Case study. Stanford restructures to beat the teaching hospital blues.
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Academic Medical Centers↗
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Results for “Hospital Restructuring”
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Redesigning hospital nursing practice: the Professionally Advanced Care Team (ProACT) model, Part 2.
The pressures of the current nursing shortage have created an unparalleled opportunity to restructure hospital nursing practice and care delivery. The potential exists to create new systems which simultaneously advance the goals of the profession and solve the problems of the shortage. Part 1 of this article (JONA, July/August, 1989) examined the similarities and differences among existing models and described the Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital ProACT model. Part 2 outlines the process of developing and implementing ProACT, an alternative nursing practice and care delivery model.
Costs and Cost Analysis↗
Sustained turnaround follows restructuring at Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital.
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Data Collection↗
Laboratory medicine in Ontario: its downsizing and the consequences on quality.
Health care in Ontario consumes 35% of provincial government annual revenues. Fiscal constraint mandates restructuring of health services to maintain a fully, publicly-funded universally-accessible health system that is patient-focussed and health-outcome driven. Acute-care hospital restructuring under the authority of the Health Services Restructuring Commission and primary health-care reform characterise present government initiatives. Laboratory medicine services at about Can $1 billion annually account for about 5% of health expenditure. A Laboratory Services Restructuring Secretariat created by the Ministry of Health in 1995 has planned regionally-based integrated laboratory services systems bringing together public and private providers, designed a province-wide laboratory information system, developed a quality management program, reviewed the human resource needs for laboratory physicians, scientists and technologists, and recommended that the legislation be rewritten so as to be enabling - not controlling. Meanwhile both hospital and private laboratories have closed, leaving 296 in 1998 compared to 394 in 1991. Laboratory physician numbers at 39 per million population falls far short of the recommended target of 52 and many are within 10 years of retirement. Renewal of laboratory physicians and scientists to meet the shortfall is not occurring. The numbers of registered laboratory technologists has fallen by 6. 8% over 2 years. Consolidation and downsizing of laboratories with the formation of core laboratories has resulted in multi-discipline and cross discipline tasking of specialist technologists. Senior and middle level management technologists have been declared redundant. As a consequence, quality control practices have been hard hit. Plans to address these deficiencies through regional integration and sharing of resources remain to be implemented.
Clinical Laboratory Information Systems↗
Hospitals dismantle elaborate corporate restructurings.
Consultants were busy helping hospitals build complex financial structures to take advantage of the economic trends of the 1980s. Now many hospitals are quietly reversing those moves.
Commerce↗
New directions in hospital governance.
This article suggests new directions for hospital governance to meet the demands of a rapidly changing health care environment. Board members must increasingly play roles as risk takers, strategic directors, experts, mentors, and evaluators. Lessons from other industries regarding risk taking, use of expertise, and streamlining decision making must be adapted to meet hospital needs. Recent data suggest that these needs may still differ by hospital ownership despite a convergence in investor-owned and not-for-profit corporate structures. The effectiveness of hospital boards in the future will depend on their ability to: (1) manage a diverse group of stakeholders; (2) involve physicians in the management and governance process; (3) meet the governance needs of multi-institutional systems and hospital restructuring; (4) meet the challenges of diversification and vertical integration; and (5) understand strategy formulation and implementation as interdependent and interrelated processes.
Decision Making, Organizational↗
Flipping assumptions and revisioning perioperative services.
As we approach a fully capitated healthcare environment, total revisioning and restructuring of hospitals as a whole, and perioperative services in particular, will be necessary to maintain the financial viability of our healthcare institutions. Nurse executives will be in pivotal roles in leading and influencing these hospital initiatives. The authors present a vision of the new hospital and discuss methods of responding to change within the healthcare environment, with an emphasis on perioperative services. An analysis of the findings of an operating room survey conducted with nurse executives is included in the discussion.
Capitation Fee↗
Tacit collusion among hospitals in price competitive markets.
Horizontal and vertical mergers, and coalition and network building activity have recently escalated in the US hospital industry in response to actual and threatened increases in competition. Parties to this industry's consolidation state that increased efficiency is the primary motive. However, increased consolidation may lead to increased awareness of inter-dependence, and facilitate 'conscious parallelism', or tacit collusion. In conjunction with this, selective contracting practices by payors with hospitals for negotiated prices may have increased the awareness of interdependence among price-competing hospitals. We posit that cost asymmetries arising from first-mover advantages to merged hospitals and multihospital chain members may be used strategically in local markets to facilitate tacit arrival at profit maximizing prices. Thus, hospital mergers and acquisitions which enhance efficiency in the short run may not yield net gains to society in the long run, as they may alter incentives which parameterize the potential for implicit cooperation. This outcome depends upon mitigating local market conditions, such as capacity utilization and market power held by payors. The current view that safeguarding emerging price competition is important necessitates careful analysis of how merger is likely to affect bargaining power between hospitals and purchasers. This complexity precludes the use of simple antitrust rules or guidelines in this industry.
