Hospitals are Driving toward a Leaner Organization Essay

In healthcare, throughput refers to the ED process that impacts patient flow (Jarousse 2011). Process and flow began to be scrutinized for opportunities to improve the overcrowding by becoming more efficient. Due to this new process focus, throughput was born. This is also the point where lean flow or lean thinking became prevalent into healthcare from a manufacturing stand point to improve throughput. Lean principles revolve around removing non value added steps and standardizing work flow and processes. When applied aggressively hospital wide, lean principles can have a dramatic effect on productivity, cost, and quality. Numerous books concerning lean healthcare have been published in recent years (Crane & Noon 2011).

Throughout this course I have learned about the various challenges that impede productivity and efficiency at today’s hospitals. These issues facing the modern healthcare organization come in varying forms from technological, staffing, and financial to name a few. There are no limits to what hospitals can face in these modern technologically savvy times. Below are the major issues that today’s hospitals are facing, though there are many facets to these topics it will be described as best as possible to meet overall challenges:

Another secondary issue is the weakened employee expectations and employee performance, which adversely affects good patient care as well. The person in charge of patient registration is unprofessional to staff and patients. The facility is not clean because maintenance is slow in performing assigned duties. The parking is unsafe and unattended. The staff lacks the motivation to perform well.

These three areas, patient satisfaction, staffing, and medical errors would be the big ones that I would have to focus on in order to improve the overall quality of service provided by the hospital. I think that better or more efficient staffing and increased patient safety via the reduction of medical errors would greatly help to resolve some of the existing patient satisfaction issues. Adequate staffing is a very important part in promoting positive patient experiences and outcomes. According to Sultz and Young (2010), “there is increasing evidence that nurse staffing is related to patient outcomes in both medical and surgical cases. Studies indicate a direct link between the number of registered nurses and the time they spend with patients and the number of serious complications and patient deaths”(Sec 3.16, Quality of Hospital Care). I would suggest that the hospital work closely with its existing nursing staff to ensure that there are enough nurses and that they have enough time for their patients.

I would say the majority of issues I have seen relate to nurses feeling their patient load was too much which may possibly result in unsafe patient care. This typically relates directly to staffing issues.

Successful medical organizations have as their guiding principles a professionally stated purpose which encompasses and details their mission statement, vision statement, values statement, and broad strategic goals. The organizational structure is established on these statements, and the function of each department and the duties of each employee are based upon fulfilling the purpose of these statements. Additionally, these statements must encompass the various aspects of the organization and its stakeholders. As Moore, Ellsworth, and Haufman (2011) purport, “ Any organization planning as though it exists in a vacuum is ignoring factors critical for its survival” (p. 16). Without these guiding principles to serve as a direction for the

In the article, The Case of the Unhealthy Hospital, written by Anthony R. Kovner, a through description of a struggling hospital, Blake Memorial Hospital, is given. This paper is a SWOT analysis, and addresses the strengths and weaknesses within the hospital, as well as opportunities and threats outside of the hospital and in the surrounding community.

[20] cited (Miller, D., et. al., 2005).”“Adoption of Lean management strategies while not a simple task can help healthcare organizations improve processes and outcomes, reduce cost, and increase satisfaction among patients, providers and staff” . Balle [5] states that: “the adoption of lean in healthcare is very young it started in the late 90s but started to gain a little bit of momentum in the last decade and now in this decade many health organisations are looking at lean principles since it has been proven to be very successful in many cases around the world”.

In the healthcare industry, services provided by the healthcare staff are converted mainly by the inputs such as: Doctors, nurses, hospitals, medical supplies, equipment and laboratories. The processing involved in the healthcare industry includes: examination, surgery, monitoring, medication, and therapy. The output of the mentioned process would of course be healthy patients (Operations Management, 2004, p.6). Healthcare workers have a higher degree of customer contacts, for the customers are our patients that we provide comprehensive care to. Services, such as providing healthcare have a variable amount of inputs for a specific case. For instance, a critical care patient may need several nurses that need to attend to all of the needs for that patients, whereas, a telemetry patient may only need one nurse to provide care for. The measurement of productivity in healthcare services is also more difficult than the manufacturing of goods. In healthcare, it is rather difficult to measure the productivity of healthcare providers because healthcare is not quantitative. Less inventory is needed on hand in providing services (Operations Management, 2004, p.6 & 7). The scope of operations management in healthcare requires several different activities performed. Forecasting in healthcare may include ordering sufficient amounts of flu vaccines half a year ahead of time

Memorial Hospital Case Study uses a series of communication between different level and functional hospital employees to paint a picture of how this hospital operates. This paper will analyze and summarize key characteristics underlining the organization structure, management style and leadership, identify major challenges and recommend workable solutions.

For several decades health care has been tied to the economy and with the current downturn we see continued efforts to control and reduce over-head costs. Health care organizations in their effort to become more efficient and address changes in the industry have altered their strategic business plans. Lee & Alexander (1999) researched organizational change in hospitals and their survival, in this paper I hope to discuss their findings and add other examples to validate their conclusions.

In order to eliminate the inefficiencies witnessed in many public and private hospitals that serve a number of patients, an integrated approach to handling the daily workload is necessary. There is need for all departments within the hospital to work closely together in ensuring more effective and efficient service deliveries. In this paper, a planned change is going to be carried out involving designing a new system that incorporates all the departments within the hospital. This includes the surgery department, pediatrics department, dentistry department, nursing department, pharmacy departments, laboratory and testing department, X-ray and Physiotherapy departments, Equipment maintenance and Engineering department, Information Technology

The operational systems of organizations can be viewed as open systems, which interact with their respective environments on a continuous basis. In this context, these systems comprise synergetic and interdependent subsystems of input, process and output with the main objective of these systems being to efficiently and effectively deliver goods and/or services to their demanding customers (Yasin and Wafa, 2002). Confronting the challenges of global competition, companies have to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet their customers’ ever-changing needs (Canel et al., 2000). Even though lean techniques were developed for the manufacturing firms and

This research done in order to identify lean practices, organizational commitment and operational performance in hospitals. This survey was conducted among lean managers and operators of each project in 2009. As per the researcher success of lean directly benefits the internal operations process as well as operational performance

Healthcare providers strive to improve service quality by implementing various quality management programs. Customers tend to seek for higher quality of care when choosing treatments, providers, and health plans. For healthcare organizations that desire to provide high quality care and compete in the global market, choosing a quality management program to implement is critical for performance and efficiency. Many studies have been conducted to analyze the effectiveness of such programs. Lean, Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) are three programs that will reviewed by three different case studies in efforts to understand them and to compare and contrast their capabilities.