Achieving Service Excellence Strategies for Healthcare

Information about customer service hits and misses is now more accessible to healthcare consumers. Outstanding healthcare organizations set the bar at a high level for both clinical and service excellence. Customers who are armed with information and aware of their options are choosing providers they believe are ready, willing, and able to provide the superior experience they expect.

This book offers a blueprint for successfully competing in today’s competitive healthcare marketplace. It presents the theories, methods, and techniques behind delivering an excellent healthcare experience through strategy, staffing, and systems.

Each chapter explores a service principle and provides numerous real-world examples and current research findings. Among the many topics discussed are creating a patient-centered environment; building a culture in which customers are treated like guests; training, motivating, and empowering staff; measuring service quality; managing service waits; and recovering from a service failure.

This second edition has been completely updated. Concepts have been expanded to include information on:

Significance of aligning strategy, staffing, and systems Evidence-based service management and design principles Customer relationship management Internet-based opportunities for various purposes, including communication, information, marketing, recruitment, feedback, and training Retail clinics, concierge medicine, telemedicine, and other new customer-driven innovations

Instructor Resources: Discussion questions and case studies with talking points. To see a sample, click the link in the right-hand navigation bar.

Myron D. Fottler, PhD, is professor emeritus of health services administration at the University of Central Florida. Previously, he served as director of the PhD program in health services administration at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has presented more than 100 papers at professional meetings and authored more than 150 journal articles, 60 book reviews, 45 book chapters, and 28 books. His most recent coauthored books include Human Resources in Healthcare: Managing for Success (Health Administration Press, 2015); Achieving Service Excellence: Strategies for Healthcare, second edition (Health Administration Press, 2010); The Retail Revolution in Healthcare (Praeger, 2010); Strategic Human Resource Management in Healthcare (Emerald, 2010); Human Resource Management Applications, seventh edition (South-Western Cengage, 2011); Advances in Healthcare Management: Biennial Review (Emerald, 2012); and Handbook of Healthcare Management (Elgar, 2015). Over his career, Dr. Fottler has been active in the Health Care Management Division of the Academy of Management and in the Association of University Programs in Health Administration. He was also the cofounder and coeditor of Advances in Healthcare Management, an annual book series featuring both empirical and review papers; served on the editorial review board for many major journals in the field; and mentored more than 50 doctoral students. He earned his master’s in business administration from Boston University and his doctorate in business from Columbia University. Books published by Health Administration Press:  Fundamentals of Human Resources in Healthcare, Second Edition