You are the business manager of a fifteen-physician group practice in family med

Question

You are the business manager of a fifteen-physician group practice in family medicine that at a recent strategic planning retreat agreed to open a satellite clinic on the periphery of its current market area in order to increase the number of families that it serves. The clinic will be located in an area of somewhat older, rundown homes that seems to be undergoing slow but steady gentrification. The clinic initially will be staffed by three physicians and has a maximum capacity of ten doctors. One of your responsibilities under the strategic plan to create the clinic is to establish a modest program for keeping track of the factors and variables that might affect the success of the clinic.

Questions:

1. Assuming the satellite clinic will open, how will you set up a monitoring and adjustment program? List the required steps.

2. Why is a monitoring, evaluating, and adjusting strategy essential to overall organizational success for the new clinic?

3. Provide two possible events that a successful monitoring program could identify and what adjustments could apply.

Please provide in-dept answers and references. Thank you!

Explanation / Answer

A-1 Monitoring and adjustment program can be set up in following steps:

1) Determine factors that effect are important for the success of the clinic: Following are the broad factors that are important for success of any clinic (there would be others too) -

Apart from the above factors, there would be other factors as well. The idea is to list down all the important ones and monitor them, and this is the first step to that.

2) Determine the appropriate level for each factor that needs to be achieved. Like for example, to serve 200 patients/day, there should be atleast 200/10=20 doctors available. This should be done for each factor, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

3) Create a MIS (Management Information System) that can help you in monitoring and tracking. This system should include all the factors and there appropriate levels. The system should be designed such that it would be needed to be fed by only current values and it would automatically show whether the level is appropriate or not. This would be based on earlier entered threshold values.

4) Monitor the level and adjust based upon your requirements, and the minimum level you desire.

A-2 When any organization, not just clinic, is set up, it is set up with certain goals in mind. These goals are supposed to be achieved in future and all the entities involved in that organization work together to achieve these goals. Under such situations, monitoring and evaluating help in keeping track of your progress with respect to your goal. One can easily lose track of what is going on if the performance is not monitored. The adjustments are required in case there have been certain events that have pulled back the progress of the organization. To counter these events and make sure that the organization returns back on track, various adjustments are required and hence are important to the progress of the organization.

A-3 One of the possible events (target) would be average no. of patients to be served by each doctor in a day after one year. Suppose the hospital wants that after one year, not more than 25 patients must be served by each doctor in a day. For such a target, it is important to bring doctors on board gradually. For that revenues too must increase so that the doctors are compensated appropriately. Hence, this target can be achieved by appropriately monitoring and adjusting to achieve the targets.

Another such target could be average no. of visits required to get treated. This is both, a qualitative as well a quantitative parameter, and should be monitored appropriately (through both quantitative and qualitative factors) to make sure that the patients get cured in as less visits as possible.

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