The medical care of but a few years ago—a rather personal service rendered by the physician and in some instances by a hospital—has changed into a gigantic health-service industry. The authors examine in great depth and with multiple professional skills the factors involved in this development.
One section traces the involvement of government in the delivery of health-care services, including the Hill-Burton Program, the Coggeshall Report, the Millis Report, and Medicare. The remainder of the text is more specifically directed toward administrative functions, such as the reorganization of a hospital, industrial engineering techniques, and business and finance. Subsections include nursing, quality control, and case hospital information systems. This text is supported by approximately 50 illustrations in the form of graphs and tabulations (including samples of time-survey sheets, worksampling programs, comparisons of charged hours and actual hours by level of work, distributions of patient-contact hours by type of patient and by