Case Study Analysis: Tufts-NEMC

Ellen Zane had her work cut out for her at Tufts-NEMC. The Tufts University affiliated teaching and research hospital had long been on the decline. It was mired in financial difficulty, was falling behind other teaching and research AMCs, and was not effectively serving its local community. Beginning on the day she accepted her position as CEO, Ellen Zane started on a path of reform. Upon learning that the hospital only had 10 months of cash on hand, she began brainstorming on how to make the hospital financially viable, starting by meeting payroll needs first. She discovered that Tufts-NEMC was being drastically underpaid and began looking for solutions to the problem of reimbursements. One of the more …show more content…

Just as Joelson said: “Our goal is to be big enough to have the scale we need to operate efficiently and to be able to provide sufficient sub specialties to be an academic medical center.” Therefore, the strategy became to 1) give community hospitals the ability to take on more care; 2) grow NEQCA from 600 to 1,000 doctors by 2010; 3) build a physician-to-physician marketing campaign; and 4) build a new 190-bed hospital in the Boston suburbs with New England Baptist. All of these things would work into the hospitals long-term strategy to expand in scale.
Structure
Structure is how people and the work are formally organized. There are six core concepts in this area: Differentiation, Integration, Chain of Command, Span of Control, Centralization/Decentralization, and Formal/Informal. By 2006, Tufts-NEMC, the following shifts had been made: tasks in the hospital were differentiated as a result of its eight new product lines, with every service in the hospital being included in one of these lines; the chain of command became more informal whereby employees could communicate with Ellen, through email or directly; the organization adopted a centralized approach since all the change decisions were made by Ellen. Here is a suggestion to improve on the above structure: more involvement of first-line managers in the informal communication process. The case study mentions the direct involvement of