Образование на Куличках - Operations management in plastic surgery

Operations management in health care industry is by no means very important and offers opportunities for MBA graduate. Operations management is about means how company delivery value and should answer the following questions:

1. How can we increased revenues
2. How can we decrease expenses

Operations management is not about increasing output or speed, it’s just about those three questions.

For plastic surgery firm to have good operations management is to maintain best performance, encompassing operation quality, careful design of the facility, patient screening, and exercise routine.

Quality is meeting the customers’ requirements. For plastic surgery cost of quality is by no means affected by maintaining perfect reputation of clinic, avoiding legal, rework, compensation and associated costs. The bad side in quality measurements for plastic surgery is that you can not create product or service specification. Of course, all customer requirements can be stated in contract and realized by clinic, but even considering that all operations and procedures were perfect, there’s chance of customer having BDO, or psychic disorder, when people dislike own body or when customer simply does not know what he want exactly.

Service time is another measure which reflects company revenues and long-run profitability. However, the length of the queue into plastic surgery clinics may also serve as one of signals for customers to go to that line, instead of making operation in clinics with free places.

Operations Effectiveness of plastic surgery clinics
1. Define the limiting resource, or bottlenecks and focus on this resource:
- define process in a clinic and their outputs, define limitations for each output,
- usually the most used or occupied resources are prime bottleneck suspects. Like operating rooms
- bottlenecks has big inventories or waiting lines ac*****ulated.
2. Process outputs should match product or service provided. For example, process of cleaning should produce clean rooms when they are necessary, but not when staff is available or rooms are free.
3. Process productivity may be increased by labor intensity increase and creation of certain degree of interaction and customization. This requires attracting and retaining qualified personnel, who can meet the required quality standards. However, if opportunities for creation interaction and customization in plastic surgery are high, for increasing labor intensity they are much lower.
4. Costs of quality or even cost of exceeding of customer expectations in plastic surgery are usually much lower than costs of corrective actions or compensations.
In essence, operations management for plastic surgery clinics can be separated into few categories:
Customer Service Management –in comparison to other service industries, in plastic surgery this requires professional medical skills, since it involves all procedures to be done before and after operations, consultation about alternative, process and outcomes, and following some time after operation.
- Operations Planning and Control- for example, plastic surgery clinics may decide to create vertical integrated business, where patients receive full treatment and spend recovery period, leaving only when scars or other signs of plastic surgery disappear. This may work for celebrity plastic surgery. On the other hand, clinic may operate day surgery, where customers leave premises just after the operation and even bring with them painkillers and ask someone to deliver them at home.
- Attracting and Developing People: for plastic surgery companies people are the most important asset and it’s common sense in may cases when name of leading surgeon associated with the whole hospital, like for Nordstrom hospital in Sweden.
- Materials planning, which include, but not limited to medicals, instruments, spare parts for equipment.