Angela M. Wicks

Radio frequency identification applications in hospital environments.

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has recently begun to receive increased interest from practitioners and academicians. This interest is driven by mandates from major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Metro Group, and the United States Department of Defense, in order to increase the efficiency and visibility of material and information flows in the supply chain. However, supply chain managers do not have a monopoly on the deployment of RFID. In this article, the authors discuss the potential benefits, the areas of applications, the implementation challenges, and the corresponding strategies of RFID in hospital environments.

Competing values in healthcare: balancing the (un)balanced scorecard.

Facing a complex environment driven by two decades of dramatic change, healthcare organizations are adopting new strategic frameworks such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) to evaluate performance (Kaplan and Norton 1992). The BSC was not originally developed as a performance management tool, however. Rather, it was designed as a tool to communicate strategy and, as such, provides little guidance when actual outcomes fall short of desired outcomes. In addition, although the BSC is an improvement over exclusively financial measures, it has three conceptual limitations that are especially problematic for evaluating healthcare organizations: (1) it underemphasizes the employee perspective, (2) it is founded on a control-based management philosophy, and (3) it emphasizes making trade-offs. To address these limitations, we propose using the Competing Values Framework (CVF), a theoretically grounded, comprehensive approach to understanding and improving organizational and managerial performance by focusing on four action imperatives: competing, controlling, collaborating, and creating. The CVF pays particular attention to the employee perspective, is consistent with a commitment-based management philosophy, and emphasizes transcending apparent paradoxes to identify win-win solutions. Rather than focusing on customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction, the CVF looks for ways to satisfy customers and employees while still addressing financial constraints and growth opportunities. The CVF also can be used to assess both the culture of the organization and the competencies of individual managers, thereby providing a clear link between strategy and implementation.

Radio frequency identification applications in healthcare

When lives are at stake, zero defects should be the established standard. This philosophy applies whether the federal government is attempting to protect the nations drug supply from terrorist attack or in other healthcare environments where patient safety is critically important and where medical errors can result in death or serious injury. Therefore, any technology that can reduce the threat of terrorist attack, reduce medical errors, and increase patient safety should be thoroughly tested and evaluated. Radio frequency identification is one technology that has significant potential to secure the medical supply chain and increase the safety and efficiency of healthcare processes. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits of passive, chip-based, read-write tags, the areas of applications, implementation challenges, and corresponding strategies of radio frequency identification in the healthcare industry.

Radio Frequency Identification Applications in Hospital Enviroments

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The IDEAL service transaction analysis approach for projects in operations management courses

The walk-through service audit has been used in classrooms for some time (Fitzsimmons and Fitzsimmons, 2004). In 1999, Johnston recommended an extension of the walk-through service audit, the Service Transaction Analysis (STA) concept. This paper is an extension of the STA whereby we incorporate a systems approach that includes the organisations vision, mission statement, core competencies, and order winners and qualifiers to determine how well key business processes are designed, executed, integrated, and aligned with these factors (IDEAL STA). Students learn to identify the mis-messages that an organisation sends to its customers, learn to identify where mis-alignment exists, and learn to prepare corrective recommendations. Survey results indicate students feel the group project is an effective classroom tool that relates to job performance and knowledge development. The project is well suited for international adaptation since a grocery store is used for the in-class exercises and fast food restaurants are the project companies.

Integrative Business Education Focused on the Environment: A Description of the Sophomore Scholars Program, Its Effects on Academic Performance, and the Regulatory Focus of Its Participants

In keeping with business education trends (Miles 1985; Aurand et al., 2001; Bridges & Wilhelm 2008) the Sophomore Scholars Program (SSP), an integrative program for business sophomores, was implemented at a Northeastern US university. The SSP afforded students the opportunity to learn principles of three core business disciplines (i.e., finance, marketing, operations management) and apply them in group projects that focused on the environment. Learning objectives for the SSP were: i) enhancement of academic performance, ii) development of team participation and leadership skills, and iii) advancement of oral and written communication skills. Identifying characteristics (i.e., regulatory focus; Higgins 1987) of students who successfully participate in programs like the SSP was another program objective.

Using Quality Tools and Methodologies to Improve a Hospital's Quality Position

ABSTRACT The authors identify the quality tools and methodologies most frequently used by quality-positioned hospitals versus nonquality hospitals. Northeastern U.S. hospitals in both groups received a brief, 12-question survey. The authors found that 93.75% of the quality hospitals and 81.25% of the nonquality hospitals used some form of process improvement methodologies. However, there were significant differences between the groups regarding the impact of quality improvement initiatives on patients. The findings indicate that in quality hospitals the use of quality improvement initiatives had a significantly greater positive impact on patient satisfaction and patient outcomes when compared to nonquality hospitals.