What is the relevance of this book for healthcare industry, I asked myself as I started reading this manuscript from Lisa Disselkamp.

On the surface nothing! It is a just another book on time and management!!  But as I read, I started to thinking that this is what is badly needed in healthcare industry.  Don’t go by the subtiitle of the book which seems to indicate it an IT book.

The book links very methodically the people, the information, and the business performance.  In its atypicalway, it links of time and labor management is not in a narrow scope.  It looks at the flow of information and talks in detail about creating a streamlined and rationalized process and then implementing into an integrated IT system.

The healthcare industry as Senator BIll Frist says is one of the largest sector of the economy and yet, it has one of the most undeveloped system and infrastructure.  Some places, it stil takes over 8 hours to make the bed available to the next patient from the time, the release order for the previous patient has been written.  In fact, it is one of the lowest margin and highest wasteful business.  Research shows that due to lack of proper system, it creates over 100,000 avoidable deaths, over 1,000,000 avoidable injuries every year.

The book is an easy read as it is less philosophical or abstract, and more tactical and experiential in creating and implementing a robust system.  Lisa does a great job by opening up with how step by step she observed, innovated, linked, and built a system in her own work experience.  In fact, the begining of the book is very much biographical.  She shares her experience about how to look at the information from time and labor management system beyond the silos to create a more integrated and effective process that provides management a better ways to improve profit and productivity.

She smoothly leads into the understanding of connectedness of different business functions into an enterprise.

The book is worth a look for those who might want to increase their own busines performance in a sustainable fashion.  And I bet it WILL.