banal enumerations, and comma-separated recitations of closely related terms loosely connected to the topic being covered in that particular section. Many pages consist of little other than paragraphs and paragraphs of lists, with an occasional full-page diagram illustrating the same lists in a flowchart format. That, and the author is certainly not shy when it comes to quoting and referencing his own other works. I don't know if that's a standard academic practice--it very well may be--but after encountering a certain number of such self-references it's just jarring. All in all, if you know literally nothing about the industry, you won't learn anything that you can't otherwise figure out using simple logic and common sense. It's that bad. The book reads more like an overblown freshman's paper on healthcare supply chain, rather than something that came from an actual Ph.D.'s head.
You can probably use this book as a learning map, to give you a sense of what areas you need to cover, but to actually cover those areas it is, I am sad to report, no help at all. I certainly hope Dr. Min's other works are of better quality, but at this point I'm a bit hesitant to check them out.
December 10, 2021
This book, while informative, would be more appropriately titled Healthcare "Operations" Management. Much of this book had very little to do with actual supply chain management and this routinely a concern when researching such issues. Authors routinely "muddy the water" by including many issues that have little/nothing to do with healthcare supply chain management. While there are some very good data points and a lot of good information within this short book, very little of it could truly be attributed or applicable to processes related to supply chain management amid a healthcare setting. A couple of examples might include the idea that healthcare supply chain managers are not involved in medical tourism, electronic medical records management, or nursing/staffing shortages; yet, these are included in a book entitled supply chain management basic concepts and principles. Healthcare supply chain managers are, inextricably, concerned about the logistics, availability of material resources, goods, and services amid a healthcare operation. By examining KPIs related to effective/efficient operations, supply chain managers can offer operational improvements to healthcare leaders when addressing other needs. Basically, good book, but Dr. Min missed the mark slightly as the title is rather misleading for anyone looking for actual supply chain management initiatives/ideas/concepts/principles. As an experienced supply chain executive, and academician, I would not recommend this book to anyone - less those of us experienced enough to understand the inaccuracies - for learning about healthcare supply chain management.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews