Practice Management Books

A3 Problem Solving for Health Care is a must have book for any Lean health care library. This book is a wonderful "coach" for someone learning A3 problem solving. The author takes the reader through a step-by-step, common sense approach to using this essential Lean tool. The book is filled with great examples of A3 use in every day health care practice areas.

Author Cindy Jimmerson, an internationally popular leader in Lean health care has, yet again, demonstrated her creative and unique approach to a critical subject that can and will change the future of how health care is delivered. Her straight-forward, entertaining, and practical approach to A3 problem solving is easy to learn and easy to apply in the course of daily work.

In particular, Ms Jimmerson demonstrates how A3 problem solving can be used by any member of the health care team to improve how care is delivered by eliminating waste and focusing on moving all of the work that is done towards IDEAL.

The design of Ms Jimmerson's A3 format, using the left side of the form to establishing understanding of the current condition and the right side to identify a target condition and the ways to achieve that target condition, is easy to use because of its logical, step-by-step approach.

The wonderful things about Ms Jimmerson's method of A3 problem solving is that her format can be used not only to solve problems in the course of daily work, but also as a template for a meeting, for orientation of new staff, as departmental guidelines, and to demonstrate projects completed and projects in progress to regulating bodies.

If one had to choose one book to keep handy for daily reference in relation to Lean health care and problem solving, this would be the book.

This is a must-have book in healthcare, no matter what your level of experience or understanding with Lean Manufacturing concepts and the Toyota Production System. The author has captured the essence of Toyota's most effective process improvement tool-- the A3. If you are a beginner, the book is simple, straightforward, and pragmatic with examples that clarify the concepts. If you are a veteran, the book will serve as a great reminder of everything you should be doing, and will be invaluable as a tool for teaching and coaching. Even though the book is written for healthcare, the truth is, it would be useful for any industry. Like the topic it addresses, the book is lean and waste-free.

I am very pleased with this manual! If you are on a budget, this book makes sense to purchase instead of the main book, AAMT Book of Style. This workbook will certainly suffice!

This book is an excellent source of reference for the Medical Transcriptionist student. Amizon delivered the book in the timely fashion in which they promised. I have had no problems with the delivery of the item or the content of the book. This book is a "Must Have" !!!

Knowledgeably written by Gayle Reichler (a registered dietitian, professional chef, and certified nutritionist known as "America's Wellness Coach"), Active Wellness: Feel Good For Life: A Personalized 7-Step Program For Your Body, Mind And Spirit offers seven basic steps including eating and exercise plans designed to effectively change unhealthy habits and create a successful celebration and long-term maintenance of good health. Individual chapters refer to metal preparation, forming new habits and avoiding old triggers, creating a personal physical fitness plan tailored to one's needs, managing stress, maintaining one's health for a lifetime, and much more, Active Wellness: Feel Good For Life is an upbeat, can-do guide written especially for non-specialist general readers having trouble getting started or sticking to a schedule for improving their health and physical well being.

I am so glad to have discovered Gayle Reichler's ACTIVE WELLNESS! Not only does it offer helpful and accessible information on adopting a more healthy lifestyle, but the author's guidance is made all the more powerful by the fact that she followed the very same program herself. I have put my entire family on the Active Wellness Program - even my children. We have all struggled with our weight at one time or another, but since starting the program we have all lost weight and kept it off! We feel more energetic than ever. ACTIVE WELLNESS is a book for everyone concerned with getting and staying healthy. And we can all use a bit of help in that department!

