Guidebook to Managed Care and Practice Management Terminology Free

The arrangement of this book considerably undermines its usefulness. Intended for students and practitioners in the social work and health care fields in the United States, it aims to be a glossary of terms and acronyms used in the context of managed care. The compilers have chosen to divide the book into four major sections, each arranged alphabetically: clinical terms and concepts, financial terms and concepts, practice management terms and concepts, and quality management and utilization review terms and concepts. By so doing, they are requiring anyone consulting the book to discover the meaning of an unfamiliar term, to know enough about the concept in the first place to choose the correct section of the book. In a publication as short as this one, a single alphabetical sequence of terms would have been far better. Cross‐referencing between the sections is minimal. Examples of the problems created by the arrangement abound. The term “level of care” appears in the section of clinical terms, with no link to the term “level of care classifications” in the quality management section. “Provider contract” appears in the section on finance; the practice management section has six other terms relating to providers, one of them using the italicised term facility provider in the definition. It is not at all obvious that this cross‐reference is to an entry in the section for clinical terms. The compilers’ claim that this book is a glossary of acronyms is also open to question. The acronym or abbreviation for a term is given in many entries in brackets after the full heading for the term, but there are no entries for the abbreviations themselves at the points in the alphabetical sequences where they would file. The four main sections are supplemented by a short appendix on health information resources, and a very brief listing of quality oversight organisations in the managed care field. This publication covers a highly specialised area of American practice, and does not do it very efficiently. It is relatively expensive, and unlikely to be worth buying except by those connected with that field, and rather reluctantly by them at that.