Healthcare operations managers have unique roles, responsibilities, and objectives because the health system is a specific sector. Operations managers should provide such changes as improving service quality, overall productivity, logistics flow, and reducing costs. Effective financial management in healthcare is the top priority and most challenging task for operations managers.
The problem is that healthcare requires expensive apparatuses, tools, and supplies for various medical procedures. Consequently, a decrease in costs for these categories will entail a deterioration in the quality of services provided. Operations managers have a unique role to play in balancing satisfactory costs while maintaining high-quality service. The operations manager must provide increased revenue and reduce costs while improving quality.
Operations managers must also analyze the number of patients at specific hours or days to effectively manage staff. Awareness of the typical workload allows operations managers to schedule staff shifts so that the required number of workers are at work. Ignoring such a strategy can lead to a personnel shortage and deterioration in the service quality or staff overabundance and increased unnecessary spending. A similar strategy applies to procuring the necessary supplies, which should be sufficient, but not lack or excess.
Furthermore, operations managers work to improve the productivity of all systems and processes. Productivity improvement is about getting better results without increasing costs. The complexity of this strategy lies in the fact that healthcare institutions employ many workers for different tasks. In such large structures, assessing employee productivity and developing methods to improve it is challenging.
However, this is one of the missions of operations managers and is just as important as quality improvement. Enhancing service quality is the essential goal of operations managers. Better quality includes a high level of patient satisfaction and safety. As in any other sector, a high level of services in healthcare implies an opportunity to increase their value, leading to new opportunities for development.