Radio Value

Teaser: Anybody who wants to display graphical information should read this book. Anybody who wants to understand how beautiful data can look should read this book. Read this book and do not put up with unintelligible and ugly graphics ever again.

Teaser: This book is one of the great blockbusters of management. It is a synthesis of the empirical literature currently available on organisational structuring. Importantly, Mintzberg discusses organisations that are staffed by highly trained professionals, like clinicians. So, if you want to understand the evidence of leading and managing the health service, this is one of the best.

Teaser: Repeated research studies demonstrate that doctors and patients alike overestimate the likelihood of benefits and underestimate the likelihood of harms. That is because we do not understand risk. Gerd Gigerenzer, is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, and lectures around the world on the importance of proper risk education for everyone from school-age children to prominent doctors, bankers, and politicians. In this book he outlines way in which we can make better decisions in healthcare.

Teaser: This book, the first in Castells′ ground–breaking trilogy, is an account of the economic and social dynamics of the new age of information. Based on research in the USA, Asia, Latin America, and Europe, it aims to formulate a systematic theory of the information society which takes account of the fundamental effects of information technology on the contemporary world.

Teaser: The great management expert Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Repeated studies have shown the importance of culture on healthcare importance. Yet, almost all healthcare reform focuses on structural and transactional change, forgetting culture. The guru on culture is Edgar Schein. Organizational Culture and Leadership is the classic reference for leaders seeking a deeper understanding of the inter-relationship of organizational culture dynamics and performance.

Teaser: We all work in organisations. But do we understand why and how organisations work? This book is a classic text in sociology. It provides a succinct overview of the principal schools of thought of organizational theories, placing each into critical, historical, and cultural context. Vividly written, with many specific, student-oriented examples, Complex Organizations offers a critical perspective on organizations, analyzing their impact on individuals, groups, and society as a whole.

Teaser: The 21st Century is the age of networks; this is the only way we can deliver the complexity of population health and care. Bureaucracies are critical for linear tasks, but networks are needed for complexity. In this book two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, outline how networks can create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. They describe the hypertext organisation, that floats alongside the bureaucracy.

Teaser: In this book, Wilkinson and Pickett remind us that it is not poverty but inequality that causes most damage to society. They also outline how more equal societies enjoy greater health and well-being and that this benefits everyone in society- the most and least deprived. In healthcare, we must therefore, address inequity of access, or the Inverse Care Law, as this is a form of inequality that is entirely within our control.

Teaser: When we study healthcare at a population, as opposed to institutional, level, a whole new perspective emerges- unwarranted variation. This is variation that is not driven by a failure to standardise, but variation that shows we do not have systems for population healthcare. Understanding the symptom that is unwarranted variation helps inform how we can fix the causes of lower value population healthcare.

Teaser: How much should we spend on people with frailty versus people with mental health problems? Unless we can answer questions like this, we cannot have high value universal healthcare. Alain Enthoven, is mistakenly blamed for suggesting to Margaret Thatcher that the NHS should introduce the purchaser provider split- actually his Nuffield Trust paper advocated the development of accountable care organisations. However, this book is about the work he and colleagues did on creating programme budgets in the Department of Defense (sic) in the US. Originally published in 1971 this is a book of enduring value and lasting relevance. Enthoven details the application, history, and controversies surrounding the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System.

Teaser: Making decisions, especially where there are competing priorities, is complex and sometimes impossible. Arrow describes two ways in which decisions can be made in democratic capitalist countries, markets and politics. Understanding these options are critical to anyone in a position to influence resource use in healthcare...

Teaser: This book really is obligatory reading for anyone who influences the use of resources in healthcare and is interested in quality. Avedis Donabedian's name is synonymous with quality of health care. He unravelled the mystery behind the concept by defining it in clear operational terms and provided detailed blueprints for both its measurement (known as quality assessment) and its improvement (known as quality assurance). Many before him claimed that quality couldn't be defined in concrete objective terms. He demonstrated that quality is an attribute of a system which he called structure, a set of organised activities which he called process, and an outcome which results from both.

Teaser: The people we serve would expect resources to be used fairly and reasonably. In this book, Daniels and Sabin outline that we lack consensus on principles for allocating medical resources, and in the absence of such a consensus we must develop and rely on a fair decision-making process for setting limits on health care so we can use resources more fairly.

Teaser: Anybody leading a public service organisation, a hospital, a clinic, a healthcare payer, should understand their role in providing public value. This great book by Mark Moore summarises what value means within the public sector, and the different perspectives that need to be taken.

Teaser: The current fashion is for targeting interventions towards those at higher risk. But this is often at the expense of interventions that are targeted at a whole population. Which is best? The population strategy of prevention refers to prevention activities that target a whole population regardless of variation in individuals' risk status, whereas a high-risk strategy targets individuals identified as having elevated risk for some adverse health outcome (e.g. thorough screening). In this classic book by Geoffrey Rose, the pros and cons of each approach are discussed.

Teaser: Friedman’s great addition to management thinking was that we need to stop focussing on doing a lot of activity productively and start to focus on outcomes. More importantly, hold ourselves accountable for doing so, Outcomes Based Accountability (OBA) can be used to improve the quality of life in communities, cities, counties, states and nations, including everything from the well-being of children to the creation of a sustainable environment. It is an approach that supports value-based population health.

Teaser: Why have costs risen in healthcare? How can we improve the value of care? In Designing Care, Harvard Business School professor and doctor Richard Bohmer explains that health-care professionals are tasked with providing two very different types of care - sequential and iterative.  To reduce costs and manage care effectively, sequential and iterative care situations require different management systems. Bohmer reveals how health-care providers can successfully manage both modes.

Fjeldstad, Ø. D., Johnson, J. K., Margolis, P. A., Seid, M., Höglund, P., & Batalden, P. B. (Accepted/In press). Networked health care: Rethinking value creation in learning health care systems. Learning Health Systems, [e10212]. https://doi.org/10.1002/lrh2.10212

How does participating in a deliberative citizens panel on healthcare priority setting influence the views of participants? Reckers-Droog V et al (2020) et al./Health Policy 124143–151 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2019.11.011

Health Care Hotspotting — A Randomized, Controlled Trial Finkelstein, A. et al (2020), N Engl J Med 2020;382:152-62. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsa1906848 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1906848