FRAGMENTATION
It would be an
understatement to say that the health care industry will not continue to
undergo a transformation over the next few years.
Both economic and
governmental interventions have not made it easy on many facilities to deliver
optimal services with diminishing cash flow. The Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act only raised the stakes, thus shifting the focus from
thinking about reform to demanding it.
If we lived in a perfect world,
those controlling the outcome would spend their time designing a better means
of care to patients, regardless of the cost and manpower; thus placing the
patient first when considering design-service-development procedures. But we
don't like in a perfect world. Health care organizations are being forced to find
new ways to cut costs, improve efficiencies, but at the same time reallocate critical
and expensive resources to achieve optimal patient care. Realigning priorities
is a difficult task; choosing the right strategies is not easy. And having
enough insight to make the correct decisions that will sustain and transform
health care takes an analysis that may not be in-house. With more than 32
million new patients coming into the U.S. health care system based on
forced governmental reform, health care organizations will need as much agility
as they can get. What will it take to make that final leap in Health Care
Patient Services?
Certainly doing business as usual
will not make it happen; believing that if we continue to move in the direction
set before, we will eventually get there. Albert Einstein suggests: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different results."
You will need to take some very bold steps to break the mold from where we have been to where we need to go. A rethinking of the
Health Care Business Model is required and to do that, it will mean that many
mind-sets will need to be changed in the fields of: Architecture, Supply Chain
Management, Procurement, and most important Physician run facilities. Each
group has their own specific interest; most being control, but over and above
that power is income. If you have control you have the mean of convicting other
groups that you know what you are talking about and deserve the funds requested
to execute the work tasks at hand. True sustainability must go beyond
guidelines now recommended by Lean and Green advocates when developing a
Strategic Master Planning. Considerations to develop and accommodate
departmental location, deliverables (process flow), and management of waste
must be part of the overall design methodology if any facility is to survive.
Since trends towards outpatient
care and wellness venues are expected to continue, all the more reason to
consider the need to fully develop an executable plan that takes into
consideration: integration of material-traffic-flow in addition to facility
aesthetics. Management cannot continue to do-what-we-have-always-done,
for that will not change the outcome. If we leave true change to the lawyers
and politicians to fix, the solution will look like it was made by lawyers and
politicians and it is highly likely that we won't like it.
RETURN TO REMTECH ASSOCIATES LLC
