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).

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 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

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.

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.

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.

The emergency room (ER) has been receiving a lot of complaints recently and the chief executive officer, it was decided to find out the root cause of the complaints. This was done in two ways. First is that two individuals were granted the role of observing customers in various locations for about 2 hours per location for a period of one week. They were required to note any issue that arose leading to problems. The second way was that customer feedback forms were introduced in all major rooms of the ER to capture the customer experiences. The observations and feedback was collected, collated, prioritized and discussed. The ER was found to be receiving an average of 9.8 complaints per day which was higher than the average for many other facilities ADDIN EN.CITE Zuckerman20041264(Zuckerman & Shen, 2004)1264126417Zuckerman, StephenShen, Yu-ChuCharacteristics of Occasional and Frequent Emergency Department Users: Do Insurance Coverage and Access to Care Matter?Medical CareMedical Care176-1824222004Lippincott Williams & Wilkins00257079http://www.jstor.org/stable/464071510.2307/4640715( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_7" o "Zuckerman, 2004 #1264" Zuckerman & Shen, 2004).

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.

With so many cases of unfilled position in the hospital patients is not obtaining great services. Patient not receiving proper cares leads to closures, because of prolonged postponements that have led to deaths. Patient complaints at the emergency room have increased in recent years. Numerous patients that were admitted to the hospital’s emergency room are at high risk of dying. Six percent of emergency rooms in the U.S. have closed. These closings took place in the inner-city and low-income areas, but with an emergency room visit increasing by nearly 51%, the overwhelming amount of closures.

Health care organizations should work on putting more emphasis on patient experience and satisfaction, such as giving evaluations when giving care. When it comes to patient satisfication the healthcare system should put their sole focus on making sure patient were well taken care of during their visit. Whether if the patient was satisfied or not with their experience. Patient experience/satisfaction in a hospital should always be a number one priority and getting the person back at 100%. Hospitals are always looking for ways to improve several different things such as technology, health in populations, reducing cost, maintaince, etc. But they fail to focus on the quality care, Avoidable harm is a worthy goal that all health care system should benefit

Every patients main concern when going to a hospital is to get a surgery to fix a problem that they have, or to receive prescriptions for illnesses and diseases. But a factor most probably are not worried about when they go to a hospital is how they are being treated. Doctors already have a difficult task to perform, but overcrowding the hospitals will cause them to be busy and possibly conduct their job with out the amount of care that is required. Giving out prescriptions in a hospital could also be effected. Patients vital medicine could be mixed up with someone else’s and cause even more harm.

This begins with educating staff on Lean principles and methodology. Once staff understands Lean thinking, principles and methods, the managers and leaders can become facilitators, teachers, and mentors while allowing professionals, non-professionals, and health care teams to make improvements in safety and quality (Aij & Lohman, 2016). Implementing Lean in Optum’s transplant services department resulted in the elimination of aspects of the telephonic outreach process that didn’t contribute to high quality health care.

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.

Operations management is the organizing and controlling of the fundamental business activity of providing goods and services to customers (Encarta, 2005). In the healthcare industry, operations management generally focuses on providing a service of healthcare to patients. An organization has three basic functional areas, and theses are: finance, marketing, and operations (Operations Management, 2004, p.4). Since operations is one of the three basic functions of an organization it holds a strong significance in the healthcare industry. The contents of this paper will explain what operations management means to the writer, and why is operations management important to a healthcare organization.