Healthcare Operations: Challenges and Solutions

This article discusses the challenges faced by healthcare operations, such as increasing patient numbers, rising costs, and limited technologies. It explores the opportunities provided by task forces and proposes solutions, including the introduction of fast track ED, formation of Critical Decision Unit, and sufficient staff allocation. The article also highlights the importance of data analysis in identifying issues and improving hospital management.

Healthcare Operations

Introduction
PATA stands for Pre Admission Testing Area. PATA is primarily the sick person clinic, at
Massachusetts General Hospital. It is liable for managing a pre-operative assessment for the
surgical patient prior to their procedures. PATA is a collective unit of MIT Sloan student and
faculty, and MGH clinics and organizational staff. PATA was suffering from incapability and
long patient times.
Main body
Explanations for the issues that have occurred issues
1) Increasing the number of patients and decreases in capacity: From the CDC data, it
is clear that demand for some basic services increases and most of the hospital raises its
hand. The number of ED patient increases from 3 to 5 percent in the year from 1998-
2003. The issue has mainly occurred because of limited recruitment of workforce and the
presence of the required number of healthcare providers (McCarty, Gallien and Levi,
2012).
2) The rising cost for care: Hospital cost is rising rapidly. In five years the hospital
expenses increased up to 29% from $1031 to $1289 in 1197- 2002.
3) Limited technologies: Expenditure is limited which results in the limitations in the IT
resources. Historical and forecasted data are not available in hospitals (Price, 2011).
4) Decreasing revenue: With all the hard efforts, the hospital has to work harder with few
resources. Key funding resources have decreased due to budget pressure.
Opportunities provided by task force and analysis of proposed solutions
Director and the DACCPM executive director made many efforts to enhance PATA’s working
conditions. In 2005, the OR director, Moss, and other hospital head assembled and set forward a
plan to set up a new PATA clinic, and it was decided to open this new clinic at Mass General
West(MG West) satellite hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts.
2 | Page

After the overall research, it would find that MG West Sattelite hospital is the best location for
more and more number of PATA patients.
In 2008, Pre-Operative Program director at UCSF Dr. Winener-Kronish appoint as a new leader
to form a PATA Task Force. In his team, the associate chief nurse of Patient Care Services, the
PATA medical director, the PATA nursing director, and the OR Medical Director are included.
Some of the major steps taken by him
● Giving priority to the more serious case.
● Provide online education to the patient about what to do on the day of surgery, instead of
offline.
● Switch to electronic tools for storage of medical records (Hou, 2011).
In 2009, a new seventh member was added, an MBA intern from MIT SloanSchool of
Management to manage the present state estimate of PATA’s ways and performance.
Well, the idea of making a group is good as it brings many changes which make the system
faster than the previous one. Switching to technologies for analyzing data and medical records
reduces the time, workload and also increases the efficiency of the workers (Porter, 2010).
Solution :
a) Introduction of fast track ED: This product reduces the patients in the hospital and also
patients are satisfied. It is planted in some commonly located area. Its main priority is to
treat normally day to day patient. This reduces the total time on task, provided guaranteed
and efficient care pan for the patients. This results in the increase the bed capacity in the
hospitals for more serious patients (Denton, 2013).
b) Formation of Critical Decision Unit(CDU): CDU is been set up with 8-12 beds for
patients that require therapy and more care. The CDU has reduces EDs admissions to the
hospital by 30%. The average admission time for CDU is 14- 15 hours in comparison to
the hospital which take 2-3 days (McCarty, Gallien and Levi, 2012).
3 | Page

c) Design a Rapid Admission Unit(RAU): RAU is designed for the patient that goes to the
hospital but do not find beds due to unavailability of bed and paperwork. It does not work
24 hours or 7days in weeks. RAI is staffed only in peak weekday hour.
d) Sufficient Staff Demands: Care should be taken on the number of staff. If the staff has
not been carefully allocated according to the demands then there is a mismatch in the
service which leads to a backlog of patients flow. Management of staff is necessary for
the proper running of any hospital and its another unit like ED, housekeeping, radiology,
laboratory or some other units.
e) Short out the demands of nurse: Collaborate with different hospitals to meet the demands
of nurse and physician.
Steps taken to find solution
The best can be gathered from the data. It can be effectively be collected by proper management
of information of patients visit in a detailed manner. As it covers how many patients arrived
daily to the hospital, what are its appointment time (Murdoch and Detsky, 2013). It also consists
of the in time, out time and length of visits. This also provides information about the services
that the patient takes like Ortho, Neuro, Card, GYN etc (Gale et al., 2013). In this context,
receiving feedback from the care users would help in identifying the issues faced on their part.
Based on these information issues can be identified and it can be resolved.
The data also provide information about the services provided by the surgical department. Some
of the data also interprets about patient scheduling over 3 weeks period which included
information about the date, day, number of shows, number of add-ons and about the number of
patients shown (Weiskopf, and Weng, 2013).
Conclusion
After analyzing the reports and data the major problems come out is the overflow of patients in
the hospital.
So the best outcomes of this solution are to expands the hospital so that more and more patients
come. After that try the give the counseling the patients so that patients would go the accurate
doctor. After that, the doctor treats the patient according to that. One of the steps taken by the
PATA is to open the Critical Decision Unit because of it the patients which took two days or
4 | Page

three days and filled the beds of the hospital is now not require, as it takes hardly 14- 15 hours
whatever be the treatment.
5 | Page

References
Denton, B.T., 2013. Handbook of healthcare operations management. New York: Springer, 10,
pp.978-1.
Gale, N.K., Heath, G., Cameron, E., Rashid, S. and Redwood, S., 2013. Using the framework
method for the analysis of qualitative data in multi-disciplinary health research. BMC medical
research methodology, 13(1), p.117.
Hou, H.T., 2011. A case study of online instructional collaborative discussion activities for
problem-solving using situated scenarios: An examination of content and behavior cluster
analysis. Computers & Education, 56(3), pp.712-719.
McCarty, K., Gallien, J. and Levi, R. (2012). Massachusetts General Hospital's Pre-Admission
Testing Area (PATA). [online] Mitsloan.mit.edu. Available at:
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/LearningEdge/CaseDocs/11-116.PATA.Levi.pdf [Accessed 20 Mar.
2019].
Murdoch, T.B. and Detsky, A.S., 2013. The inevitable application of big data to health
care. Jama, 309(13), pp.1351-1352.
Price, D.J., 2011. Managing variability to improve quality, capacity and cost in the perioperative
process at Massachusetts General Hospital (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology).
Porter, M.E., 2010. What is value in health care?. New England Journal of Medicine, 363(26),
pp.2477-2481.
Weiskopf, N.G. and Weng, C., 2013. Methods and dimensions of electronic health record data
quality assessment: enabling reuse for clinical research. Journal of the American Medical
Informatics Association, 20(1), pp.144-151.
Zakaria, N., Affendi, S. and Zakaria, N., 2010. Managing ICT in healthcare organization:
culture, challenges, and issues of technology adoption and implementation. In Health
Information Systems: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 1357-1372). IGI
Global.
6 | Page