Group 1, Section C || Operations Management || Reading Rehabilitation Hospital Analysis

Members: Sandeep Agrawal, Kanika Bhagat, Surbhi, Bhavna Chapule, Varis Kumar Kalia

Case Study: Reading Rehabilitation Hospital

Q1) Who are RRH’s stakeholders? What do they want from RRH? How do they define quality?

Main stakeholders of RRH are:

● The patients coming to the hospital

● The therapist treating the patients
● Staff including nurses, technicians etc
● Referred patients from other hospitals including RHMC, Saint Josephs Medical Centre and
Community General Hospitals. Also, a few traditional nursing home centres
● Seventh Day Adventist Churches
● Government
● Insurance companies
The patients wanted to get treated and discharged as soon as possible. The patients were
overall satisfied with the quality of service provided as this was visible from the patient
perception of quality which was 8.7, greater than the national benchmark of 8.

Hospitals were not very satisfied with the service as they wanted to minimise the time taken
by RRH to discharge the patients. As the patients are sponsored by them, it will reduce their
cost.

The churches too wanted some changes as they wanted to include spiritual healing as part
of the treatment.

The insurance companies, along with hospitals, wanted to reduce the patient days to
minimize their own cost.

Government too wanted to minimize their expenditure by reducing the patient days, as their
policies were being implemented by the state budget.

As we see from the above discussions, the main issue with RRH was to reduce the number of
days to discharge the patients.

Q2) What are the benefits of the new system in which care delivery is organized around
diagnoses or a service line in comparison to the old system where patient care was
organized by function? What are the drawbacks?
 The benefits of the new system:

● Coordination of different services will ultimately result in faster and better care to
patients
● Increase in patients’ focus and satisfaction. Much more attention to patients was
given now and their satisfaction was also ensured.

Hence, above given are a few benefits of the new system.

The disadvantages of the new system are:

● Increase in the number of staff which will ultimately results in the increase in the
total cost for RRH
● Decrease in efficiency and utilisation of resources

Q3) At 116 therapists is RRH overstaffed? How many therapists would you hire?

Actual Billable hours for 1998 130026

Workdays per week 5
work hours per day 8
work hours per week 40
Total work hours per year 2000
At 75% usage 1500
Number of therapists 116
Expected billable hours for
1998 174000
Excess billable hours 43974
overstaffed therapists 29.316

The analysis clearly indicates that only 87 therapists are required and we have an excess of 29
therapists.
Q4) Should RRH keep service lines or return to the earlier way of organizing care around
functions?

A4) Our analysis shows that by changing their approach the hospital has become more resource
efficient with better utilization. This means that the hospital now requires lesser number of
therapists than before to operate at the same capacity, or, alternately, increase the capacity.
Also, by shifting their operations to a customer centric approach, they now have better
satisfaction level amongst their patients because of better care provided to them and better
coordination in handling their care.