Healthcare Management and the Knowledge Economy Today,

Healthcare Management and the Knowledge Economy

Today, the healthcare industry is undergoing myriad changes, most of these stimulated by a combination of regulatory need and technological advance. Where the two intersect, the industry is under a considerable amount of transformation. This transformation has a direct impact on the roles and responsibilities of healthcare professionals and particularly on those who must demonstrate effective leadership through such change. For those serving healthcare management functions, roles are increasingly being defined by these dramatic shifts in policy, procedure, practice and other dimensions of care impacted by reform or advancement.

Therefore, perhaps the most important role that the manager will play in today's healthcare system is that as a leader in reform. Quite certainly, new legislation and the demand for better ways of meeting the challenges of a currently struggling industry will demand effective internal stewardship and commitment within the management corps to the goals of reform. At the simplest level, the text by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)(2011) identifies several fundamental roles that have historically been vested in healthcare management professionals. Accordingly, the BLS states that "medical and health services managers, also referred to as healthcare executives or healthcare administrators, plan, direct, coordinate, and supervise the delivery of healthcare. These workers are either specialists in charge of a specific clinical department or generalists who manage an entire facility or system." (BLS, p. 1)

However, these general organizational functions are today combined with a new set of responsibilities that reflect the above-noted changes in the industry.

Particularly, the text by Legace (2009) posits the argument that managers will be chiefly responsible for the optimal distribution, management and utilization of knowledge within their respective health systems, especially as this knowledge is emergent within new managed care contexts. To this end, Legace indicates that "as delivery organizations become more focused on how to manage the care, learning to capture their own knowledge about it becomes progressively more important. So perhaps the most important innovation is organizational -- the creation of organizational structures and processes that foster learning in routine practice and the creation of more effective models of care delivery." (Legace, p. 1)

The text goes further to argue that the responsibility therefore falls upon those in managerial positions such as physicians, nurse managers and administrators to create a context in which evolving knowledge contributes to consistency of care, an ergonomic set of controls over procedure and an overall improvement in the quality of care and the health outcomes achieved.