Process Centered Management Model in the Health Care Industry Setup - Essay Example

Process Centered Management Model in the Health Care Industry Setup The early 1980's became a period of reflection in American business frontier. Beleaguered by the onslaught of Japanese and other foreign multinationals, Uncle Sam's managers was clueless on how they would improve their productivity and minimize cost to compete with foreigners. It was until the introduction of revolutionary management theories, such as the process centered management, in the latter part of 1980's that aided American businessmen to realize the resuscitation of United States' industrial prowess.

Michael Hammer, developer of process-oriented management pinpointed the tasked-focused thinking generated by specialization of labor paradigm as a culprit. For him, the specialization of labor bannered by the Industrial Age, served as a reason of American business inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Individual tasks brought about by individual people or a group of people that form a department delimits their flexibility needed in optimizing the output of the whole company. Instead of focusing on the company's overall performance value on customer's viewpoint, they are more concerned on the productivity of a particular task of an individual person or a department.

Though we can say that the tasks assigned to the department is performed productively, it does not still discredit the fact that many of the tasks done by each department in the traditional corporation are useless and/or hampered by the delay of the preceding unit in the production flow. These factors contribute to the inefficiency and unwanted costs that haunted even the largest of American corporations. Hammer blamed the lack of concern for processes or "how the units (tasks) fit together into a whole.

" With this in mind, he formulated the process-centered model, a management paradigm that revolves around business processes.Process centered management aims to divide a company by processes, not by function based departments. Led by process champions, each process consists of persons doing different but relative tasks to accomplish a particular objective. Instead of utterly obliterating the existence of function based departments, it streamlines various tasks to meet the requirements of the processes.

This entails weeding out of unneeded tasks and simplification of the entire production to provide products and services that caters to customer value more than task fulfillment. This newly acquired business mission of maximizing customer satisfaction by reorganizing a corporation from fragmented functional departments to synergized process groups became alluring to healthcare firms. Having a critical role of saving and improving one's life, owners of these companies opted to adopt this management practice to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of their services.

Under this scheme, physicians now work hand in hand with any other qualified medical professionals to perform a well-defined process, just as what Winthrop/South Nassau Health System did that fostered the improvement of their services and "customer intimacy" with their patients as well as the "optimal balance of customer focus and internal focus" (Bloom & Hefner 4-5). Its senior officers initially identified processes such as Develop Products and Services, Deliver Care, etc. Then they fill in people from different departments to them, like their appointment of a staff and a voluntary physician, and a senior nurse showing entrepreneurial aptitude as "three champions" or process owners to lead the Develop Products and Services process, which is to reorganizes the firm's approval system for product and service offerings to reduce selection time and to minimize risk.

Works CitedBloom, Harry, and David Hefner. "Beyond Functional Management: How the Process-Centered Management is Transforming Health Care." Group Practice Journal. 01 Aug. 1998. Computer Sciences Corporation. 20 Jun. 2006. .Hammer, Michael. "Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-Centered Organization Is Changing Our Work and Our Lives." Business Week. 20 Jun. 2006. .