At Joe Restuccia's BU class

I was pleased to be invited back last night to talk with Joe Restuccia's class at Boston University.  The class is part of the MBA program and is entitled: "Health Services Delivery: Strategies, Solutions, and Execution."

Here is the course description:

With the increasing demand placed upon health care organizations to provide effective and efficient health care services, management of these organizations requires

a high level of knowledge and skill. This course is intended to provide knowledge and skills needed to design and operate systems capable of delivering accessible, high quality, efficient health care services.  In particular, it will emphasize organizational transformation in order to achieve high performance, drawing upon relevant information from discipline-based and application areas of study including strategy, operations, marketing, finance, law, human resources, organization behavior, quality improvement, and information technology.

Joe is Professor of Health Care and Operations Management and Dean’s Research Fellow in the BU School of Management’s Department of Operations and Technology Management.  He also holds the positions of Research Scientist at the VA’s Center for Organization, Leadership and Management Research and of Visiting Professor at Bocconi University School of Management in Milan, Italy.   He is the perfect instructor for this kind of course, as his  35 years of research have focused on issues related to health care quality measurement and improvement, cost containment, information technology, and evaluation of interventions intended to improve effectiveness of health care delivery.

He lists the objectives of the course as to build students' ability to:

• Understand the complex nature of organizational transformation of health care delivery systems
• Recognize and evaluate the problems that exist in health care delivery organizations and systems
• Apply knowledge and skills derived from various management disciplines to analyze and improve health care organizations and delivery systems
• Organize and support your understanding through qualitative and quantitative analysis

My role was to tell the story of the cultural transformation at my former hospital, stressing the impact of transparency on the process improvements we achieved over several years.  The students were active and thoughtful participants in the discussion, and I promised that I would include pictures of those who gave the best answers here.  I do so with their names included so potential employers out there will know who they are when they apply for jobs!