Steven Eastaugh

Enhancing productivity better balances all factors of service delivery to get the greatest output for the least input effort. The best productivity programs are rapid, large in scale, cost beneficial, and provide benchmarks for assessing future performance. Programs that focus on the activities of individuals ignore the two greatest keys to improvement: work-team organization and acuity-driven workload staffing. Gainsharing incentive compensation plans can foster long term productivity gains.

Do not confuse bad performance with destiny. You can improve your position with the right management and incentives. One must manage risk in today’s rapidly changing marketplace by surveying product, place, price, and promotion. The benefits and costs of both specialization and diversification are surveyed. Increasingly, specialization helps trim expenses and enhances service quality.

Our past solutions are our current problems. The consumer marketplace system encourages demand and diversity, whereas the control system leads to uniformity and possibly rationing. American business is increasingly looking to Europe and Asia for global budget strategies to contain price, quantity, and total expense. Can we continue our tradition of resisting a comprehensive single system, given that it is very expensive and duplicative? Current policy trends point in all different directions like a pile of jackstraws.

Physicians and patients are increasingly dissatisfied with managed care. Some HMOs and PPOs have made the ultimate cost sacrifice by simply closing down. In order to survive, managed care must improve customer relations, trim paperwork, develop new service-lines, and utilize life-cycle costing. Employers and the public want their healthcare to offer a delicate balance as a social good and a consumer good.