Healthcare management priorities in Latin America: Framework and responses

This article introduces the teaching cases for a JBR special section, and relates these cases to the management priorities in the healthcare industry in Latin America. This paper is based on a review of the literature on healthcare management, a survey of hospital managers in Latin America and the analysis of cases included in this special section. This special section includes ten teaching cases of healthcare institutions from six countries that are designed to address nine of the ten most relevant management issues in the sector. The most important management issues among healthcare institutions in Latin America are common to public and private hospitals, relating to the areas of strategy, management training, healthcare informatics and organizational change. Generally, private hospitals suffer from problems of underutilized capacity, so their managers are concerned with issues of marketing, pricing and demand forecasting. Conversely, public hospitals are overwhelmed with patients and need to better manage capacity, inventories, waiting lines, and working capital. The cases included in this special section address most of the problems in these three categories.