Although to many, the rate of change in the IT area has slowed down from the frenetic pace of the dot com era, to most that is just as much an illusion as the false profits of the dot com era were. The rate of change is still rapid, and in many areas the extent of the change is hidden. If your task is to make a "small" change to a large program, that single change may be monumental, in approach, execution and consequences. Therefore, when talk turns to being an adaptive enterprise, it must include both the ability to create new products in order to enter new markets and the capability of adapting current products to respond to smaller changes in customer needs. It is not possible to consider one to be microchanges and the other macrochanges, as either one could be large or small depending on the circumstances.
In both cases, it is not possible to be adaptable without adopting the appropriate mindset, which involves emotional and organizational adjustments. Emotionally, one must become tolerant of change and organizationally, it is necessary for information to flow quickly and in both directions along the hierarchy chart. The emphasis in this book is on the organizational adjustments that need to be made, although the emotional adjustments are occasionally mentioned. The organizational adjustments are handled very well, described in enough detail so that there is no ambiguity in understanding what they are and how they are performed.
The emphasis is on reusable components, not all of which are constructed of software. In chapter 2, there are descriptions of the physical components, functional components and interface components. Several different types of organizational patterns are described, what they are, how they are used as well as the consequences of their use. Chapter 3 covers the general categories of transact patterns, publish patterns and collaboration patterns. A transact pattern is any application that writes structured information to a system. Publish patterns deal with data that is presented in a read-only form, although it also includes any summaries and other analysis done on the data. The collaborate patterns deal with the sharing of data between peers. Each pattern covered is then summarized in sections describing the benefits of using it as well as the weaknesses that it exhibits.
In chapter 4, the emphasis is on the creation of adaptive services, which are shared structures that are static and permanent, reusable and have a different lifecycle than the physical infrastructure. As the authors mention, the key to providing adaptive services is to identify those parts that need to change independently, and structure the service so they can be altered without changing the other components.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 deal with the strategies used to define the business problem(s) to be solved, developing arguments to justify the project and obtain the funding, managing per-project processes as well as periodic processes, communicating with developers and customers, and the management of the people in the process. This section is a summary of the best practices in how to identify and solve problems using methods that will lead to subsequent problems being easier to solve.
After a great deal of ink has been used to explain the failures of software development, the IT crowd has made relatively little progress in solving many of the problems of software development. Some of that ink might as well have been spilled, but not so for the ink used to create this book. Packed with sound advice as to how to build a solid yet flexible developmental infrastructure, this is one book that all managers of large projects should read.

The infrastructure management approach that the authors give in this book incorporates practices from systems (and software) engineering, and is a blueprint for success. The objectives are: (1) end-to-end management with no gaps in ownership, (2)cost efficiencies through reuse and component-based strategies, (3)holistic view that looks at business, operational and technology (instead of the common 'technology only' view), and adaptability (an infrastructure that is managed to long range goals, but can be quickly adapted to emerging and immediate business needs).

How the authors meet these objectives is by identifying physical, functional and interface components that make up the infrastructure and integrating them into a service-oriented framework. This is consistent with component-based software engineering, and it is a remarkably good fit to infrastructure management. Moreover, the authors introduce patterns, also borrowed from software and systems engineering disciplines, to map business requirements to design in an efficient manner that promotes reuse. Another advantage of patterns is this approach captures knowledge (something not directly pointed out in the book). If you're not familiar with process patterns the book I recommend for infrastructure professionals is More Process Patterns by Scott Ambler. This is the second of a two book set and it directly addresses patterns that are related to infrastructure (the first book, Process Patterns, is more focused on software engineering).

The two chapters I liked the most are 4, Developing Adaptive Services, and 5, Services Starter Kit. These chapters tie services to infrastructure and go into fine detail about how to integrate services and the underlying technology. I especially like the way the authors use multiple life cycle management for each layer in the infrastructure. Chapters 6 (Processes and Methods) and 7 (Packaging and People) neatly pull together the preceding chapters into a coherent, process-oriented strategy. The single appendix is also valuable because it gives a comprehensive component catalog. This catalog can be used as the basis of the infrastructure blueprint as well as the foundation of an encompassing asset management initiative.

This book has everything a person need to assist with progress notes.

It just doesn't get any better than this!

Working as a counselor with proposition 36 clients is a tedious and fast paced job, dealing with monthly progress reports for probation and courts. This has just solved alot of the difficulty and saved loads of time!

This is another winner to add to my bookshelf at work; my patients benefit greatly, as do I, from the many creative assignments to work through. Great to use for group work also!!

