Revenues and Resource Allocations - Essay Example

"Revenues and Resource Allocations" is a great example of a paper on the health system. Effective revenue and resource allocations are crucial for the sustenance and survival of organizations. Resources are allocated for the purpose of ensuring that these are utilized in the most optimized manner to earn revenues and profits as well as facilitate the attainment of the organization’s goals. The need to allocate resources is acknowledged to be pertinent in health care organizations, particularly those serving clients with diverse needs. The current discourse aims to present findings from a peer-reviewed journal regarding financial strengths and weaknesses as well as challenges and barriers of other health care organizations that provide similar services or benefits to one’s health care organization, The Jackson Center for Multiple Sclerosis. The article entitled “Lean Service Operations: Reflections and New Directions for Capacity Expansion in Outpatient Clinics” written by LaGanga (2011) was published in the Journal of Operations Management. The findings of the author focused on examining the shortfall in generating revenues of service clinics due to failure to effectively undertake scheduling of patients, as well as in undertaking appropriate resource allocations (LaGanga, 2011).

The information gathered from the article presented the implementation of the lean process improvement project, Rapid Improvement Capacity Expansion (RICE), which was found to be effective in increasing the service capacity of mental health outpatient clinics through proper scheduling of patients. Service capacity problems were noted to be addressed through overbooking and the implementation of the lean process improvement. One of the conceptual frameworks that were crucial in the implementation of the RICE was the use of the electronic health record (EHR) system (LaGanga, 2011). The use of the EHR was beneficial to the study through the provision of data which indicated the frequency within which patients normally confirm attendance to schedules. As acknowledged, “the increasing use of EHR in outpatient healthcare provides opportunities for other researchers to analyze actual appointment data, test and replicate time-related effects on no-shows, and incorporate these factors into new scheduling approaches and models” (LaGanga, 2011, p. 23). In addition, other inputs that were noted to have potentials for further improving resource allocation in outpatient clinics are the patients’ preferences (quality of time with the doctor vis-à-vis waiting time), the idle time of the service providers (health care professionals) while waiting for patients, and other cost-related factors.

The improvement in scheduling and the ability of patients to adhere to their schedules within the defined time frame enabled outpatient clinics to maximize the time according to patient care, as well as minimizing idle costs and opportunity costs which dampen the bottom line of the health care institution. Thus, the findings from the article could be used in The Jackson Center for Multiple Sclerosis in terms of evaluating the impact of a no-show in patients who previously scheduled for consultations and the manner by which the EHR could provide the necessary information to assess and proposed more effective scheduling strategies. This would enable the center to generate as many revenues as possible to be utilized to support operating expenses, as well as minimize the idle time for the practitioners.

The important lesson learned is that “reducing costs is crucial to expanding access to necessary services” (LaGanga, 2011, p. 26). In addition, with improved scheduling and more effective allocation of resources (time, assets, personnel), revenues for the center and those of other outpatient health care clinics, would improve in the long run.