Healthcare Management Roles and Functions
Abstract
Healthcare management is no doubt a fast-growing profession. The number of healthcare organizations is growing by the day, and so is the level of intra-industry competition. The effectiveness of healthcare organizations today is based on the effectiveness of its managers. Effective management entails understanding the roles, tasks, responsibilities, and functions of healthcare management. This text explores the four functions of healthcare management, and analyses how they contribute to effective management.
History of e-Commerce
During the internet’s conceptual infancy the idea of establishing a network of computer users was purely strategic in nature, as researchers from the U.S. Department of Defense and their counterparts abroad worked to develop instantaneous communication via electronic computing. Soon afterward, however, a glimmer of the commercial opportunities waiting to be unleashed was seen, as the prototype ARPANET was used to facilitate the sale of cannabis between students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This exchange of goods for legal currency was widely regarded as the “seminal act of e-commerce,”2 a phrase coined by author John Markoff. During the early 1980s a number of initial forays into experimental e-commerce activity were made in European nations, including the advent of online ordering via the French Minitel telecommunication network in 1982. Soon enough California led the way in terms of American legislative response to e-commerce, holding hearings in 1983 to interview representatives for early online innovators like CompuServe, Volcano Telephone, and Pacific Telesis. When Tim Berners-Lee developed the programming code for the first web browser in 1990, his innovation launched the age of the World Wide Web, providing consumers with convenient access to the previously complex and convoluted online marketplace. By 1992, a Cleveland-based company called Book Stacks Unlimited began operating the commercial website www.books.com, becoming one of the first entities to offer credit card processing to conduct payment, and unwittingly providing an early model for modern e-commerce success stories Amazon and PayPal.