Assessing and Improving Staffing and Organization

From The Critics

Reviewer: Elizabeth Kimball, BA(Creighton University School of Medicine)
Description: This is a good primer on medical office staffing and organization. It presents general principles and overviews of basic human resource management with strategies for implementation.
Purpose: It is designed to assist physician managers and/or their practice managers to handle human resources issues more appropriately with step-by-step, concrete, practical information and worksheets. This is a good book, especially for practices that are getting ready to transition to a more contemporary business model.
Audience: The book is ostensibly written for physician managers but would be of great help to any practice manager as well. The author is a credible authority in the field.
Features: It covers the basics of hiring, training, and structuring an office practice. There are excellent tables, figures, and worksheets that are full of easily applied, valuable information and analysis. An exceptional feature is the enclosed diskette that contains all of the forms for great ease of reproduction. Beyond one extremely brief section on RVUs there is little information on staffing ratios. A challenge for any book of this type is to reach all audiences and although it attempts to address all practice sizes, some suggestions may be inappropriate for larger or smaller practices.
Assessment: This book could be especially helpful for new managers, physicians or not, who need a jump-start on bringing their practice up-to-date. It is heavily focused on personnel management and practice structure. Although this book is easily accessible and implementation of its suggestions is "cookbook easy," a more in- depth understanding of the topics would ideally be the ultimate goal of any manager. Unfortunately, few references are listed and readers are left to their own devices for further information. All in all, this book would be a valuable asset to any new manager, and even the most experienced manager is likely to find several gems they will want to implement in this well organized, clearly focused book.

3 Stars from Doody