Productivity Improvement In Specialty Hospitals In China

Abstract

The world-wide challenges, such as aging of population, the growth of chronic diseases, and the increased aspiration of better-quality life, are imposing enormous pressure on healthcare systems all over the world. Facing these inescapable challenges, the world is engaging in providing healthcare services with higher quality but less cost. In order to reduce complexity, decrease service costs, increase productivity and improve service quality, focus strategy has been advocated to apply in the health care industry as service lines are organized around a special identifiable problem and a certain segment of patients who are aggregated and treated as a collection of individuals with similar diagnoses and treatment. However, there is no conformable finding that specialty hospitals in reality will provide permanent improvements and better performance when compared with general hospitals or other medical institutes. Especially in China, specialty hospitals stand in a weak position in healthcare industry.

This research is aiming to develop the insights of improving productivity in Chinese specialty hospital by exposing the problems existing in the operations management of Chinese Specialty hospitals and figure out possible solutions for these issues. Benchmarking, comparing the performance of Chinese specialty hospitals with that of Chinese general hospitals and Finnish specialty hospitals, is the main research approach in this research to find the deficiencies in Chinese specialty hospitals and to expose the potential improvements in operations. This research is focused on surgical units.

The result of the study indicates that productivity of Chinese specialty hospitals is low, deficiencies exist and there is huge potential space remained for Chinese specialty hospitals to improve. It is observed that different kinds of promising operative practices for surgical units can be learned by the Chinese specialty hospitals from Chinese general hospitals and Finnish Specialty hospitals.