This has saved me many times when I sudddenly find out I have to run a group minutes before it starts. It also has been a great supplement for indivdual needs that go beyond our curriculum.

I had a co-worker a few years ago that had this book and I borrowed it alot to help me write treatment plans this is a fabulous tool! It gives a step by step means that is clear and simple. I finally purchased my own book when I changed jobs and would recommend it to anyone in the field.

This book is awesome for many addictions, as well as addresses issues that are correlated to addiction, such as grief or past family trauma. It is ASAM oriented, so you can pick out what dimension you want to address. The verbage is concise and makes you sound real smart ;) It identifies the problem, gives goals, and recommends objectives w/strategies. Great for interns or anyone who can always use a hand developing an all-encompassing tx plan. Get the supplemental homework planner and you are set.

This book was very beneficial to the graduate class that I participated in during the summer semester.

Galbraith, M.W., Sisco, B.R., & Guglielmino, L.M. Administering Successful Programs for Adults: Promoting Excellence in Adult, Community and Continuing Education. Krieger Publishing Company, Malabar, FL, 1997. Pp. vii + 187. When the opportunity to review a book written by three acknowledged professionals, in not only adult educational instruction, but also in research and publication, the expectation of quality would seem foreseeable. In this case, the expectation was a reality. From the "Preface" to the final chapter, the student is presented with a clear, concise, and literary explanation, of a relevant and timely topic, the administration of programs. To often, authors of scholarly texts, find it necessary to use professional language, understandable only by experts in the discipline or subject matter. This is not the case with this publication. The text was written and published with current, or "would be", administrators in mind. The primary goal of the authors is to convey a basic understanding of the administrative process. The authors of Administering Successful Programs for Adults, include in their "Preface", an excellent synopsis of the book. The text has nine chapters. Chapter 1 is concerned with and titled the "Administrator". This chapter "...examines the settings and contexts in which the administrative role is carried out", and includes "...a self-assessment inventory that allows", students to discover pertinent knowledge about themselves (p.viii). Chapter 2, "Approaches to Administration", is just that. The authors examine, "The classical, human relations, organization behavior, contingency, and systems perspectives..." and "...their appropriateness for adult, community, and continuing education" (p.viii). In Chapter 3, "Determining Program Content", they address "...the administrator's role and involvement in the process of determining program content", with an emphasis on the macro approach. "Budgeting and Financing" are the topics of Chapter 4. Different types of budgets are discussed, along with "...useful tips on how to develop a successful budget..." and "...and how to augment funding..." (p.viii). Chapter 5, "Selecting and Developing Staff", explains that this "...is an essential function of administrators in adult, community, and continuing education agencies and organizations" (p.viii). A plan is presented which includes ideas on role identification, selection, and development, of staff. "Marketing and Public Relations", "Chapter 6, is dedicated to the understanding of marketing and the essential elements of a marketing plan and promotional strategies" (p.ix). Chapter 7, "Evaluating Programs", "...is devoted to the process of evaluating programs for adult", and includes suggestions on "...the design and application of an evaluation plan" (p.ix). "Legal and Ethical Considerations", is the subject of Chapter 8. These include, "...affirmative action and equal employment opportunity guidelines..." as well as information about "...the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990..." and "...ethical dilemmas confronting the administrator..." (p.ix). Chapter 9 is concerned with "Maintaining Effectiveness As an Administrator", "...through professional development of yourself and others" (p.ix). It "...concludes with a brief annotated listing of resources found to be particularly helpful in ensuring administrative and organizational success" (p.ix). This content summary presents a view of the explicit and concise style of this text. Administrating Successful Programs for Adults was written as an introductory text or primer, to be used and perused by "would be", new, or existing administrators. It will not replace Niccolo Machiavelli's, The Prince. It will, because of its condensed or abbreviated style, be a useful tablet. The theme of each chapter is clearly developed and the included "Summary" is a definite plus. There are an adequate, not an overpowering, number of explanatory tables, models and charts. The numbering system for these items, at the bottom, rather than the more common placement at the top, seemed awkward. The documentation and referencing of source and contemporary or companion literature is complete and aptly supplemented by the brief but sufficient annotated listing included in Chapter 9. Fortunately, which is not always the case in referenced material, the authors documentation, in this text, does not interrupt or detract from the intended subject matter. There is nothing unique about the organization or presentation of the information available, or the written prose, in Administrating Successful Programs for Adults, except that the style and substance could be used as an example of plain English. This style, one of clarity, not circumlocution, is not found, often enough, in academic publications. We live in a world of administrating and administrators. In order to progress and prosper, we must continually create and implement compromise. It is extremely difficult to reach a position where compromise is a possibility, much less a reality, without administrative assistance. The use of this text can assist in making compromise a possibility. I fear that the authors have, unwittingly, underestimated their audience. They have proposed, that "...adult, community and continuing educational programs for adults"(p.x), might benefit from this publication. These are, for me, the underestimated audience. The general resource nature of this volume, its ability to present the administrative process in broad strokes, and in clear and plain vocabulary, make it a viable and usable document, for this every growing and demanding group of learners and activists. These groups, adult, community and continuing educational organizations, must have access to the administrative expertise that will lead them in the direction of compromise, if they are to be the positive and productive force they should and intent to be. Many adult, community and continuing educational texts address the concept of the "Critical Thinker". The essence of "Critical Thinking" is very clear explained in Administering Successful Programs of Adults. I consider the process of "Critical Thinking", a clear and detailed road to reaching compromise, a result desired by any progressing administrative program. Although administering compromise, is only one of many important concepts included in this text, I find this example, a sterling explanation of why, I believe the authors attained their goal, of publishing a book and thereby providing a primer for, easy access to knowledge of the administrative process.

