More conceptual Medical stuff.

I hope this isn't too rambly:

I’ve been thinking of ways to fairly distribute exam rooms. I’d like to see movement toward members owning parts of a whole, and sharing that whole. What we have now is members owning individual sections, without an attachment to the whole. As a result, they horde resources causing some to do without while others are gluttonous.

I suppose my model is communist in nature. It’s also a model of incorporation. Either way, the individual ceases to exist in favor of the group.

As I think, I’m beginning to see that it isn’t really a communist model. In a communist model, the members give what they have and take what they need. It presupposes that they control the resources to begin with. At the hospital, the members (the individual clinics) never really own anything. They don’t exist without the hospital. They aren’t really giving anything up because they never owned it in the first place. Room assignments and ownership are figments of our imagination.

Saying that is one thing. Maneuvering through the politics is something else.

In a corporate model, distribution must be somehow determined. This is also necessary so we know resources (exam rooms) are being distributed fairly. One problem we have is that the organization is using Pathways data as its gold standard, when that data is anything but standard.

The new standard should use Pathways, but instead of visit volumes, it should be visit length. It’s also important that all appointments be placed into Pathways. Optimally, this would happen in advance, and a day’s reservations would be based on the schedule.

Another option is to add the miscellaneous appointments after the visit. Then, at the end of the day, data will be available for how a family spent its day at Childrens. As it is now, some services expect appointments to take longer, but there’s no data to track what that really means.

Neurodevelopmental and Cranofacial lie at one end of the spectrum. Every visit is placed into Pathways. Pulmonary lies at the other. One appointment is scheduled; nutrition, social work and RT drop in as needed and are never reflected in the schedule past or future. If we put the data in retroactively we could us past data to predict future performance.