Inside Story Background Good Care Corp

The Inside Story Background Good Care Corp (GCC) is a for-profit, multicity, multi-facility hospital and long-term care organization in a central state. Internal environmental scanning is a year-round activity in this organization. The Issue An external event of interest occurred this week. A not-for-profit competitor began using the previous two years of its customer satisfaction ratings to attract patients to its facilities. Based on their internally developed survey they found that their cardiac and stroke rehabilitation services had the highest satisfaction ratings of all their services. They proclaim themselves as the number one provider of cardiac and stroke care in the state. The quandary for GCC is that patient satisfaction information for all their locations is known to be sparse and generally inadequate based on Baldrige (2007) criteria for customer relationships and satisfaction. This matter has been on agendas twice before, but it was tabled each time because it was felt that there were more pressing internal issues to work on. The possibility of losing market share to a competitor is real. This places a high priority on developing a strategic plan to gather, assess, and disseminate customer satisfaction information particularly for customers who had cardiac and stroke diagnoses. A strategic plan is urgently needed for the measurement of overall customer satisfaction. Patience Wearing, director of marketing, noted that the current GCC marketing strategy was based on a high degree of patient satisfaction. This criterion was in line with the mission statement that proclaims, “we meet our stakeholders’ needs and expectations, especially those of patient stakeholders.” She reminded everyone that there is not adequate information available to determine whether patients believe that GCC does the things they say they do as well as they say they do them. Starting a Strategic Plan: Resources Link Systems, of the information technology department, suggested that his department could provide older computer terminals at selected locations to get consumer feedback before they leave the facilities. Terminals could be placed at information desks, in main waiting areas, and at the transporter/security locations. All computers would be linked to a single server. For protection Link noted that he would use an old server to keep the satisfaction information separated from the regular institutional servers. Jorge Duboyou, vice president of GCC, asked Patience if she would take on this customer satisfaction endeavor and he asked Link if he would estimate the cost for the hardware setup, questionnaire software development, personnel training, and data analysis. Patience said yes and was given leeway in putting together a team. Link said he could have a budget laid out within the week. Hi Tower, GCC CEO, asked Patience to be sure to look into the options for getting a large sample of the patients who have been discharged in the past two years. He offered to make available past Baldrige Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence information on customer satisfaction and funds from his discretionary monies. A motion was made for Patience and Link to go forward with these initial tasks and report to VP Duboyou within seven working days. Working Days 1–3 Patience asked the director of rehab services, Manny Talents, PT, to look into the physical and occupational therapy literature on patient satisfaction to generate optional survey questions. Next, he went to Emma Climber, RN, director of mursing, and asked her to investigate the criteria for patient satisfaction from a nursing perspective. Finally, Patience spoke to the medical staff president (physicians) to secure his views on patient satisfaction. Her impression was that each physician had his or her specialty benchmarks. To try to put all of these quality indicators into one instrument would make it so long that few people would fill it out. Working Day 4 Patience reviewed the Baldrige information provided by the CEO. Manny reported that he found a 2000 general PT satisfaction instrument (Goldstein et al., 2000) and a 2002 PT outpatient satisfaction instrument (Beattie et al., 2002) but nothing on inpatient physical therapy. Emma suggested that the group look at the past GCC Press Ganey (2007) survey results to get a better picture of inpatient perspectives. She mentioned that a new instrument from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (2007) produced for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would be available shortly. Her inclination was to go with a reliable and valid instrument administered by a consultant group because they were the trained instrument development professionals. This would be a superior approach than was taken by the competition. It would also rate GCC on a wider scale because its satisfaction data would be compared to benchmarks of similar successful hospitals and long-term care facilities on a national scale. Emma’s strongest points were that there was inadequate expertise at GCC and insufficient time to develop a survey, administer it, and analyse it. Manny added that the competition only measured consumer satisfaction at its hospitals; it did not include its rehabilitation or long-term care facilities. He believed that GCC was doing an excellent job when the whole continuum of care was considered. This raised the issue of there being a possible need for multiple surveys. Working Day 5 Link Systems announced that he had 50 operational computers and keyboards and the server ready. The cost estimate could not be completed until it was known how long the questionnaire was, how many questionnaires were expected to be completed, and what types of analyses were required. His best guess was to allocate $15,000 for IT maintenance and other services. Your Tasks 1. Review the chapter section on consumer satisfaction. What additional questions do you think would be of interest in dealing with the issues presented in this scenario? 2. Access Press Ganey to get an idea of hospital criteria for patient satisfaction. 3. Access the Baldrige criteria. What do they say about customer complaints? How do complaints fit into this scenario? 4. Consider mission, leadership, labor availability, market position, financial resources, and so on, and determine GCC’s strengths and weaknesses. 5. Based on the limited information in this scenario, what, if any, is/are the potential competitive advantage(s) of GCC? 6. Identify the parts of the strategic planning process that have been completed thus far. 7. If you were Patience Wearing, what would you do on Day 6 in preparation for your progress report and recommendations for the V.P., Jorge Dub you?