Personal Development Plan

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Personal Development Plan

Reflection on The Process of Decision-Making

Introduction

Operations Management has been defined in many different ways depending on the business type yet they all fall under the same meaning were OM is the ‘task of designing, establishing, planning, running, controlling, maintaining and improving systems’ (Wild, 1987). All of these elements combined creates the road-map of operations management process in any business which decision-making is guided through the variation in these elements relaying on the market supply & demand and customers behavior.

What Influences The Process of Decision-Making?

Healthcare is a dynamically changing business and the field is constantly being updated through new experiments and studies or have new products and technologies that supports and improves the quality of healthcare delivered to the patients. Focusing on the Health Information Management (HIM) structure within the organization allows for better understanding of the impact of operations on the layout, process technology, job design, planning & control and capacity planning & control.

Working in a hybrid environment where medical records and patients information is managed through both physical files and partial electronic health record, the physical layout design relies heavily on the strategic objective of the organization (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston, 2014) which is to make the patients’ information available for healthcare providers to provide the patients’ with the best care and services possible. The important aspect is how can the layout type impact the turnaround time of making the files available for patient care such layouts tend to be a mix of the cell layout and product layout to ensure the continuity of the massive number of charts maintaing and delivery, and since any interruption can impact the workflow of the entire operation.

‘When machines become more sophisticated, human beings can be transferred to do new kinds of work’ (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston, 2014). The concept of process technology is introduced in healthcare in so many aspects, the HIM is related to the implementation of new electronic medical record system that will make the organization a ‘paper-light’ system to be more efficient through having patients’ information accessible on the spot. Also utilizing technologies and innovations to support physicians in allocating bast practices and utilize the clinical decision support to improve the overall patients’ quality of care and services delivered. Another example would be the use of Telemedicine and how such technology allows for accessibility of patients in remote areas to different specialties and services from reading diagnostic results such as labs and x-rays to monitoring patients’ remotely and having physician-patient’s visit remotely and without being in the same place physically (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston, 2014). My current organization is also contracting radiology services where radiologist through a telemedicine system read and dictate diagnostic reports for patients in our organization remotely due to the shortage in Radiologist and need to deliver the outcome of the studies in a timely fashion.

Different jobs require different needs and responsibilities. Job design is the process of designing the individuals’ and groups’ jobs, define the work schedule and design the working environment. Each job within an organization has technical requirements, core job characteristics and mental and environmental status which all relates to the individual’s performance and personal outcome (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston, 2014). In the HIM department and with the implementation process of the Electronic Health Record the department will shift operations for handling physical files to more monitoring, auditing and maintaining information through the system, this shift is planned as of January 2017 and the mapping process and listing the new job requirements is in process to establish the needed job requirements while also planning the department physical layout to shift to a more office/cubical operation to manage the activities in the new system implemented.

Planning & control is basically the business to reconcile the market demand and the operation’s ability to supply and deliver. Then the decision-making process that takes place on the planning & control will depends on the nature of demand and the nature of supply in the operation (Slack, Brandon-Jones & Johnston, 2014). And capacity management ‘capacity planning & control’ is basically to balance the level of operations with the level of market demand (Wild, 1987). A HIM example on capacity planning & control is related to managing inactive patients’ information and how they get archived. The process starts similar to an assembly line where the file get prepped and indexed for scanning and then go through a quality check to ensure the accuracy of the scanning and archiving process; the decision making falls when a sudden request from a remote clinic to support their backlog of unarchived documents which interrupt the operations within the department working off a schedule. Yet the department is obligated to do a short-term planning to accommodate such requests as this is all considered part of the patient care and having information available will improve the overall outcome for the patient.

Conclusion

Why do we need to strategically think and plan for decision making? In today’s business world, the market’s awareness on the importance of developing and implementing a strategic model for organizations to achieve their goals and allow for their sustainability and value creation to induce their competitive advantage in the marketplace (Ball, 2011). Moreover, due to the complexity of healthcare systems the need to develop a dynamic decision-making model has become difficult due to identifying affected parameters, parameter correlations, projected impacts and the uncertainty in the market future conditions and demand (Ball, 2011).

My learning curve in improving my decision making process is built on a number of aspects that has been developed through my experience in the field, exploring the most recent updates in the field and learning the techniques and methodologies that currently used through this Operations Management MBA course. This will allow me to utilize the tools learned during this module to develop a roadmap and a strategic plan for the changes in operations which will occur during the coming two years in the organization to accommodate the changes in the operations as well as in the human resources aspect and specifically the job requirements and design.

References

Slack, N., Brandon-Jones, A. & Johnston, R. (2014) Operations management. 7th ed. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Wild, R (1987), 'DecisionMaking in Operations Management', Management Decision, 25, 2, p. 31, Supplemental Index, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 June 2015.

Ball, DR (2011), 'Integrating Multiple Sustainability Criteria in Technology, Innovation, and Operations Management Strategic Decisions', Proceedings Of The Northeast Business & Economics Association, pp. 27-33, Business Source Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 24 June 2015.