Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/58916
"BY MAKING HEALTHCARE OPERATIONS MORE EFFICIENT, PHYSICIANS, STAFF, AND PATIENTS, AS WELL AS THE PATIENTS' EMPLOYERS, ALL BENEFIT. IT'S WIN-WIN-WIN." — Herbert Moskowitz, Krannert School of Management at Purdue University a simulation software application from Imagine That Inc., a company in San Jose, California. Using the simulation, they recommended that the clinic implement the following improvements: n Convert 60 percent of its traditional advance appointments to same-day appointments (those made no more than 48 hours before arrival), which have a no-show rate of only 3 percent. n "Batch" patient arrivals so that patients arrived in groups, rather than one at a time. For instance, the clinic would ask nine patients to arrive for 8:00 a.m. appointments. New patients would be asked to come ten minutes early, while old patients would be asked to come five minutes early to spread arrivals. By batching patient arrivals, the clinic could avoid the workflow problems that come with patients arriving late or not at all. n "Pool" patients into a single queue in the waiting room, so that patients have equal access to all medical assistants. If one assistant is answering the phone or locat- ing a missing record, another assis- tant would still be available to help patients in the waiting room. In the simulation, the changes reduced bottlenecks, improved physician utilization, and improved the no-show rate. The percent- age of patients whose wait to see a physician exceeded 20 minutes was reduced from 27 percent to just more than 3 percent. Clinic staff members were so impressed with the simulation that they plan to put these changes into action. Moreover, Moskowitz and Chand, as well as students who helped with the research, learned a great deal from working with the real-world healthcare environment. "I'm now more effective in teaching the MBA students in my process improvement course," says Chand. "By studying the clinic's operations, we saw many things we don't often see in a manu- facturing environment. Batching, pooling, telephone interruptions— seeing so many elements in a single example is truly rare." Moskowitz and Chand will continue to use simulations to experiment with new approaches to improving patient flow—thereby reducing cost—in healthcare environ- ments. They are now pursuing fund- ing to study the use of radio frequen- cy identification (RFID) technology to streamline patient processing. With healthcare costs on the rise, companies in all sectors are eager to find ways to make the healthcare process more efficient, says Mos- kowitz. "A significant portion of the cost of any product pays for employee healthcare. By making healthcare operations more efficient, physicians, staff, and patients, as well as the patients' employers, all bene- fit. It's win-win-win," he says. To read more about this and other research at the Regenstreif Center, visit www.purdue.edu/discovery park/rche/index.php. The Death of the Printed Page A recent study by Niels Bjørn-Andersen, a professor at Copenhagen Business School's Department of Informatics in Denmark, predicts the demise of the printed page may come sooner than many think, as it loses ground to electronic transmissions of infor- mation. At a recent CBS conference, the "eMedia-Nordic Seminar on eBusiness and Media," Bjørn- Andersen noted that big players like Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia are likely to win the media wars in the coming years. E-business, says Bjørn-Andersen, is growing at 30 percent to 40 per- cent per year. This means that tradi- tional publishing companies are being threatened by companies like Vodaphone, Nokia, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, as they begin to deliver content via PDAs and mobile phones. Printed information sources like the Encylopedia Britan- nica are also threatened by the new Niels Bjørn-Andersen electronic sources, such as Wikipe- dia, a popular online encyclopedia. Furthermore, Bjørn-Andersen points out that while consumers are quite happy to receive information on the Internet, very few Internet users are actually willing to pay for online content. "It is very difficult to cre- ate a sustainable revenue flow from Internet publishing," says Bjørn- Andersen on his Web site. "E-media is not stealing the business away from newspapers. It is simply eroding the current business models." Finally, Bjørn-Andersen notes that, in the future, users will increasingly personalize content for their indi- vidual consumption. "It is no longer a question of a 'push' strategy, where BizEd MAY/JUNE 2006 53