Located in Gold Coast, Australia, Gold Coast Private Hospital continues to offer medical services to Australians and people from other parts of the globe. With stiff competition in the healthcare sector in the country, the 284-bed capacity hospital implements marketing strategies. The latter has played a pivotal role in helping it to remain efficient in the industry and carry on to offer quality care and treatment to patients. Although competition among health care providers attracts heated debates from society and commentators, it contributes to improving the industry through reduction of cost, improvement of quality, and enhancement of innovation. With the help of modern technology, for instance, hospitals in the country have concentrated their efforts on improving not only health care but also the level of customer service in a bid to attract new patients and retain current health consumers. The establishment under consideration is Gold Coast Private Hospital whereby has invested in an online and mobile appointment system that enables patients and visitors to book an appointment. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a wireless queue management system that the hospital can use to add value to and raise its performance. The paper suggests to the hospital invest in a wireless queue management system to improve its service efficiency and effectiveness and reduce customer wait time.
Part 1: Overall Analysis of Gold Coast Private Hospital
Gold Coast Private Hospital Competition and Operation
The hospital offers medical services that include clinics for chronic diseases and general medical services to improve the health care of the members of the community. Due to competition from other private hospitals in Australia such as Abbotsford Private Hospital and public medical facilities that include Augusta District Hospital, Gold Coast Private Hospital seeks to differentiate itself by unique customer service and high-quality care. This strategy enables the management of the hospital to continue attracting the patients from Gold Coast and other areas. Moreover, the hospital operates social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. It employs them to present more information about its services and provide a link to its main website where consumers can view more details about it. According to Neti (2011), social media is emerging as a strong tool that modern marketers use to promote and advertise their businesses.
Organizational Form of Gold Coast Private Hospital Using Mintzberg’s Classification
According to Mintzberg, Gold Coast Private Hospital is a professional organization. It is staffed by qualified and well-educated medical workers who deliver valuable and highly specialized services and charge their customers according to the services provided. For this reason, the hospital is a professional organization whose complexity of tasks results in relatively low centralization. Moreover, the hospital’s highly qualified professionals enable the organization to attain coordination of various functions through standardization of qualifications and skills required to perform work of a certain position. In addition, the hospital defines its positions on the basis of capabilities and ensures that all departments work effectively individually and collectively to meet organizational goals. Furthermore, the health care organization is characterized by competent knowledge members of staff that ensure decentralization of decision-making processes for the improvement of various activities carried out and attainment of maximum success.
Value Chain of the Hospital Using Porter’s Value Chain Model
Management of a firm employs the concept of the value chain by viewing the organization as a system that comprises subsystems including output, input, and transformation processes. Considering Gold Coast Private Hospital as a system, the management of the healthcare provider engages in a myriad of activities that enable it to convert input into output. The hospital’s activities can be grouped as either support or primary activities.
Primary Activities: The organization’s primary activities are concerned with the creation and support of services it offers. The primary activity performed at the hospital is operation activities, which involve the provision of services that create value; for instance, robotic surgery and maternity services. In addition, the organization performs marketing and sales activities on social media and other platforms to attract clients.
Support Activities: The primary function of the hospital’s supportive activities is to provide support to primary activities. They include infrastructure (for instance, accounting and quality assurance), technological development, including hardware and software, Human Resources Management such as hiring and training of doctors, and procurement (for instance, acquisition of pharmaceutical products).
Analysis of the competitive strategy of Gold Coast Private Hospital
The threat of new entry. Due to the high cost of constructing a hospital and purchasing medical equipment, the threat of entry into the healthcare sector is low. For that reason, Gold Coast Private Hospital operates in an attractive industry.
Buyer power. The number of customers (patients) in the healthcare sector is large, and hence they have little power that may apply to force the hospitals to reduce cost of offering services. To that end, the force is low and favors the existing organizations.
The threat of substitution. The chance that a customer may switch from one healthcare provider to another is high because the cost of switching is low. Therefore, the force is strong, which behooves Gold Coast Private Hospital to offer high-quality services to retain patients.
Supplier power. There are few business people and organizations that supply medical equipment and pharmaceutical products to hospitals because of the high capital required to start the businesses. Consequently, the existing several suppliers can push the prices of their goods making the force to become strong.
Competitive rivalry. In Australia, a myriad of hospitals provide medical services similar to those offered at Gold Coast Private Hospital. Consequently, they pose stiff competition, and hence the force is strong.
Part 2: Analysis of an Existing Human Activity System Which is Problematic
Online and Mobile Appointment System
The management of the hospital in collaboration with stakeholders has identified the problems using the organization’s Online and Mobile Appointment System. The hospital has been using the system to improve its level of services. However, the system has been noted to have poor customer support, which results in a significant reduction in the number of patients it receives. Therefore, to improve services, the management should choose a system that is not only reliable but also offers quick response times. The primary stakeholders of the human activity system are patients and the members of staff. While patients use the system to book an appointment, the hospital’s employees depend on it to increase the number of customers served.
DeLone-McLean Model of Information System Success
System quality. The quality of the system indirectly affects the degree to which the human activity system is able to provide benefits. All parts of the system must function well for it to be termed successful. Therefore, the Online and Mobile Appointment System fails to meet this threshold and hence fails to achieve system quality.
Service quality. Along with system quality, the hospital can evaluate its Online and Mobile Appointment System based on the quality of service that it delivers. Therefore, the organization’s system is not successful because it does not offer quality services as the management intends. The unavailability of customer support in the system results in providing poor services that do not meet the set standards by the administration.
System usage intentions. Whereas the organization uses the system to deliver services to some customers, the system does not reach its goal of benefitting all clients who may wish to use it to interact with the hospital. For that reason, based on the system usage intention, the Online and Mobile Appointment System is not successful; hence, the management should change, modify, or improve it.
