One Of The Highly Challenging Aspect Of Hospital Is To Manage The Revenue Cycle

Prof M Mariappan, Chairperson, Centre for Hospital Management, School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, in interaction with Sanjiv Das, chalks down strategies for hospital management

- Sanjiv Das

Hospital management is one of the most recent concepts in the field of management courses. How has this stream of study evolved over the years?

Hospital management or administration as a discipline has been existing for more than six decades in India. It is evolving slowly and has reached some level during the last five years. Hospital administration was introduced in All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indian Army Hospitals and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai had started this programme over five decades ago. At present, hospital administration has been viewed in many ways on the clinical ground – some of the institutions offering MD in Hospital Administration, which is mostly focussing on the management of clinical services and enhance the clinical quality. Such institutions offer this programme only to medical graduates. Other institutions are looking at hospital administration as a management programme. These type of institutions offer hospital administration to all graduates. It is seen that both are serving the need of modern hospitals.

In the past, hospitals were managed by medical officers who use to do administrative work along with clinical activities. But this scenario is getting changed due to the development of professionalism in hospital management. Further, Indian healthcare is strongly oriented towards curative care. Therefore, a large number of hospitals are created with huge infrastructure, facilities, human resources, system, and process.