Introduction to Operations Management in Healthcare - Essay Example

Introduction of Obstetrics was introduced primarily because of the large influx of families into the community and the large group of families that were planning on starting a family.

The process modifications were chosen as follows for the service lines: cardiac catheterization laboratory and chest pain unit as well as obstetrics service use Process C.  The chest pain unit was chosen in order to facilitate a higher satisfaction rate for patients while trying to keep the resistance at a less than very high level.  It was believed that facilitating this type of process by modifying this service would in fact help in diagnosing patients quicker through the unit and sending those home that does not need to be necessarily admitted otherwise.

Another choice to include obstetrics is perhaps the best use of funds allocated so that it may serve the current aging population, but, according to the simulation, this was in fact a poor decision based on the ROI for setting up the lab will not necessarily justify the costs.

The addition of the obstetrics department is important to facilitate the anticipated growing population that will come with the new community families moving from Silicone Valley.  The use of this department will not only help the new mothers with their deliveries but also with educating new moms and the community as a whole.  Generally, when a mother gives birth at one hospital and finds the service above reproach, they will continue to seek out the same hospital for future births.

Phase 3:  Program Implementation and Customer Satisfaction

Case management was chosen to help in being more definitive in providing more help with individual cases with respect to identifying those patients that could be used by specialists on a case-by-case basis.

Referral management was chosen to be implemented to add value to patients’ individual case files.  This would hope to add a higher customer satisfaction reaction and that would be beneficial to the hospital as a potential leader in the community.

The outcome of these implementations and upgrades only proved to be minuscule with respect to accommodating new families or those who are planning to start a family and the real issue was within the cardiovascular department itself.  Although this was a good choice to improve and obstetrics was a good department to implement; the real issue was with wait times and quality of care in the cardiovascular department.  The issue may in fact be with choosing to improve this particular department with incorrect measures such as case management and perhaps a more robust method of enhancing customer satisfaction should be chosen.

Re-Running Simulation for Alternate Outcome

After reviewing the results, it was decided to rerun the simulation for an anticipated different outcome.  The following charts and performance evaluation for each phase are taken directly out of the simulation software “planning operations::

Phase 1:

Performance Analysis

Although choosing the obstetrics service line was well justified for the upcoming childbirth increase, the choice of digestive orders to modify was not.  It was a decision to go with digestive disorders to deal with potentially harmful gastroenterological disorders that have not been addressed sooner through education and diagnosis.  According to the statistics, only four percent of the top 25 discharges were due to this situation, but, new members coming from a high living lifestyle from Silicone Valley into the new community may increase these numbers.  The simulation suggested that it was better to have considered modifying the Cardiovascular service line.

Phase 2

The use of a cardiac catheterization lab may be a small ROI when it comes to implementing this into a hospital system, but, this is perhaps maybe a good choice should there be a need to service the aging population with services such as the following cardiac conditions: angioplasties, coronary artery bypass graft, removal of blockages.  But, combining the nutrition and exercise counseling activity with the discharge planning process will help save time and costs and better coordination of care for these patients may resolve the problem of cardiologists being overloaded with patients.

Phase 3

It is found through introducing and upgrading these techniques, it is evident that there is more of a need to handle referrals than what can be done with discharge planning.  This is an area that requires great thought and consideration and may take years to perfect along with using community input.  It is apparent that discharge planning is more of an individual-oriented technique and a more mass-oriented technique would focus better on improving the overall care of an aging and growing population instead of on a unique case-by-case situation.

Conclusion:

Any decision to implement or upgrade existing services comes at a great cost to one faction of the community or another, but, it is important to weigh the evidence in favor of attracting younger patients into the hospital with services that would optimally benefit them throughout their entire lives. By relying on older citizens to balance palliative care with generating revenues it is obvious that the hospital would benefit far more from introducing newer medical initiatives.