Antitrust Laws↗
Public sector hospitals and organizational change: an agenda for policy analysis.
An important feature of health care systems in recent years is the change in the organizational position and relations of public sector hospitals. Health sector reforms have led to increasing heterogeneity in the organizational location and status of public sector hospitals and new organizational forms of public-private relations are being developed by and for hospitals. These changes can have important implications for health and health care. They raise issues around equity, control, accountability and performance of health care. Yet the policy process in practice may be failing to develop and implement appropriate forms of policy formulation on health sector reform. This paper focuses on the organizational position and relations of hospitals within public sector health services. It firstly outlines key elements of health sector reform and relates these to two dimensions of organizational change for hospitals: increasing heterogeneity and forms of public-private relations. The paper provides a descriptive format for classifying forms of hospital organizational change and proposes a framework of six questions for analysing these organizational forms. This may be used to assess the appropriateness of specific policies to particular country situations and to develop more open debate around hospital organizational forms.
Decision Making, Organizational↗
Hospital autonomy: the experience of Kenyatta National Hospital.
An increasing number of countries are exploring the introduction or expansion of autonomous hospitals as one of the numerous health reforms they are introducing to their health system. Hospital autonomy is one of the forms of decentralization that is focused on a specific institution rather than on a political unit. It has gained much interest because it is an attempt to amalgamate the best elements of the public and private sectors in how a hospital is governed, managed and financed. This paper reviews the key elements of the concept of hospital autonomy, the reasons for its expanded use in many countries and a specific example of making a major teaching hospital autonomous in Kenya. A review of the successful experience of Kenyatta National Hospital and its process of introducing autonomy, with regard to governance, operations and management, and finances, lead to several conclusions on replicability. The legal framework is a critical element for successfully structuring the autonomous hospital. Additionally, success is highly dependent on the extent to which there is adequate funding during the process of attaining autonomy due to the length of the transition period needed. Autonomy must be granted within the context of the national health system and national health objectives and be consistent with those aims and their underlying societal values. Finally, as with decentralization, success is dependent upon the preparation done with the systems and management necessary for the proper governance and operation of autonomous hospitals.
Decision Making, Organizational↗
Managing retrenchment in French public hospitals: philosophical and regulatory constraints.
The French hospital system is experiencing economic stresses similar to those experienced by US hospitals. Pressures for cost containment have occurred due to changes in health care funding. The public hospital system is facing unprecedented severe retrenchment. Innovative strategies for managing retrenchment have been restricted by regulatory and philosophical constraints. What is needed is to provide more autonomy for individual hospital managers together with greater accountability for achievement of results.
Financial Management↗
Health care reforms in the French hospital system.
The French health care system, like other health care systems, entered the 1990s in a state of flux. During the 1980s, attempts to curb health care expenditure had a limited impact with the liberal and pluralist values of the health system undermining reform strategies. In 1991 the French government introduced a new hospital reform which had four main strands: rationalizing public and private health care provision; introducing a medical logic into the hospital service; increasing hospital autonomy and strengthening participation and involvement in the hospital system. However, these reforms left untouched the financing of the health service. Consequently there remains a need for a more fundamental reform of the management and financing of the French health care system.
Budgets↗
Decentralization of management responsibility: the case of Danish hospitals.
This article examines a specific management reform at three hospitals in a Danish county. Management reform at the hospital level implies a decentralization of responsibility and power to the departmental level. Along with increased responsibility and power, departments get the message: keep your budgets and keep your output level. This preliminary analysis indicates that departmental budgets can be a way of containing costs in clinical departments. Non-staff expenditures especially are subjected to reductions. The system still seems to 'favour' doctors and nurses, but less than in a system with traditional budgetary institutions. The behaviour of the top-management teams shows that the output constraint is not seriously meant. Departments are allowed to reduce capacity, with declining output, with the knowledge of the top-management team. The declining output makes it easier to departments ceteris paribus to keep within their budgets. And that makes it easier for the top-management team to keep the overall hospital budget. The obligation to keep the overall hospital budget is thus an important criterion of success in the eyes of the political masters of hospitals.
