Introduction: How to Use This Book

Today, a widening chasm exists between those who actually deliver healthcare and those who study it and how it is delivered. Although rooted in understandable historical tradition, this gap results in tens of thousands of needless deaths and billions of dollars of wasted costs in healthcare every year.

Healthcare delivery science is an emerging field that attempts to bridge this gap. It brings research-quality methods to bear at the speed that real-world healthcare delivery requires, both by improving care and making discoveries.

Until very recently, no training programs in healthcare delivery science existed. Today, these programs are being created at an accelerating rate. If you are enrolled in one, or considering doing so, Understanding Healthcare Delivery Science will serve as a framework for this burgeoning field and its critical elements.

But chances are that you are someone else:

• Maybe you are a health services researcher or epidemiologist who is frustrated that discoveries don't reach patients, and you want to affect the care that patients actually receive.

• Perhaps you're a healthcare administrator who is tired of not truly knowing if a new program worked, and you sense the opportunity to do something better for your patients, staff, and providers.

• You might be a student in a master's program in a health-related field, and you want to bridge scholarship and real-world practice. Or maybe you are earlier in your career, studying business in college or university, and you want to focus on the future of healthcare.

This book is designed to fill that gap that all of you sense—to help bridge the divide between real-world healthcare operations and research-quality methods.

This book focuses on what emerging practitioners and leaders of healthcare delivery science need to know to be successful. It is divided into four parts:

• Part I: What Is Healthcare Delivery Science, and Why Do We Need It?

• Part II: Making Change in the Real World—Tools for Healthcare Improvement

• Part III: Seeing the Truth—Analytics in Healthcare

• Part IV: How to Embed Healthcare Delivery Science into Your Health System

While the book is a coherent whole and progresses logically, each part and chapter is also designed to stand on its own. That makes it fine to skip around to meet your needs. Each of you will have a different background, with different strengths and different areas that you're trying to strengthen. For example, if you're a researcher or epidemiologist, Part II focuses on real-world tools for improvement and may represent new tools and techniques for you. Or if you're an operator/administrator, you may want to move directly from Part I to Part III, which introduces research-quality analytic methods.

There are several features of this book to be aware of: