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Eastern Medical Case Essay

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The Business Context
The call centre of the Eastern Medical Faculty Foundation, hereafter referred to as EMFF, provides a competitive advantage to the Internal Medicine Department of the Chicago School of Medicine through the delivery of efficient and high quality service to patients. Treating patients generates revenue the Internal Medicine Department and contributes to investments in research in the highly competitive healthcare sector. Unfortunately, declining customer satisfaction, as evidenced in a growing number of customer complaints, suggests the quality of service is deteriorating and threatens the very competitive advantage of the EMFF.
Problem Description
Laura Jones, supervisor of the call centre, seeks to remedy …show more content…

This will result in a preferred alternative with supporting rational.
Detailed Analysis of the case
The current average utilization rate of the call centre is 30.48% (see appendix XXX). The average arrival rate, rate at which the patients call, is lower than the average service rate, rate at which the patients are serviced. However, both the arrival time and the service time contain moderate variability (see appendix XXX), negatively impacting the flow time during peak hours. There are two arrival rate variability issues: variability amongst the different days the calls are received and variability amongst the hours the calls are received. The problem is bigger than Laura anticipated. As per the ‘Appendix 5’ of the case, the average daily abandoned calls are 338 and not 35. This does not include the patients receiving a busy signal, therefore becoming lost throughputs. Thus given the low utilization rate it is clear that the problem the call centre faces is in managing variability and not capacity.
The total annual profit margin lost due to missed calls from the call centre is $380,813.33 or 104.62% of IMD's expected profits of $364,000 (see appendix XXX). The total annual profit margin lost due to missed calls between 10AM to 2PM is $190,406.67 or 52.31% of IMD's expected profits of $364,000 (see appendix XXX).

Therefore the scheduling and variability problems of IMD’s call centre are

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