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After reading Chapter 6 (Productivity and Performance Management) in the ebook titled, "Health Care Operations Management" (this is not your textbook, but the ebook required reading in Module #4), calculate the labor productivity for each of the three months of data.  Remember the formula for productivity is outputs divided by inputs.  In this case, your outputs are the number of visits and your inputs are the hours of labor for medical assistants (MA). You can assume for that every occurrence of a physician working on a particular day, regardless of the number of patients scheduled, one MA works 8 hours.  See the pivot table example below. For Dr. Baker, there are 64 hours of MA labor for January, 72 hours of MA labor for February, and 40 hours of MA labor for March.  You will need to aggregate all of the hours of MA labor for each of the three months. 

Consider the capacity of the clinic that you have previously calculated.  Assuming that patients are scheduled to capacity every day, what is the ideal productivity of the clinic for MA labor? 

Discuss what the actual productivity measurement for each month represents.  Compare the actual measurement to the ideal measurement and discuss it thoroughly.  

Calculations:

Please answer

Consider the capacity of the clinic that you have previously calculated.  Assuming that patients are scheduled to capacity every day, what is the ideal productivity of the clinic for MA labor? 

Discuss what the actual productivity measurement for each month represents.  Compare the actual measurement to the ideal measurement and discuss it thoroughly.  

An example:

Labor productivity can be calculated as hourly output over output per hour. “It is possible for everything important to be quantified and measured, even if the people performing the tasks may feel that the nature of their work does not lend itself to measurement. There is a common expression that “What gets measured gets done.” In other words, if productivity is measured and made important, there can be improvements over time” (Langabeer, 2016). Anything that can be measured can be improved, and for the Bayside clinic, productivity is calculated by the number of appointments divided by total MA hours. Each month’s measurement represents how many patients are being seen per hour of labor. For example, in January, Dr. Anthony Baker had 151 appointments with 64 MA hours, meaning each MA sees approximately two patients per labor hour.  

As previously measured, the total utilization for the clinic is 51.74%. So, the clinic currently operates at a little over half its capacity. The ideal productivity for MA labor is 4.074. Since the full capacity of patients is 160 per day, the total for all 11 weeks is 8,800. So, then you divide 8,800/2160, and you get 4.074. Comparing the ideal productivity measurement to the current one, you can see a stark difference. The current capacity is 2.11, which is slightly over half the ideal measurement for the clinic. After looking at the data, the clinic is not meeting its optimal level, with several bottlenecks hindering services within the clinic. With this knowledge, Bayside clinic should have a sense of urgency to quickly improve the processes within the clinic to improve the utilization and number of patients per hour. All of these numbers give evidence of operational problems within the Bayside clinic, which needs improvement without losing the quality of care within the clinic.

Resources:

Langabeer, J. R., II, & Helton, J. (2016). Health care operations management : a systems perspective (Second edition.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.