General Hospital

Conflict Resolution at General Hospital

General Hospital was founded in 1968 as a nonprofit community hospital. They expand their bed capacity from 175 beds to 275 beds and upgraded their emergency room to compete with other hospitals. During this time they also signed a contract with a local medical center to provide service they could not provide.

The conflict that is occurring at General Hospital

General Hospital began to experience conflict amongst employees and management after their patient occupancy dropped 65 percent because of renovation project and replacement of old medical equipment with state of the art equipment. Before this changes they were 90 percent occupied. On top of losing patients they experienced 35 percent increase in Medicare and Medicaid patients. Beds were being filled but they were losing revenue because Medicare and Medicaid are government health insurance plans that generate less revenue than private health insurance plans. Mike Hammer CEO of General Hospital also realized that the company was taken a nosedive due to high speeding. Because of his lack of experience as a health-care executive he hired a new chief operating officer, Marge Harding to deal with their issues. In the past Hammer tried to control physician-driven cost but his attempt failed. He approached Dr. Mark Williams, Director of Medicine about getting staff physician to become cost effect in their decision making, but he defended their wasteful actions as the practice of good medicine.

The first measure taken by Harding was to computerize General Hospital EKG readers. Harding signed a contract with Health Diagnostics for one year and trained their technicians. By doing this she saved the hospital $100,000. Dr James Boyer an attending cardiologist who was approved by the board of trustees and the medical staff at General Hospital to interpret EKG’s reading was fired. During the first week of computerized operation there were problems after problem with EKG...