Performance, Improvement, and Change Organization Management (Chapter 9) CASE: C
ID: 392254 • Letter: P
Question
Performance, Improvement, and Change Organization Management (Chapter 9) CASE: Can Organization Theory Inform Efforts to Improve Health Care Quality? Improving the quality of health care has proven to be an elusive and difficult task. Health care organizations have experienced considerable difficulty in grasping all of the individual-level, team-level, organization-level, and system-level factors that shape quality. They have also been challenged to measure quality, to motivate providers to change their practices, and to implement quality improvement projects. The problems have been manifest in high rates of hospital readmission, high rates of preventable deaths and medical errors, uneven quality of care for people with inadequate insurance, and the introduction of new and expensive medical technologies without concomitant gains in life expectancy. Questions . Does theory and research in management offer any guidance for practitioners seeking to improve quality of care? 2. What does each school of thought reviewed in this chapter suggest about what to do? 3. Which of the schools of thought seem to offer the most useful advice? REFERENCES H.,& Ginsburg. P. (2009). Is health spending excessive? If so, what can we do about it? Health Affairs. 28, 1260-1275. Ahuja. G. (2000). Collaboration networks, structural holes, and innovation. A longitudinal study. Administrative Science Quarterly. 45(3). 425-455. Aldrich. H. E. (1979), Organizations and enuironments. Englewood Cliff, NJ: Prentice Hall.Explanation / Answer
1. Theory and research in management will help in finding the root cause of all the problems witnessed by the organization. The research will help in exploring all dimensions and factors which may be having an impact on the overall quality quotient of the healthcare provider. After realizing the root cause, the management can think about steps in which the root cause can be tackled permanently, thus improving the overall quality offered by the healthcare provider.
2. The quantitative school of thought would have facilitated the idea of enhancing quality in services offered by capitalizing on the principles of production and operation management.
The behavioral school of thought would have focused more on improving the mindset of employees in the organization, to improve the rate of quality in the services offered
Scientific management under the classical school of thought would have highlighted that the management must come up with initiatives to improve rate of quality and the employees must be the implementers of such initiatives.
3. In my views, a combined view of quantitative school of thought as well as behavioral school of thought will help in improving the quality in the services offered by the healthcare provider.