Operations Management

Exercise #1

Executive Summary

Organizational success is dependent upon the ability to maintain profits during periods when the layout of operations change. Organizations must be able to identify resources and use them to identify the changes that are occurring in their daily operations, while doing this within an acceptable time frame. Operational dashboards provide a valuable tool to managers to monitor their employee performance and to aid in coaching their staff to achieve improvements. The use of the dashboard is crucial to healthcare because it prompts management to respond to the changing needs of their departments, which ultimately can affect the quality of care being provided as well as impact its overall performance measurements (Gordon & Richardson, 2013). To meet some of these pending challenges it is recommended that administration develop a dashboard to consistently monitor results as well as evaluate progress in all of the departments.

Hospital and health systems are more technically accomplished that ever before due to meaningful use requirements that have been the driving force. Meaningful use is defined as the use of certified electronic health records and is used to help improve quality, safety, efficiency, while reducing health disparities, engaging patients and their families, improve care coordination, and maintain the privacy and security of patient health information (Meaningful Use Defined, 2013). New CMS quality standards have put a focus on clinical performance. With organizations moving to a paperless work flow and trying to simplify the workflow with a variety of new management tools and as this is occurring, it is becoming more of a complex environment to keep track. Many organizations are continually plagued with inefficiencies, lack quality or customer satisfaction scores and still deal with uncontrolled costs. Healthcare managers are requiring more transparent access to clinical and operational performance data...