First, thank you for sharing your audit experience with us, Latoya. I love when one lesson springboards from another because it shows such cohesion. This morning, I had read responses to your Unit 1 post on Tesla’s mission statement and was impressed by your reinforcement of the Unit 1 concept of “what is our business?” (David & David, 2017, p. 42).
Then, I read the chapters assigned for Unit 2 and prepared my paper which I chose to write specifically on the hospital sector. I happened to pick up an old book off the shelf which studiously recognized the blurred lines that have been created in services as hospitals are no longer just competing with hospitals, but in many cases with other facilities/settings as they offer overlapping services. An excerpt:
“The current healthcare environment promises confusion in identifying the competition. Not only do organizations have to ask themselves ‘What business are we in?’ but they also have to ask about the competition: ‘What businesses are they in? What businesses will they be adding tomorrow? Which providers and organizations that contract with us now will choose to contract with our competitors tomorrow?’” (Wolper, 2011, p. 330).
Your mention of audit readiness, information gathering, and industry benchmarks along with this snippet made me realize that while we know what we need to do, do we know how far we need to draw our perimeter for catchment so to speak? Are we asking enough questions? Are we gathering enough data points to be a disruption to the industry? One example that coincides with the above would be if we are only benchmarking against other hospitals, and not against outpatient ambulatory centers who provide many of the same services. This would be a variable that qualifies as an actionable response defined in the text (David & David, 2017). While I have had a handful of courses rooted in healthcare economics, I would say this unit by far provoked a more critical thinking approach in addition to the procedural approaches of matrices, cost shifting, and price controls.
David, F.R. & David, F.R. (2017). Strategic management: A competitive advantage approach. Pearson.
Wolper, L.F. (2011). Health care administration: Managing organized delivery systems. Jones and Bartlett Publishers.