Operations Management and Healthcare

Nicholas Drzycimski

Operations Management
SCMS 3510-003

University Of Memphis
November 9, 2015

Introduction Most people would agree that access to healthcare is an issue with definite room to improve; there are constant demands from both taxpayers and the society for change. Organizations which provide healthcare are faced with economic limitations and constraints, long waiting times and queues of patients. Healthcare organizations are also affected by strict budgets that prevent them from procuring additional resources. One solution to combat all three of these constraints simultaneously would be to implement ideas and concepts from the Operations Management field of business. The most effective concept would likely be Lean production, that is, limiting as much waste as possible while using what resources are on hand to their most effective state possible. Of course, this is a very difficult goal to achieve when dealing with the unpredictability of day-to-day operations at a hospital, but measures can and should be taken to limit as much waste as possible and maximize efficiency of resources used. While new ways to implement more ideas and concepts of Operations Management into the healthcare industry are constantly being researched, there are aspects and tasks that are performed in a Hospital that can be considered the operations of a hospital. The goal of this paper is to explain some of these operations of a hospital.
Regulatory Reporting One way in which hospitals utilize regulatory reporting, is through reporting to the FDA or to a manufacturer when a medical device has caused harm, illness, or potentially even death as an adverse effect to one of the hospital’s patients. If a death has occurred at the hospital due to a malfunction of a device, both the FDA and manufacturer of the defective device must