University Health Services: Walk-in Clinic - Harvard Business Review Case Analysis

One of the major problems currently facing the Walk-In-Clinic that affects the service quality of the clinic is the wait time experienced by patients as a result of the Clinic allowing patients to request specific doctors. Because the Clinic allows these requests, the MD resources are frequently less available. The Clinic could ban these requests, in an effort to reduce wait time, but this could adversely affect the perceived service quality that the patients receive. A more appropriate solution would be to increase the number of doctors working during peak times. Yes, this could significantly increase costs, but this would be the most direct way to improve overall service quality. Doctors are the only workers capable of handling all problems and would be more likely to instill confidence and perceived service quality in the patient’s minds. Primary care by its very nature is most successfully practiced when the physicians have an understanding of a patient’s background and are able to monitor and track a patient’s progress. This relationship directly relates to perceived service quality. Since funding is limited, a way to offset the additional costs would be to charge patients a nominal co-pay if they requested to see a specific doctor. This would have the added effect of discouraging walk-in patients from requesting specific doctors.

Another way to improve the service quality of the Clinic would be to expand the nurse practitioner guidelines beyond the 13 ailments that they are currently allowed to treat. This would help address the MD wait time problem by shifting the some of the doctor’s workload to the nurse practitioners. Pre-Triage, patients 40% of the patients were seeing nurse practioners, with Triage, only 28% of patients are seeing nurse practitioners. Expanding the guidelines would help address this shift. In the meantime, nurse practitioners should not treat problems beyond the 13 ailments until those guidelines are expanded. The case mentioned that...