Reference no: EM132274123

Sunset Health Systems is a national provider of healthcare. They have 62 wholly owned hospitals in 39 states. Within each state are ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) that also support the hospital communities with outpatient surgical services. Finally, Sunset also owns a total of 120 physician clinics that support the patient flow into the Sunset hospitals and ASCs. Sunset revenues for 2017 were $439 million. The CFO, Robert Staley, reported to the CEO, Bill Rush that the organization had spent $225 million for travel clinicians and contract labor to care for the patients in the Sunset facilities. This represents spending of 51% of annual revenues. The hospitals, ASCs, and clinics used various staffing companies to meet the needs of the patients by filling staffing vacancies of the core staff. Healthcare staffing is in very high demand as the nursing and clinician shortage grows. The staffing companies could charge premium rates for their staff as competition for these resources is very strong. In Bill Rush’s mind, he needed to figure out a way to get that spend down to 40% of the annual revenue without compromising patient care. Sunset has a strong reputation for providing outstanding care and it always ranks very high with patient satisfaction scores. Bill and his team have a meeting to discuss options. Many options are presented by the executive leadership teams and no viable solution is offered. Bill is of the opinion that the “same old ideas” keep getting recirculated. He challenges his team to find a solution to this dilemma. Curtis Brown, the system COO, makes an unusual suggestion. Curtis started his career in the retail industry 26 years ago as a store manager in a department store chain. He crossed over into healthcare after securing a clinic administrator position. He explained to Bill that the retail industry often had struggled with finding a reliable staff to work in their stores. They would reach out to staffing organizations to support their core staff for a variety of jobs….warehouse, stocking, front end sales, and housekeeping. The corporate leaders of the department stores even developed their own internal pool of staff that would be flexible enough to support all of the department stores within a market. Although this concept was not new to healthcare, Curtis suggested that Sunset hire a consultant that understood staffing but did not come from a healthcare background. He suggested that the “outside” consultant could give a new perspective on an old healthcare problem. Immediately some of the executive team suggested that this thought process was ridiculous and that tried and true methods should be used for this situation. Curtis felt the pushback and decided not to make any other suggestions; however, Bill stated that he liked the thought of having fresh ideas introduced. He asked Curtis to prepare a presentation with the details. Curtis presented his findings and recommended a consultant from a company by the name of Primary Staffing Innovations (PSI). The consultant from PSI was Jim Cruz. Jim had worked in the staffing business for 15 years; however, his experience was in the light industrial environment. Bill initially had some concerns about Jim’s qualifications but after listening to the presentation, Bill felt that Jim was well qualified. There were many similarities between the two industries. It was clear to Bill that he needed to change his thinking and his approach to this issue. After Jim was done, Bill assembled his team for deeper discussions and to decide if the course of action given by Jim was the correct one.

Please answer the following questions in details,

1. If Bill accepts the recommendations of the consultant, what will his first priority be from a strategic plan perspective? How will this change the direction of the Sunset Healthcare System?

2. Bill took a chance on supporting Curtis although other executive team members did not seem to agree with the strategy. What does this say about Bill as a leader? What strategies can he use among his executive team for them to support new ideas and thoughts?

3. In your opinion, will the engagement of a non-healthcare consultant be successful? Why or why not? Please be specific with your answer.

4. Please give an example where healthcare and non-healthcare businesses have joined to offer customer services. Has it worked? Why or why not?

5. What steps would you take to develop a marketing plan from the organization’s strategic plan? How does the marketing plan affect other business plans in the organization (operation, finance, human resources, clinical)?