Scenerio: A primary care clinic can be an individual-physician practice or a mul

Question

Scenerio: A primary care clinic can be an individual-physician practice or a multiple-physician practice organized as a nonprofit or a for-profit facility. Multiple-physician practices generally specialize in cardiac, women’s health, pediatrics, or related services. You are the administrator of a local for-profit, multiple-physician community clinic owned by five local physicians, specializing in internal medicine, women’s health, pediatrics, orthopedics, and oncology. The clinic sees an average of 50 patients per day. Scheduling is centralized with two receptionists, and each specialty has four staff members to assist the physicians. All the physicians have visiting privileges at the area hospitals and frequently speak at local and national conferences on numerous preventative health care topics. The clinic is noted for its use of technology and has agreements in place with the local hospitals for web-based exchanges of health information on shared patients. Action Required: Your office just underwent an organizational change and one office receptionist was eliminated, saving the office $25, 000 per year in labor costs. However, there have been a number of complaints that all patients cannot be processed due to the increased flow of patients. Two weeks later you begin to hear that wait times for appointments have increased, and one specific patient was not able to be seen. That patient now has developed an infection and requires surgery Question 1: As an administrator, you need to assess this situation: How would you determine if there was a true need for another receptionist? Do you need to reinstate the position or can you retrain the current number of employees? Why? Question 2: As an administrator, describe the effects that labor shortages of key personnel and rising costs of labor have on profitability. How would you determine how to allocate your money? Be sure to think critically about the impact that quality outcomes and patient outcomes have on financial resources Question 3: Based on what you have learned so far in this course, what would be your plan of action for the next 30 days? What types of reports would you use to help support your decisions?

Explanation / Answer

Question 1: As an administrator, you need to assess this situation: How would you determine if there was a true need for another receptionist?

It is clear that the absence of one receptionist actually impacts the service level to the patience and started receiving complaint on the same. The actual saving in removing one receptionist from labour force is $25,000 per year. Thus analysis has to be done whether this 25, 000 savings will really make an impact on operational cost or not. Patience service level is very important and there should not be any compromise on that for a health sector. Two options are available .1. Train the available staffs especially the administrative staffs on the duty of a receptionist, so that on days where patience flow is high we can utlise the available administrative staffs as a part time worker for the role of receptionist. 2nd option is to hire a receptionist with lower packages ( basically an eligible fresher from a college having good communication skills and ability to deal with patience) , so that 10-15% of 25,000 can be saved.

Question 2: As an administrator, describe the effects that labour shortages of key personnel and rising costs of labour have on profitability.

Impact will be customer loyalty and service level. They are qualitative aspects that could directly create adverse effect on profitability. The frustrated patience, which didn’t get proper service from the hospital will never approach again and they will opt some other clinics in the locality.

Health clinics have healthy competition across the locality. So to meet the required synergy it is advisable to develop a good plan to serve them best .

Based on what you have learned so far in this course, what would be your plan of action for the next 30 days? What types of reports would you use to help support your decisions?

It could easily observe that there are some gaps in customer requirement and current service level. A requirement of a good facility manager is there so that every operational aspects can be controlled or monitored very well. A process map has to be created that must incorporate different departments, their available resource, amount spent for operations, number of average patience coming per day, peak demand . Then map the resource on the process and requirement has to be synchronised based on the proper mapping.

Proper training and development plan has to be formulated to encourage multi task within the available resources. Some administrative staffs wont behaving 100% utility per day,so that they can be effectively used for other work ( like receptionist, co-ordinator to a physician).Separate incentive or additional perks,package can be given for such initiatives on added responsibility. This can motivate employees to participate in the new plan. Physician has to be given training on effective checkup plans and their turn around time for each patience check-up time.

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