The typical mid-sized hospital trying to keep its head above water in the increasingly tight health care market. It has determined that a critical area for it in today’s market is customer service. Until eight or nine years ago, hospital’s had a reputation for being a small hospital with the “personal touch.” However, in order to keep up with larger hospitals, it has been forced to rapidly expand its facilities and the range of its services such as its new oncology and cardiac clinics. Unfortunately many feel that with this expansion has come a loss in the personalized care that earlier distinguished hospitals. Customer displeasure appears to be rising, as a six month patient survey has recently revealed. In these competitive times for hospitals, the new CEO of XYZ hospital, believes that this is an area that cannot be ignored. She has hired you to get a better picture of what she thinks could be a problem for XYZ hospital.
She suggests you focus on the hospital’s Radiology Department which the survey revealed has the lowest customer ratings in the entire hospital. This also includes internal customers (medical staff, and various personnel in other departments). She shares some of the findings with you:
• there are often very long wait times for x-rays;
• staff don’t seem very knowledgeable about the cause of the delays, or department procedures in general;
• staff are not very willing to go out of their way to help patients with various problems;
• radiology staff don’t seem to be very coordinated with one another – technicians are not ready for patients when they are brought in by radiology staff, records seem to get misplaced, etc;
• staff are rude to patients, or at the very least, not very sociable;
• staff don’t have respect for patients’ privacy;
• staff are often “not on the same page” with the needs of other departments and personnel in the hospital (treatment priorities, protocol, etc.)
Ceo states that she is part of the “new breed” of hospital executives that feels customer-oriented issues are a priority in healthcare. She feels that the lack of customer service in hospitals is a problem nationwide, the reason being that health professionals have simply never been educated in this area.
Ceo seems a bit defensive about the low patient ratings in his department and is not very sold on the idea of taking up valuable staff training time in teaching people “to smile more.” He also feels it is important to look at the “reality of the situation.” The patient population has expanded, especially in the last four years, but Radiology’s facilities and staff have not kept pace. And, while the hospital’s operations have extended geographically to new wings of the hospital, Radiology has remained centralized, meaning that staff “spends half their time running all over for patients or responding to calls for our portable x-ray equipment.” He adds that constant hospital remodeling projects in and around the Radiology Department have created “bottlenecks” in getting patients through various parts of the radiology process.
Ceo admits that hospital has recently increased his budget for staff and he tries to stretch this increase as much as possible by hiring mostly temporary help during particularly busy times of the year. With the hospital’s blessing he has also instituted a freeze on all pay raises. He concludes his conversation with you by voicing his hope that you will “look at the whole picture” before putting his people through “a bunch of needless training that may not be the real answer.”
Questions:
At this point you have very little information (and you really don’t know what’s important/ relevant among the information you do have), but based on what you’ve got, what are some indicators of what may be contributing to this performance gap (and thus worthy of further exploration)?
1.) Describe possible knowledge-based (probably requiring training or other instruction) that may be indicated.
2.) Describe possible non knowledge-based factors (other things such as proper resources that do not require and are not affected by training/instruction).
You will no doubt need to collect additional information in order to determine whether your initial speculations are accurate.
1.) First, indicate what key questions you need to have answered in order to reach some sort of reasonable conclusion about the performance gap causes
2.) Second, describe the best information sources (management, employees, SME’s, records, etc.) to answer the questions you have identified in. Provide a rationale for your choices.
3.) Choose three methods (interviewing, survey, observation, record inspection, focus group, etc.) for gathering this particular data from your sources you identify in and explain why you think they would be the best choices under the circumstances. Also detail how you would employ them.