Week1

Health care service organizations should develop methods for dealing with production. In the health care industry today, it is facing a changing financial and clinical environment. There is a relationship shift between patients, physicians, insurance companies, hospitals, and government. Operations management is the quantitative management of supporting business systems and processes that transform resources (or inputs) into health care services (outputs). Operations management has many roles and goals to accomplish as one of the front leaders of a business.

While considering that the business of health care is ultimately a service with moral implications, the healthcare industry is complex in the sense that new techniques and medical technology provides a multitude of different aspects for managers to understand. Understanding how to compartmentalize healthcare aspects can be a powerful tool when managers begin to define roles and set goals. “Healthcare operations management is a discipline that integrates scientific principles of management to determine the most efficient and optimal methods to support patient care delivery.” (Langabeer, 2008. p. 3). Organizations need to treat every patient as an individual with individual needs while also using methods of mass production to provide equal service with limited resources. The production of health services faces the operations management dilemmas of integration, coordination, and control. Knowledge management is needed to integrate diverse medical knowledge into coherent diagnoses and treatment

plans without losing the benefits of specialization. Different providers’ service elements must be coordinated in time and space into processes, workflows, and pathways while also adapting easily to changing circumstances (Schmenner and Swink 1998). Finally, goals must be set

and performance must be measured, monitored, and controlled without encroaching on professionalism and motivation. A system,...