Healthcare Operations Management

Operations Management

The American healthcare industry faces multiple challenges today; limited resources, rising costs, increasing demand for care, and the growth of the uninsured or underinsured population serve as a few examples of these challenges. Healthcare organizations find one way to respond to these challenges through the application of the principles of operations management. This paper will review healthcare operations management, discuss the various responsibilities of operations managers, and identify the importance and interconnection of these roles.

Healthcare operations management is defined by J.R. Langabeer as “the quantitative management of supporting business systems and processes that transform resources (or inputs) into services (or outputs)” (p. 6). More specifically, operations management involves measurement and management of these inputs to deliver the greatest quantity and quality of outputs, with the intent of maximizing the profitability of the organization. While operations management has been widely used for many years in manufacturing and supply chain management, service industries such as healthcare and banking now recognize the value of operations management. Implementation of operations management can increase productivity, reduce waste, and improve the bottom line of virtually any organization in any industry (Sox, n.d.).

Operations managers in healthcare organizations share universal roles and responsibilities. These roles include reducing costs, reducing variability, improving logistics flow, improving productivity, improving quality of service, and ensuring continuous improvement of business practices. Operations managers must first identify and measure costs in order to reduce costs; tracking costs allows management to determine where costs may be reduced without negatively impacting service levels. Operations managers measure variability in the dispersion of inputs and outputs to ensure that services are...