Careers in Healthcare Management: How to Find Your Path and Follow It

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Only one fifth of the book is written by the authors, and this part of the book is very useful, and contains good advice.

The rest of the book contains profiles of professionals in healthcare administration. Most of these professionals are in very senior positions in the industry, and talk about the path they took to get there.

Before reading this book, my impression of professionals in the healthcare industry was that they are generally noble people who care about the well being of fellow humans. However, after reading the profiles in this book, I get the impression that these people are just as ruthless, career oriented, and money driven as people in any other profession.

Rating:
Summary: Starts of good, then looses focus
Review: The first part (which is only one-fifth of the book), is concise, informative, and very helpful.

The second part (which is the rest of the book), contains profiles of healthcare managers. These profiles are authored by the managers themselves. The book states that the profiles are diverse in every way, and are therefore truly representative of careers in healthcare management. But almost all the profiles are of people in senior level management positions, and the majority are of Vice Presidents and Presidents/CEOs.

A few of the contributors have gone to the trouble of giving good career advice.

However, the vast majority have taken up most of the space to tell us about the impressive job titles they have held, and the associations they belong to. Towards the end of their profiles, they have dedicated hardly a sentence or two to giving advice, which is mostly common sense (such as getting proper education, finding a mentor, volunteering, etc).

Looking at the profiles of these people, it is not surprising to note that most of them ended up either as VPs or Presidents/CEOs, given that most of them graduated from the top ranking universities in the country.

So if you have graduated (or expect to) from an Ivy League school, you stand a good chance of following the career path of one of the people in the profiles. But this book is definitely not a very useful guide for the rest of us.