User satisfaction. By providing benefits to customers and operators, a system leads to user satisfaction because all parties meet their goals. However, in some cases, the Online and Mobile Appointment System may result in user dissatisfaction, in particular when a customer is in need of any form of support from the hospital. In case it is left unresolved, a high level of customer dissatisfaction may lead to a myriad of clients losing their trust in the organization and considering switching their allegiance to competitors.
Measures of success. In spite of the problems that bedevil the hospital’s Online and Mobile Appointment System, the management can use it to achieve accessibility, ease, and convenience of its services. In the modern world, people use the Internet to carry out the most basic functions such as retailing. Therefore, Gold Coast Private Hospital can effectively use the system to attract individuals who would desire to book an appointment from their homes only to travel to receive medical services. Based on these success measures, therefore, the system lacks efficiency while its effectiveness remains a work in progress.
Part 3: Suggestion of a New Information System
Recommendation of a New Information System
To add value to its business, Gold Coast Private Hospital should use a wireless queue management system that allows its patients to wait for an appointment at any location within the hospital’s premises before a doctor or customer care attends to them. The system significantly minimizes congestion and eliminates the use of loud announcements. Similarly to the Online and Mobile Appointment systems, the stakeholders for the wireless queue management system are patients, doctors, and customer care. Customers use the system to await an appointment and physicians, and customer care providers eliminate invisible client queues.
Data and Information Involved in the Wireless Queue Management System
The system records each customer’s position in a queue and their phone numbers that members of staff dial when they want to serve them. After recording the position of a particular client in a queue, the system cannot skip a customer in the line, which eliminates confusion and possible conflicts among customers. Moreover, it allows doctors and customer support to attend to all appointments and hence increase their productivity. Accordingly, service providers can set a daily target, which the system enables them to meet in time. Moreover, the system creates an exact time of an appointment that allows allocating time for both patients and medical staff in a more efficient way
Classification of the New Information System
The information system can be categorized as customer-facing because it interacts directly with clients. Moreover, it is specifically designed to provide satisfactory user experiences in an area where many customers may get tired and possibly discourage them from visiting the same hospital again. In addition, the system’s primary function is to help customers, and when applied well, Gold Coast Private Hospital can appeal to numerous customers. Moreover, the system adds value to the interaction between the clients and the hospital in a process that benefits both parties concerning convenience and service delivery.
Impact of the New System on the Organization
The system not only makes patients more relaxed but it is also customer-friendly and leads to more profits for the hospital. For customers who loathe queuing for long hours, the system allows them to remain unperturbed in selected locations until their time to receive services reaches. For that reason, the hospital can serve numerous patients and hence generate more profits, more than it could earn when patients queue as they wait to get medical services. However, the system is sophisticated and the hospital requires must recruit and train personnel whose only role is to guide new customers on how the system functions and their role. Moreover, the system can have some errors that would result in customer dissatisfaction and loss of their time.
Measures of Success
The new information system is effective and efficient as it predicts customer waiting times accurately. In other words, a patient can easily know his/her turn depending on the normal speed at which doctors at the facility used to treat patients. This capability would enable the hospital to differentiate its services from those offered by competitors. Furthermore, central to the system is the ability to satisfy customers by giving them the best experience and interaction before they receive the actual services, either treatment or consultation. In addition, its application allows the members of staff to increase their levels of productivity because they can concentrate on carrying out other functions as opposed to searching for patients. In the problems are absent, technology could play a critical role in ensuring that the hospital stands out from the competition.
Part 4: Recommendations and Reflection
Recommendations to Hospital Management
Advancement of modern technology implies that organizations in various sectors not only compete for customers to generate profit but also battle for the latest innovation that would improve their service delivery. However, the technology must be effective and efficient to ensure that it serves its primary function despite its cost or application. For that reason, this paper recommends to Gold Coast Private Hospital change its model of online booking. Thus, it will ensure that it uses a system that supports and interacts with clients in a way that will result in an excellent user experience (Urbach & Müller, 2012). Correspondingly, the article suggests that the hospital should invest in a wireless queue management system that eliminates the use of visible queues. Indeed, a well-designed model would play an essential role in motivating patients to seek services at the medical facility because they remain calm in selected positions until customer support or doctors serve them.
Recommendations on the Use of the New Information System
The choice of a wireless system should be informed by its ability to offer an easy way for Gold Coast Private Hospital to manage its waiting lines in a cost-efficient way and with more flexibility. Moreover, the model must be integrated with the hospital’s day-to-day activities seamlessly to improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which it provides its services immediately after a patient enters the facility and when one leaves the premises. Indeed, correct application and management of the system can also give the healthcare organization valuable information regarding its visitors and use it to develop an in-depth understanding of how to enhance the levels of services offered. For instance, the hospital can obtain information such as the number of patients it serves daily, the time visitors take at the facility, and the types of services each patient seeks (Petter, DeLone, & McLean, 2013). Consequently, the management of the hospital should combine the information with its operational insights to offer unique services conveniently and at a low cost.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Gold Coast Private Hospital should use a wireless queue management system to enhance its delivery of services and minimize the time the patients wait to receive services. The model ensures that visitors do not make visible queues but rather wait unperturbed until they receive their services. Therefore, the new information system is effective as it predicts customer waiting times. In addition, the system allows the staff to perform effectively, saving their time rather than searching for patients. Moreover, the hospital can obtain further information about patients and use it to design unique services that would improve user experience and customer satisfaction. Undoubtedly, the implementation would enable the healthcare organization to serve customers better and increase its revenues.