Budgets↗
Layoffs, reductions-in-force, downsizing, rightsizing: the case of a state psychiatric hospital.
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Employment↗
Linking mental health and addiction services: a continuity-of-care team model.
Reorganization of mental health care delivery services at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center addressed problems with the coordination of addiction treatment and mental health programming for patients with significant psychiatric and addiction comorbidity. Clinical services were organized into interdisciplinary continuity-of-care teams that follow patients across different levels of care. The teams provide addiction treatment through "universally available" resources such as a partial hospital addiction rehabilitation module. Continuity of care remains within the team structure as clinicians follow patients throughout their rehabilitation course. Patient and staff satisfaction focus on improved accessibility of addiction services and continuity of care providers across time and levels of care. Overall inpatient utilization and recidivism decreased after model implementation.
Continuity of Patient Care↗
[Improving productivity by implementing RIS and PACS throughout the clinic: a case study].
PROBLEM: How are improvements in productivity in connection with RIS/PACS to be defined? What do they cost? To limit the problem to the relevant topics, we first describe the objectives of a radiology department and the identified bottlenecks in the workflow. How to define and assess the improvements is discussed. METHODS: The case in question for this study is the RIS/PACS project at the "Klinikum der Universität München, Campus Grosshadern". The goals of the project and its present status are reviewed. The project is not yet completed, so this is a "midterm" report. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: We describe the status of the achieved and not yet achieved goals and of the eliminated bottlenecks. On the plus side, for example, nearly 100% of all digitally generated images (except mammogramms) are digitally archived. They are accessible to the same percentage in radiology via PACS and in the hospital via the webbased intranet image distribution system when needed. In some radiology areas, such as multislice CT, already the reporting can no longer be performed without softcopy image interpretation. However, the full elimination of hardcopy images is still not reality, since the distribution to DICOM viewers for selected requesters with demands for almost reporting quality, high cost image displays is still in the testphase. To reduce film costs, images are being printed on a high resolution paper printer in addition to the intranet distribution during this transition period. On the negative side, due to a lack of job positions in the transcription rooms, about 40% of the reports are still being handwritten by radiologists. Furthermore, the dictated and transcribed reports are usually still not available early enough in the RIS and thereby in the intranet report distribution of the hospital. Here only a speech recognition system can remedy the situation. As soon as this problem is solved and the image distribution to the DICOM viewers works routinely, the reports and the images will be accessible within minutes to maximally within some hours after the examination. CONCLUSION: The goals reached so far suffered delays due to unforeseen problems and pitfalls. Altogether, a quieter operation and workflow in radiology has already been achieved, due to less inquiries from the requestors for unfinished examinations, images and/or image copies.
Computer Systems↗
[Quality management in a radiology department].
PURPOSE: To increase the quality of internal and external interactions (patients, clinical colleagues, technicians, radiologists) in a department of radiology. METHOD: Accompanied by a well-experienced adviser workshops have been performed dealing with different topics like "contact to patients," "performance of the radiological report and interaction with the referring colleague" or "research and teaching." A catalogue of different actions was defined to reduce hindrances within the internal and external work-flow. RESULTS: A total number of 53 actions was defined and related to different persons who were responsible for the realisation of the measures within a time interval. Six months after starting the quality management 46 (86%) of the defined actions were realised successfully, and another 4 (8%) measures were still running. There was a moderate increase of satisfaction of the patients and clinical colleagues considering the waiting time. CONCLUSIONS: A quality management in a radiological department allows an optimisation of the internal and external interactions. However, the guidance of a well-experienced adviser is as essential as the continuous control of successful finished measures.
Education↗
The impact of organisational change on outcome in an intensive care unit in the United Kingdom.
OBJECTIVES: To study the change in outcome for patients admitted to an intensive care unit following the establishment of a team of resident medical staff and a change from an "open" to a "closed" organisational format. DESIGN: Database review of prospectively collected data. SETTING: Intensive care unit of a postgraduate teaching hospital. SUBJECTS: 1134 admissions to the intensive care unit over a 3-year period, of whom 476 (42%) followed elective surgery. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Hospital mortality corrected for illness severity by using the APACHE II scoring system. RESULTS: Crude hospital mortality fell from 28% before the changes to 20% afterwards (P = 0.01). With correction for case-mix factors, the probability of death after the changes was reduced by almost half (OR 0.51; CI 0.32, 0.82, P = 0.005). CONCLUSION: A "closed" format of organisation of the delivery of care may result in improved outcomes for patients admitted to intensive care units.
APACHE↗