A Telemedicine Opportunity or Distraction Benefit/cost, Is Strategies & Solutions

...

Company’s Model & Business Goals (Spoke / General Hospital System)

As with any medical or health care service the ultimate goal is to save lives, enrich current ones, and extend longevity of their patients, the same goes for potential hub or spoke hospitals for the TeleStroke Service. The overall company model revolves around providing quality world class health care while continuously improving, researching, implementing and distributing new health care methodologies. Their overall business goal is to implement state of the art telemedicine technology, like video conferencing and the ability to offer virtual consultations, in order to speed up stroke victim decision making when identifying, diagnoses, and treatment, in an emergency or rehabilitation manner. A positive bottom line and sustainable financial business plan is extremely important for any company’s viability. For hospitals focused around long term financial viability goals might include, lowering financial burdens and expenses by decreasing admission, diagnostic, administrative, and procedural costs and by maximizing patient satisfaction, minimizing malpractice risk, and the procurement of government aid and insurance reimbursement.

Company’s Model & Business Goals (TeleStroke)

TeleStroke Service Partners or TeleStroke themselves have similar company goals as general hospitals, only their main focus is saving lives by identifying acute strokes and helping to speed up stroke victim recovery. Even though the end game has always been a reduced chance of death and disability due to strokes, on a more granular level, the company’s model was originally built around saving money by putting a 24/7 stroke specialist in every one of their hospitals via telemedicine techniques. Through needs identification, the start of the system development life cycle, they realized their need for more cost effective methods of stroke identification was also the needs of other institutes. An industry evolves rapidly especially those actively using IT/IS which is why once TeleStroke Services were more widely used, a demand for a consultation services for the guidance and assistance in the developing of other tele medical services was needed. Their company model and therefore their business goals switched to include this consultation service. They further evolved into aligning their mission to cover a more complete range of pediatric consulting services.

Major IS Strategy (Telemedicine IS Strategy – TeleStroke Example)

In today’s world of virtual teams and instantaneous communication a hospital’s IS strategy without a solid telemedicine back bone is simple impossible. Telemedicine is the use of information exchanged from, or communication between one geographical place with another via electronic communications to improve a patient's health status, with TeleStroke focused on acute stroke identification, diagnosis and treatment. TeleStroke was developed as a Work Group IS, blossomed into an Enterprise IS and now has become an Inter-enterprise IS/IT available to any hospitals that could benefit from their services. Traditionally, hospitals who wanted to prototype a telemedicine service had to deploy an IS strategy heavily reliant on third party development of software, but with highly customizable telemedicine services a hospital is able to reap the benefits without incurring unreasonably high costs. By only training a few employees as super users and updating their IT/IS infrastructure, they can leverage their new tele medical programs as a competitive advantage by reducing costs when compared to full time stroke specialists. Then if they so choose they can strategically expanding to include the offering of telemedical services themselves, develop new products, and then force institutions to invest in extra IT/IS infrastructures, thereby increased their clients switching costs. If and when a telemedicine system is utilized, other IS/IT strategies can be implemented, like a rudimentary business intelligent analysis and processes while using BigData to statistically allocating appropriate bandwidth and pricing models at high traffic hospitals. As TeleStroke is an innovative IS strategy, the spoke hospital or network partner would be on the forefront of providing telemedical services by implementing vital protocols, experimenting with new applications, and numerous other services. It also speaks for itself that extensive testing is done before launching any new applications, which further strengthen a telemedicine company as an innovate one.

Firm Based Value Chain Model

To understand what Porter’s firm based value chain model is we first have to define the core words used to build this definition. “Firm based” and “model” are easily understood, but “value” by itself, is the amount of money that a customer is willing to pay for a resource (Kroenke, 2014), but a “value chain” is defined as a network of value-creating activities. Porter broke down value-creating activities into primary activities, business functions that relate directly to the production of the organization’s products or services, and secondary activities, business functions that assist and facilitate the primary activities. When a value chain analysis is used for service-oriented company the value is generated more so by the operations, sales and marketing, and service activities, rather than outbound and inbound logistics and manufacturing. We use this model because, according to Porter, to be an effective organization its goals, objectives, culture, and activities must all be consistent and support its strategy. Using this model we will be able to determine whether activities are strengths or weaknesses, but more importantly will help identify those which add value and create a competitive advantage. An activity is considered advantageous when its margin, the difference between the value generated and the cost of it, is positive. If it the margin becomes negative the company can adjust its strategy to reduce that activity’s costs or increase its value.

Model Application (Spoke/General Hospital)

Figure 1. Value Chain Model for Spoke Hospitals [pic 1]

Primary activities start with inbound logistics, which is receiving a potential stroke victim at a partner hospital, and then turns into operations, the biggest and most valuable adding activity in spoke hospital’s value chain which includes eligibility requirements to video consultation, or the categorization of a patient. The next step is virtual outbound logistics which includes the collection of data, reports, and