End-of-Topic Case: Hospital Administration

A hospital in a southwestern city needs better cost tracking. While the hospital is large by many standards, with over 400 beds, the administration has just realized that costs have been increasing by over 60% over the past year with little to no increase in revenue growth.

Worse, the hospital administration team does not know what is driving this cost increase or revenue stagnation. For instance, a bottle of water now costs an in-patient over $18 and a 3-inch piece of surgical tape now costs over $8. Patients are bewildered by these charges, and the hospital board is unhappy because of decreases in hospital operating revenues.

The CEO of the hospital decides to hire a project management consultant, who in this case is you, to study and document answers to the following questions:

  1. How are costs tracked and billed at the hospital?

  2. How do departments within the hospital bill patients?

  3. What factors are driving cost increases and have these changed over the past five years?

  4. What recommendations would you propose for cost containment?

  5. What recommendations would you propose for revenue generation?

What is the “stakeholder need” in this vignette? How would you describe the corresponding project in this vignette? If you were the project management consultant brought in by this hospital, who would you want on your project team? What project delivery principles would you have to consider to successfully answer questions 1–5 above? How might your work differ by each stage of the project management life cycle? Finally, how would you know when you are finished on this project?