These assignments are a wonderful adjunct to the therapy process. They are very down-to-earth and practical -- no off-the-wall stuff here, just common sense, mainline psychology applied to everyday life circumstances. They are not too long so the client will be more apt to complete them. The exercises are focused on common presenting problems (Anger Management, Chemical Dependence, Depression, Sexual Dysfunction, Intimate Relationship Conflict, etc.) and they can be copied directly from the book or customized on your computer and printed from the CD that is included. If you are using The Complete Adult Psychotherapy Treatment Planner to formulate your client's treatment plan, these asignments are fully integrated with the presenting problems in the Treatment Planner book. I also like the fact that these assignments can be accessed in TheraScribe, the computerized treatment planning software, if you purchase the additional module that can be installed into the program. These Practice Planner materials save a lot of time and enhance the treatment process. You will not be disappointed.

it helps when clients that want to make changes in their lifes can see in frount of them work they are doing to make that change. my therapist didn't provide me with homework, so i went out and got my own! i think homework should be a part of every therapy duration. even if you give them a sheet and tell them they can do it when they are ready, just to leave it on there coffee table or some other place they can see it a lot and so they can think about the questions, and then they can do it at their own pace and when they are done and ready to discusse it they can bring it back.

Written for the business bankruptcy specialist, this two-volume set offers an unsurpassed compilation of Chapter 11 statute and case law analysis prepared by some of the country's leading bankruptcy experts. Advanced Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Practice, Second Edition covers such areas as:

Interim operation procedures and automatic stays
The pitfalls surrounding settlement of stay relief litigation
The treatment of intellectual property
Bankruptcy and retiree benefits
Release of guarantors

Payment of interest on secured claims
Cross-border insolvencies
Plus, a section on the special issues in railroad, airline, agriculture, and environmental reorganizations

Written for the business bankruptcy specialist, this two-volume set offers an unsurpassed compilation of Chapter 11 statute and case law analysis prepared by some of the country's leading bankruptcy experts. Advanced Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Practice, Second Edition covers such areas as:

Interim operation procedures and automatic stays
The pitfalls surrounding settlement of stay relief litigation
The treatment of intellectual property
Bankruptcy and retiree benefits
Release of guarantors

Payment of interest on secured claims
Cross-border insolvencies
Plus, a section on the special issues in railroad, airline, agriculture, and environmental reorganizations