Designing Physical Therapy Services with Lean Thinking: The Trade-Off Between Patient Needs and Service Profitability

Abstract

As medical resources are limited and expenditures and demand continue to rise medical services should meet the needs of patients under the guarantee of expenditure benefits to create sustainable and profitable medical services Therefore the purpose of this study is to use lean thinking to weigh the needs of physical therapy patients and service benefits and to design physical therapy services The improvement unit of this study is a physical therapy center of a public hospital in Taiwan First explore patient needs and operating conditions Second issue patient demand questionnaires to identify service gaps Third use contextual inquiry to discover the treatment process of patients Then interview patients and service providers to find out the reasons for service gaps and back-end restrictions Fourth weigh patient needs and service benefits in focus groups and discuss development strategies Fifth physical therapy service process and countermeasure design Sixth import design and effectiveness evaluation compare service income patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction before and after the intervention The results show the service gaps were "symptoms can be handled properly" and "therapist health education information is perfect after treatment " Moreover found that the unit's operating losses and the largest controllable expenditure are the labor cost which needs to increase productivity The results of the contextual inquiry indicated that because the therapist handled the scheduling problem and waited for the space equipment to interrupt the treatment Also because the treatment interval is too long and the patient needs to go home and exercise by himself After focus group discussions the appointment scheduling system was designed The functions include: providing scheduling information scheduling appointment diverting space and equipment providing patient scheduling interval information Three months after the system was launched the number of people increased by 3~5 per day and the monthly income increased by 13% Patient satisfaction before the intervention was significantly greater than after intervention The results point out that design physical therapy services with lean thinking which is driven by patients' needs can have a positive effect on the patients and service profitability

Date of Award	2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Yu-Hsiu Hung (Supervisor)