Health Care Hall of Fame Past Inductees

John Griffith

Inducted in 2014

When asked what keeps him going after more than 50 years in the field of healthcare management education, John Griffith will tell you, “Opportunity inspires me. I like to see students get better. I like to see hospitals succeed. I like to see problems get solved.”Griffith has been a professor of health management and policy at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor since 1960, including many years of leadership positions in the department. He is now professor emeritus. As the man who literally wrote the book on health management, Griffith is recognized for his quantitative approach in helping healthcare organizations, and their future leaders, to institute the best practices that lead to higher performance and cultures of empowerment. His widely used textbook, The Well-Managed Healthcare Organization, outlines a leadership culture that promotes teamwork and emphasizes the need for continuous improvement in the hospital setting. Originally published in 1987, the book is now in its seventh edition, and many still consider it to be the most comprehensive resource in the field. But Griffith says he's most proud of a publication called Quantitative Techniques for Hospital Planning and Control (published in 1972). He says it focuses on medical quality, measuring market share and forecasting demand, which he says were relatively unexplored territories at the time but are top priorities in the industry today.As the author of more than a dozen textbooks and numerous articles and papers, he never had a shortage of material to shape his curricula, but his main focus has been to help both graduate students and practicing healthcare executives translate book knowledge into actual applications. “A textbook does not impart skills, it imparts facts,” Griffith said. “To teach students skills you have to get them to apply what is in the textbook.”